What The Dickens?
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday August 1, 1997
Victorian London is the setting for New York-based Australian writer Peter Carey's latest novel. What in the world is he up to?
Peter Carey reckons he knows when a writer has been at work. "You go into this weird place that's not this world, it's some other place," he says. "You can always tell a writer in the street - they have this weird look on their face. A fiction writer, I mean. Someone who's making things up."
Making things up is Carey's business. He once described writers as "professional dreamers". These days, he does his dreaming in New York, the city with "glass towers trembling in an ecstasy of magic", as he put it 16 years ago in his first novel, Bliss.
To reach Carey, you catch the Number 1 subway train downtown from Times Square. A woman is begging in the carriage, mouthing the single word "Please". An empty soft-drink can rolls on a yellow plastic seat. People move it when they sit; the can works its way down the carriage.
The Greenwich Village streets smell of cigar smoke and garbage. Shops sell flowers and Tex-Mex food. A black man sitting under a pink striped umbrella tends a stall selling $10 watches and sunglasses.
Around the corner is that rare thing in Manhattan: an empty patch of green. It's not a park - just a scrubby, shady, fenced-in place with trees stretching up to the sky. Peter Carey looks out on this urban spinney from his upstairs study. It is a room the size of a train's sleeper berth, and so narrow he can lean back in a chair against one wall and rest his feet on the bookcase opposite. But from it, he can work on his laptop computer and see these trees.
The son of car salesman from Bacchus Marsh in Victoria, Carey has lived on a commune in Yandina, Queensland; next to a river in Bellingen, northern NSW; in a house with a breathtaking harbour views in Birchgrove, Sydney; and - since 1990 - in New York. These subways, these stalls and signs and streets: this is now his world. But he's still thinking about Australia.
Along the skirting board in his study is a series of colour photographs: scenes of parched paddocks and ghost gums. They help him think about his work in progress, which, he says, he isn't sure he wants to talk about just yet.
Perhaps not at all. Like a child shutting a treasure box, he turns off his laptop and closes the lid.
Lies. Beautiful lies. Peter Carey makes things up. In Bliss, Harry Joy is a storyteller, suckled on stories. Herbert Badgery, hero of Illywhacker, confesses that "lying is my main subject, my specialty, my skill". In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Carey created a country with its own history and language. Now, in his new book, he is like a jazz musician improvising around a theme by a master storyteller - Charles Dickens.
Jack Maggs, Carey's sixth novel, uses Great Expectations as a catalyst for a story about early 19th-century England into which Carey weaves bits of Dickens's own life, bits of Carey's own obsession about Australia's convict past, and also the "notion of the writer or artist and their relationship to the lives of those they burgle". The book is Carey's riff on Abel Magwitch, Dickens's convict who is transported to Australia and later returns to visit the young English gentleman, Pip, to whom he has been an anonymous benefactor. But Carey's character, Jack Maggs, is only an echo of Magwitch.
"Jack Maggs," Carey insists, "is not the story of Magwitch, because none of the things that Jack Maggs does in London are things that Magwitch did." Maggs, he says, "has got nothing at all to do with Magwitch really but yet" - he pauses, head down - "he has some of Magwitch's actions. He has Magwitch's quest. He searches for the young man Henry Phipps, who obviously has some relationship with Pip, but Phipps is not Pip."
Carey is a better writer than talker. He often responds to questions with "Perhaps" or "Who knows?" He apologises for rambling or contradicting himself. He has never been fond of interviews, a process he once described as "records of conversations with strangers". He even suggests that he is "not a very good witness" to his own work. Part of the problem is that while he's discussing his new book, he's already thinking about the next one - the novel he may or may not talk about.
But here he is, in a black T-shirt and blue jeans, creaking back in a chair, trying to recall the genesis of Jack Maggs. Maybe, he says, it all began around three years ago when he read Edward Said's thoughts about Great Expectations in his book Culture and Imperialism. To Said, a literary and cultural critic, Magwitch is a metaphor for the relationship between England and its colonies.
