Tirra Lirra by the River (22 page)

Nora is cursed with wanting life and art—desires that in Brisbane in the early twentieth century could not speak their name, and that are probably pretty difficult to reconcile, without a lot of collateral damage, in any life. Indeed as I write this, in time bought from a babysitter, bargained from my husband and stolen from my children, the risk of collateral damage feels closer than I’d like. And yet, though I have read my Anderson and my Tennyson and know the risks, what I find myself most wanting—at least from time to time—is a nice, high tower all of my own.

As a girl, Nora inhabits a world of women who are either chafing at or enforcing the limits of that world. Nora’s father died when she was six, and she lives with her sister and her mother, who, as she says with admirable, now anachronistic lack of self-pity, ‘didn’t like me much.’ (‘Our natures were antipathetic. It happens more often than is admitted.’) A brother dies in World War I. Nora suffers from the longing to be elsewhere, somewhere she imagines real life is possible.

Nora’s foils—those examples of alternative fates—are two other young women. Olive Partridge is a literary girl. She will have three hundred pounds a year when she turns twenty-five, and, as she says, ‘that very minute I’m off.’ Dorothy Irey is beautiful and quiet and seems too aesthetic for this place. As she and
Nora cross paths on their obsessive, frustrated, ‘lonely walking’ of the streets and paths of Brisbane, Nora notices Dorothy’s fingers ‘nibbling together.’ At home, Nora wonders to her sister, ‘Why does Dorothy Irey stay here?’ But Grace turns on her ‘in a fury’ saying, ‘We don’t all think we’re too good for this place, Lady Muck.’ Like Nora’s mother and, later, her hideous mother-in-law, Una Porteous, Grace is a self-appointed policewoman of other women’s legitimate desires.

While she waits for her life to take shape, Nora makes embroidered wall hangings with her energies and time. Dorothy Irey gets married and stops walking. She is busy, Nora presumes, with a house and babies.

The question of what one might reasonably want, the tailoring of desire to social limits, runs through the book as it runs through all our lives. And those limits are policed with a question: ‘Who does she think
she
is?’ This is a question of multipurpose violence, which can be applied with equal ease to shrivel artistic ambition as well as sexual desire. This question is, one might say, how the curse of female passivity is kept alive. It is how the tower is patrolled.

This is how it works with sex. When Nora is in her teens, a group of boys—polite when alone, rapacious as a group—try to grope the girls, who are varying degrees of willing.

I’m disturbed by the extent to which Nora’s girlhood seventy years earlier resonated with us as we grew up in 1980s Australia. We are led to believe that sex had been ‘liberated’ fully a generation earlier in the 1960s, but like all regime change, the results of the sexual revolution were more uneven than advertised. In the 1930s, Nora’s husband at first calls her ‘frigid’ and then, when she starts to get pleasure from sex, a ‘whore’. I remember similar kinds of sexual shunning applied to girls, when the slippery slope from ‘frigid’ to ‘cocktease’ to ‘slut’ was vertiginous and absolute, and you could be shunted from one category to another without, for your trouble, having had any fun at all. And I remember the policing question, too, muttered most often by other girls, not directly to you but deliberately within your hearing: ‘Who does she think
she
is?’ In fact, the question was so brutal and basic that it could be asked without any words at all, just by a look.

At Olive Partridge’s going-away party, Nora stumbles upon her Lancelot. He is a dark, thin man, not young, ‘the look in his
eyes like a caught breath.’ She runs into a room to catch her own breath. When she comes back to find him, he’s gone, replaced by a pale imitation, his nephew, Colin Porteous.

The man she wanted is gone. ‘I couldn’t speak. [Colin] came a step nearer and looked closely into my face. “Well, well, well. My, oh, my.” ’ The stand-in is able to humiliate her, simply because he witnessed her desire.

Nevertheless, Nora marries this substitute Lancelot, and so makes her escape to Sydney, which, with ‘what little common sense I had,’ had become a stand-in for Camelot. The couple lives in a flat in Bomera, a dilapidated mansion right on Sydney Harbour at Potts Point (still gloriously there, and worth a Google). And it is at Bomera where, for the first time, Nora makes friends with other artists. As the horror of her marriage unfolds, she realizes she is more comfortable in their company than her husband’s. They are people who understand implicitly the need to make something, to create. ‘All I wanted in the world was to be left alone in my beautiful room, close to people who never asked, audibly or otherwise, who I thought
I
was, but who nevertheless were interested in the answer to that question.’

When the Depression comes, the couple leaves the beauty of the harbour and moves in with Colin’s mother, Una, into a ‘big flat chequerboard suburb, predominately iron-grey.’ Whether they really need to move for financial reasons or whether Colin just wants to be closer to his grotesque and doting mother is not clear. Nora’s entrapment and misery out there is profound
and lasts for years. It is the shocking poverty and dependence of a wife who must steal pennies from her husband’s or mother-in-law’s purse, taking care not to let the coins chink, and whose yearning for freedom is reduced, once again, to desperate walking. Strangely, these were the things—utterly beyond my experience in every way—that stuck fastest to the teenage flypaper mind. Why?

We read Henry James or Edith Wharton or Tolstoy not because the social conditions and mores are the same, but because the human condition of ducking and weaving around them, of conformity and rebellion—and their price—are. What is the price to be paid for straining at the socially acceptable edges of happiness? A novel—this novel—might show you.

When I was a teenager, powerless myself and trapped in a maze of strict expectations, spoken and unspoken, it was Nora’s entrapment I noticed most. But now what shocks me more is the corrosive effect of her passivity and the way, as she says, that ‘[m]uch of my long life can be apportioned into periods of waiting’ to escape. This passivity, combined with the persistent underestimating of her own talents, concocts a trope so perniciously feminine that to write of it even now feels like invoking a curse.