Carey hadn't read much Dickens, although when the Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda came out in 1988, some critics pointed to a Dickensian influence. But Said's book led him to Great Expectations, which he found to be "a wonderful, wonderful book ... and no soppy little girls". There is certainly a Dickensian flavour to Jack Maggs: set mostly in a gas-lit London, its characters include Percy Buckle, the grocer made rich by an inheritance, Mercy Larkin, the maid, and Tobias Oates, a young gentleman writer who sees in Maggs (and the secrets he extracts from him by mesmerism) the subject matter for a wonderful story.
Gazing down at Maggs, Oates decides that he will be "the archaeologist of this mystery; the surgeon of this soul". In Oates, there are dollops of Dickens: the fascination with mesmerism, anxieties about both class and money, scribbling pieces of journalism in rattling coaches. And also a bit of Carey. How much? "All my characters are me," he sighs.
"Whenever I talk about a new book, that autobiographical connection is always sought, and I always resist it, and it seems the more vehemently I resist it, the more I get caught with it. There's something weird about the whole thing, because I don't write about one character. I write about at least five major characters and I am all of them and, yes, I inhabit Tobias Oates. And I am Jack Maggs and I am Mercy.
"Anything I can find within myself, any scrap of anything I can use to apply to Tobias, I'll damn well use it. I'm happy to use it. Do I worry about money? Yes, I do. Am I writing out my own money
worries? No, I don't think so. Once or twice or three times in my life I've written autobiographical pieces; I'm not at all shy or frightened about laying out my own shit in public if I want to do it. But the purpose of my fiction is never therapeutic or confessional; I'll just use whatever's there.
"I'll show you where I started," he says, rising to search in the shelves that line one wall of the narrow room. He's looking for something which he studied in an attempt to find his narrative voice for Jack Maggs. It is a book of 18th and 19th century criminal biographies. He flips through the pages, enthusing over the words and sentence construction. He started to write the book this way: in archaic language. But it proved to be one of several false starts, which is the way things tend to go with Carey.
"I was stuck with the fact that it's anachronistic; it becomes a bit mannered. So I ditched it. Then I tried more of a first-person account, closer to the letters Maggs writes. Then I diced that; I wanted a broader view." He began with Maggs's return to England: It was a Saturday night when the man with the red waistcoat arrived in London. It was, to be precise, six of the clock on the fifteenth of April in the year of 1837 ...
Getting the locale right meant doing research on the London of that time. At the suggestion of his theatre director wife, Alison Summers, whom he turns to often for advice, he found in the New York Public Library accounts by foreign visitors, including Dostoevsky, of 19th-century London. Carey read them and pored over maps until he felt he'd assimilated enough. And then, he says softly, almost as a throwaway comment: "I begat."
He begat in New York; an Australian living in Manhattan writing about 1830s England. Looking out at trees in Greenwich Village, hearing police sirens screaming down Sixth Avenue, he conjured scenes of the London of the last century and the heat and misery of the convict colony at Moreton Bay. He finds it impossible to say if he might have written the same book had he still been living in Australia. But he thinks distance gives him perspective and helps him see Australia more clearly.
"I think the degree to which tension is created by absence from home is probably very useful," he says. He likens it to the tension he felt when he was writing and still working in advertising - a profession that gave him the financial security to write but discomfited and sometimes embarrassed him.
Carey is now 54. His children - sons Sam, nearly 11, and Charley, almost seven - have spent more time in New York than in Australia. Yet Carey remains "defiantly Australian", says Laurie Muller, general manager of the University of Queensland Press, which has been Carey's Australian publisher for 12 years. Despite its English setting, Muller describes Jack Maggs as "a very Australian book" - an inversion of Dickens's tale.
In Maggs, Tobias Oates is sharp, like a jockey . . . He was edgy, almost pugnacious, with eyes and hands everywhere about him as if he were constantly confirming his position in the world.
Once this could also have applied to Carey, who has described his younger self as "speedy; full of adrenaline". Even 10 years ago, he could be both edgy and defensive, especially regarding his advertising background. Now he seems more settled. Muller talks of his personal and professional calmness and maturity: "I accuse him of being a sook - he loves domesticity, which he came to relatively late. He is almost embarrassingly in love with Alison."
Muller describes Carey as amazingly disciplined in his work. Three years ago, in a talk he gave at a writers' weekend in Queensland, Carey referred to "the fanatical controlling pride, the will which drove me every day to my computer and kept me there working on an empty stomach until three in the afternoon". But he also noted that a writer tended to be "a vulnerable creature easily crushed".
When Muller first worked with him on Illywhacker, Carey was "very anxious about his writing career - he had enjoyed the wild ride his creative life had given him but was uncertain about where it was going". Now, Muller says, Carey has the confidence that comes from knowing he can write well.
And he feels settled in the US, which he has called "an incredibly foreign country where everybody speaks English". Ask him how long he thinks he will stay and he pokes with one shoe at an envelope on a shelf. "It gets very hard to know ... All my life I've gone places and it's been relatively easy to go on to the next place. For the first time, it's difficult, because I've got children and they have friends.
"I took Sam out to Australia in March, which he really loved, and I said, 'What do you think: should we live here?' And he said, 'What about my friends?' 'Well,' I said, 'make new friends' - but he didn't look too happy about that. So I guess now I'm looking at it as being a longer period than I'd originally imagined. I think I still have this fantasy that I can live in New York half the year and somewhere else, maybe northern NSW or Queensland, the rest of the time. But that's a fantasy; I can't imagine how that would happen."
Laurie Muller was with Carey in 1994 when he revisited the commune at Yandina after a 14-year absence. Carey was nervous about going back and finding everything changed. Muller describes him as "ready to bolt; nearly hiding under the dashboard, he was so tense". Then, after he was welcomed back and had found much that he recognised, he was "nearly childlike in the way he showed off his former home".
Australia matters to him. After first resisting the idea, he has hooked into the Internet and regularly reads The Sydney Morning Herald. He was recently a signatory to the "prominent citizens' statement" sent to Prime Minister John Howard and Governor-General William Deane calling on the Federal Government not to extinguish native title.
But New York suits him and his family. Summers, he says, has a career in the theatre that "every year gets better and better. So we don't want to walk away from that. If I was miserable, we'd all be out of here tomorrow ... [but] I'm pretty happy."
There is a perception that he left Australia because of his post-Booker Prize high profile. Muller says: "We love our success stories and make them public celebrities. It's very hard to be a private person with that. Peter was forever being asked to do something or was recognised when he was just going down the street. He is not an egotistical person; he could handle that celebrity thing but would prefer not to have to."
Carey says: "Everything you read was probably partly true. Only in bad novels do people do things for one reason." He was uncomfortable with fame; Summers was keen to work in New York; he was "receptive to the notion". He suspects that had he gone to Tuscany, like David Malouf, people would have found it easier to understand. Few perceive New York as a place to relax.
In Manhattan, he lives without the burden of fame or recognition, with which he's never been comfortable. He thinks it is healthy, having had success (winning every major Australian literary award), "to be placed in a position where you're not successful". This is too self-deprecating. His work is both known and respected and he is part of the New York literary scene: invited to the premiere of The English Patient; mingling with the likes of actor Richard Gere and ex-Talking Head David Byrne at a party for the visiting Salman Rushdie.
Rushdie is a liar, too. Another myth-maker. Carey mentions Rushdie when the conversation turns to storytelling. Is that, in the end, what it's all about? "Who knows?" he says. "I think it's a mistake to extract any single thing as being the thing, but obviously it's something I've been interested in."