Nora’s marriage ends, and she goes to London. On the ship she has an affair with a genial, married American which reveals to her a reality of love, that ‘far surpassed the theory.’ She recalls, ‘At last, I thought, I knew how freedom could be reconciled with appeasement.’ But she ends that relationship at the dock. In London, she discovers she is pregnant and suffers a horrific abortion. Afterward, Nora decides to end her sex life.

Which leaves the artistic life as the one remaining to her. But whether she is consciously aware of being an artist is a major question of the novel.

Anderson described Nora to an interviewer as a woman ‘who was actually a born artist, but was in a place where artists, although they were known to exist, were supposed to exist elsewhere. She was born among that kind of people, and she herself doesn’t know that she’s an artist. She struggles through, trying to arrive at her art and never succeeding.’

When asked if the backbone of the novel were, to her, ‘the plight of the unrecognized artist,’ Anderson described a plight more fundamental:

To be a strongly original person takes acres of secret confidence, endogenous or achieved. The vicious, kneecapping question ‘Who do you think you are?’ seems to have entered Nora’s consciousness so early and so profoundly that it was simply not possible for her to imagine herself as an artist.

How much of this is to do with being a woman of her time, place and economic circumstance and how much (if any) is particularly Australian is hard to tell. Certainly, artists and intellectuals of Nora’s generation, such as Christina Stead, felt they had to leave Australia, as would the generation after hers (among them Germaine Greer, Clive James, Robert Hughes, Michael Blakemore and Jeffrey Smart). I sometimes think that the justly vaunted egalitarianism of Australia, the ‘fair go’ which had its apotheosis in the Whitlam 1970s of my childhood, had a darker flip side. Just as the fairness of Australian society goes back over a century in no small measure to an Irish Catholic
tradition of social justice which set limits on (often English) power, I imagine, too, that the Irish Catholic underdog thinking came with it, as its shadow. Possibly this is best explained in an old (and not very funny) joke: An American, an Englishman and an Australian are digging a ditch. The boss drives past in a Rolls-Royce. The Englishman: ‘Lovely car, but personally I would always choose the Bentley over the Rolls.’ The American: ‘One day, folks, that’s gonna be me riding up there.’ The Australian: ‘One day that bastard’s going to be back down here in this ditch with the rest of us where he belongs.’ Or, put another way, ‘Who does he think he is?’

But escape is possible. Nora’s friend Olive Partridge, who has money, gets to London where she can express her artistic ambition. Olive says, ‘I want to be simple, utterly simple. Like water.’ Nora tells her, ‘No chance. You’ll never be simple, and neither shall I. We had to start disguising ourselves too early.’ Olive is then struck by Nora’s intelligence, which Nora laughs off, in that modest way in which women do, thereby damaging themselves. But old Nora acknowledges, ‘Of course, I underestimated Olive. If she did not arrive at simplicity in her person, she did so in her later books, whereas I never have, in anything.’ A judgement she must later, fortunately, modify.

If you are a born artist, can you survive if you cannot make anything? The making of things is necessary for artists of any medium to find their way to be in the world. If Nora is not making something, she is not really alive, much as a writer who is not writing is miserable. If you step outside your tower and stop work, you feel dead.

Or you feel like killing someone. Nora’s childhood friend and fellow walker Dorothy Rainbow, née Irey, is a creative soul trapped in a life of marriage and babies. Dorothy meets an end
of almost unspeakable violence and tragedy. (One of the most moving things in the novel is the magnificent restraint of Nora’s interactions with Gordon Rainbow, Dorothy’s only surviving child.) At a very low point of her own, Nora remembers her old acquaintance: ‘I ask myself why Dorothy Rainbow did not hang on, provisionally, and why nothing was offered to appease the remnants of that need that once drove her to walk.’

But Nora must know why. Dorothy, trapped in Brisbane within the confines of what she could ‘reasonably want,’ had no chance. Whereas Nora, in London, had found solace among a second community of creative people, making costumes for the theatre. ‘Before a week was out,’ she remembers, ‘it was clear that I had fallen among people who would accept me for what I was, whatever I was.’ Even though being among them has saved her life, the curse of ‘
Who do you think you are?
’ is so strong that Nora persists in not daring to name herself as an artist of any kind.

And yet, when the older Nora is presented on three separate occasions with embroideries she made all those years ago, her tone changes radically. Gone is the diffident underdog. In its stead is the confident voice of an artist with a gimlet eye, critically evaluating her work. Each time she examines one of the works, the tone shift is so radical that the fabric of the novel seems to tear a little, revealing, Escher-like, the hand of the artist behind it.

When shown the first embroidery, Nora is ‘so astonished by the excellence of the design and the beauty of the colour’ she cannot speak. It is of an orange tree with eight little birds, ‘all fabulous yet touchingly domestic’ which ‘strut or peck beneath it.’ She declares to herself, ‘They are in danger of giving it a spotty effect, and yet they don’t, and that risk, taken and surmounted, is its merit and distinction.’ The second embroidery is of a magpie thrusting its head through the leaves of a
jacaranda tree. It is a disappointment so Nora immediately suspects the brilliant orange tree was a fluke. Her carer, Betty Cust, offers words of comfort: ‘You would think that maggie was real.’ Nora’s next thought gets a paragraph of its own:

When Betty brings in the third work, a design of swirling suns, moon and stars, Nora is floored by it. Its excellence ‘disturbs as well as amazes’ her and prompts her to ask aloud in Betty’s presence what she was running from all those years.