While a common complaint about contemporary fiction ("or postmodern writers, or whatever we damn well are") is a lack of plot, Carey - like Harry Joy in Bliss - sews together a patchwork of lives, legends, myths. He is enthusiastic about the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: "Until him, the story wasn't a very interesting thing for modern writers. And there are many modern writers who revel in telling stories. Rushdie is one. And Paul Auster. "The thing that goes unremarked a little in Paul's work is that he loves to tell stories. Mr Vertigo - ah, what a great start that is ... I was twelve years old the first time I walked on water. The man in the black clothes taught me how to do it, and I'm not going to pretend I learned that trick overnight ... Auster sat up on the roof one day with me and recited that. He'd just started writing, and he had this first paragraph."
Carey's own work has ranged from his early, fabulist short stories to a contemporary fable, Bliss; an historical allegory like Oscar and Lucinda (to be released as a film, starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett, in the US in November, several months later in Australia); and The Tax Inspector - "almost realism for me, though it's not really".
The only pattern, he says, is that "each book seems to be definitely not the book before; this comes from being heartily sick of a book by the time I finish it.
"I guess I'm only interested in doing something that I don't quite know how to do. The idea has to be a little scary ... So almost by definition that will not be the book before."
He once described "that nagging uncertain ache which lies behind all but the most exhilarating moments of writing". Computers have helped the revision process, he says - invention remains the difficult part.
"Most writers I know can't invent for very long. They can write for a long time but they can't invent. After three or four hours, people have done most of the inventing they can do. Then you can sit down and do craft things. But mostly, you're exhausted."
Is it ever terrifying? "Well, I sort of don't like it much. I'm working on this new book at the moment, which I may or may not tell you about ... Every day I sit down and think, what am I going to do? I can't imagine that I'll be able to invent another chapter, but every day there's another three or six pages done. I find it very difficult, and I always forget how difficult it is."
He teaches his creative writing students at Columbia University and the New School how hard it is. He teaches, he says, because he has two children at private schools in Manhattan. He likes it because he believes there are things that can be taught, but he resents the time it consumes; time he might otherwise devote to his work and family.
In most writing courses, students tinker with several pieces during a semester. In Carey's classes, he keeps them working on just one. Desmond Barry, one of Carey's students at Columbia, who also worked as a research assistant on Jack Maggs, suggests that what Carey teaches is less writing than rewriting. "He talks about tenacity and perseverance and patience - especially patience."
Carey says that in the 1960s, he was twice short-listed for a place in a creative writing course at Stanford University in California. Twice he didn't make the final cut, which he now suspects may have been a blessing. "I fear I might not have been thick-skinned enough to do it. You have to be pretty tough. I would have hated criticism, because I was a very prickly, defensive person."
He used to keep his writing projects and ambitions to himself. Robert McCrum, Carey's friend and former publisher at Faber and Faber (Carey's British publisher), got the manuscript of Bliss already bound. He told Carey it might as well have had "Don't fuck with this" written all over it. Now Carey sometimes shows McCrum even the early drafts of a manuscript and seeks suggestions from both him and Summers. He says his wife's theatrical background gives her insight into characters and dialogue. Muller describes theirs as "a marriage of creative minds". But Carey is still sensitive: he has talked of the way Summers' suggestions can prompt glares or cause "a field of violent static".
He lies and make things up. But not all the time. Two years ago, he wrote a very personal piece for The New Yorker magazine describing the loss of children he conceived with his first wife. One child was aborted; twins died after a premature birth. It was an essay on loss and 1960s Victoria.
The New Yorker's fiction editor, Bill Buford, had commissioned Carey to write a piece of fiction. Instead, Carey wrote a non-fiction story called A Small Memorial. He wrote it, he says, because it was a subject he wanted to explore.
The abortion theme reappears in Jack Maggs. A harrowing account of a girlfriend's abortion is one of the memories wrenched from Maggs's past. Abortion also figures in some of Carey's early work. In the short story Peelings, for example, a woman who collects dolls broods on the fact that aborted babies are never listed in death notices.
Is this a theme? A coincidence? Something still being worked through? Carey responds with his own Q&A on Peelings: "Does it deal with abortion? Yes. Might that have grown out of the same incidents I wrote about? Quite possibly. Is it significant? I'm not sure."
He draws a distinction between his
fiction and non-fiction. "If there's any therapeutic stuff, it's happening in the memoir. That is the 'small memorial' made by the piece. The other's fiction. At my disposal I've got feelings and information I can touch, but they don't have to be my feelings - they have to be my character's feelings." But emotional engagement is important to his writing. Carey is a family man. Jack Maggs is about a man's quest for his son, and the children he's left behind in Australia.
Carey has been a published writer for more than 30 years. But ask him his ambitions and he replies, without hesitation: "I want to write a great book." Hasn't he already done that? "I don't know. I think it's very hard for any of us to know what we've done. Most of us who are writing today will disappear without trace. Writers have always been very bad at judging their contemporaries, for the most part. So who knows?"
Authors and titles are kicked around. Great Expectations? "Definitely a great book." The work of Marquez? "A couple of great books." Tolstoy? "With all that messy stuff in them, all that boring crap, Anna Karenina and War and Peace are still great, great books." As is Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. What about Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, often nominated as one of the finest Australian books? "A little too caricatured ... She's an extraordinary writer, but the work's flawed. But who cares? Writers should be permitted to make mistakes."
Okay. It's time. Time to ask, again, about his current project, which could be his next book. He pauses, frowns. Then says: "All right. Maybe I should tell you."
Ned Kelly.
The photographs he has laid out along the floor - taken, he says proudly, with a throwaway, wide-angle, cardboard-box camera - are of the old Kelly farm in central Victoria. And the book he searches for now in his shelves is a catalogue of Sidney Nolan's Kelly series.
"I went up to see the Nolan Kelly series a few years ago when they were at the Met[ropolitan Museum]. On the subway, and then on the crosstown bus, I remember saying to Alison, 'I wonder how this is going to look here?' I wasn't totally confident they were going to look wonderful.
I got in there and they looked extraordinary. Better than they'd ever looked. And I'd seen them many times. They had the look of things that had to be painted."
Leafing through the catalogue, he stops at one picture: Stringybark Creek 1947. "Such an extraordinary awkwardness and grace; [the series] just had to be made."
He feels a similar imperative. "I know that Rob Drewe wrote a really good book [Our Sunshine]. And Jean Bedford wrote a book [Sister Kate], and the Douglas Stewart play [Ned Kelly] seems like it's in here [tapping his head]. Despite all of this, I really want to write about Ned Kelly."
For years and years, he says, he kept a copy of the so-called Jerilderie letter, from 1879, in which Kelly, describing himself as "a widow's son outlawed", composed a document that is both a bushranger's manifesto and his own version of the killing of three policemen at Stringybark in 1878: I could not help shooting them or else let them shoot me, which they would have done had their bullets been directed as they intended them ...
"What I'm writing, I guess, is sort of like the Jerilderie letter," Carey says. "One can inhabit that voice through that letter. It's quite a tough act, but very exciting to do. And I think I would never have done that living in Australia because it would have seemed very obvious. Because writers I like and respect, my contemporaries, have written about it, it seems presumptuous to go in and do it again. But that's what I'm doing."
In Greenwich Village, by a window opening on to the noises of New York and a patch of fenced-in trees, Peter Carey sits thinking about Ned and Kate and Glenrowan and paddocks parched the colour of bone by the sun. He talks of the Kelly story as a series of dots. There is much that is known, and bits in between.
So what shape, what direction will his project take? "Oh," he says, "I've got some things I'm not telling you."
Peter Carey will speak at a Herald/Dymocks Literary Luncheon at the Wentworth Hotel, Sydney, on Tuesday, August 12. For bookings, call (02) 9449 4366.
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
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