Cirrus@Austlit

'‘Something else,’ the shopkeeper in the local delicatessen would say as he supplied each request. Cheese, marmalade, bread, olives, each transaction punctuated with its ‘Something else’. There was no mark of interrogation.' (Introduction)   

'Back in England back in time, a memory theatre of growing up there, all the struggles and resistances after the new world sense of freedom, back to accent, class, place.' (Introduction)

'Membership of the Adam Lindsay Gordon Society was a step on the path of literary aspiration. We stayed back after school under the tutelage of the English master and read from our own work in a deserted classroom. But the invitation to the Shakespeare Reading Society was the mark of acceptance, reading from the works of Shakespeare on a Sunday evening in the Headmaster’s house. This was the entrée to the higher world of culture and French words. French windows, too, opening out onto the croquet lawn from the long, low Georgian house, the trace of medieval monastic ruins beyond the grass at one end, the stand of horse chestnut trees at the other, and the Headmaster intoning Hamlet, Prince Hal, Lear, Macbeth, Othello. This was as the world would be, privilege, exclusivity: and the girls from the private school over the wall brought in to read the few girls’ parts. Knees together on the long, low couch. The Headmaster opposite in his arm chair. We attendant lords from the sixth form on straight-backed, hard, auxiliary seating.' (Introduction)

‘Often when we think we are writing one thing we are in fact writing something else,’ Joe intoned, more than once. ‘What you consciously devise is not where your unconscious is taking you,’ he elaborated. For all his cultivation of the Lawson laconic mode of Australian demotic, he was often drawn to elaborate. Perhaps it was the potentiality for the exploitation of this that he envied in my academic employment, perhaps in his secret dreams he would have liked to have stood there, capped and gowned, elaborating in panelled halls. Well, now he has his opportunity in that college of buggers and spies. His words, I hasten to add. Though the teaching component of the fellowship, he told me, was something he had managed to have waived for his tenure. It was the teaching component that had made the fellowship so unattractive, certainly to me. That would have discouraged me from applying for it, had it ever been advertised. But apparently there was no advertisement. It was cosied up by invitation. Joe was never one to advocate public examinations and careers transparently open to talent. Competition, market forces, all that ideology that he proclaimed, was for the others. Indeed it was properly, precisely, an ideology: something that masked the true workings of society. Even its originators and progenitors could be heard to complain that it had never in fact been introduced into practice. It had remained a slogan to mystify the middle class masses, and Joe had been one of the happy advocates, though surely he must have known in the depths and shallows of his cynicism that things were never done like that, that society functioned on a system of deals and favours and controls and patronage, and the wise positioned themselves in order to benefit from the system.' (Introduction)

'Joe passed the typescript across. There was nothing said. No ‘look on these words’, no ‘as when the sun breaks through the weltering clouds and pricks out characters of rare device’. Nothing but his blank expression, the expression he used when attempting lack of expression. ‘Just be yourself,’ I told him. ‘That look gives it away, don’t try, just act like you write, totally expressionless.’ It made no difference. Somewhere, could it have been by correspondence course, he had learnt his expression degree zero, of how to achieve power over others, and he would never surrender it. That, you might think, boded well for the rest of us. A warning sign. But he used it so widely that what it warned could not be deduced. It did not necessarily indicate malice. It might be an attempt to conceal joy. Or desire. Envy. Despair. Anything but detachment or disinterest.' (Introduction)

'Even to have imagined that the push, the world of the Libertarians, as they called themselves, was a site of the exotic seems, from this distance, something in which the search for the appropriate word can only fail. Absurd, bizarre, comic, daft, extraordinary, an alphabet of possibilities begins to assemble, though with no decision, no certainty, just indication of, if not fi rm deprecation, amused equivocation. And yet within the possibilities known to me, within what was perceived as available, at the time, and entirely without refl ection, neither forethought nor foreboding, it was new, sensual, exciting. If it now looks different what can I remark except to remove that ‘if.’ Certainly it now looks different. But at the time it provided its allures, pursued as they were in a haze of unconsciousness, unawareness, oblivion. How else could allures prove effective?' (Introduction)

'Ozzie Cambridge certainly had a lot of books. Even when he first appeared on the scene. Later he would call it his obsession, this collecting. But when he fi rst appeared it was more a young man’s hurry to be an authority, to acquire the weight and bulk necessary to occupy the role. How he got the role was not at all clear to me. This was another of the eternal mysteries never revealed. In a general sense an explanation could be offered, but the specifics were shrouded, as always. In previous eras you had a patron who placed you in position. And in Ozzie’s case there was a university person who had spotted him as a student, not that the university person was of much weight himself nor that the position was much of a position, a little magazine, one rift with plots and coups, and Ozzie was brought along. Not that he wrote anything, neither stories nor poems. But he came into that world of the editors, the review editors, deciding what went in or more important, what didn’t, and assembling the beginnings of a magnificent library of hard backed review copies. It was part of a network, these people who were around the magazine and around the university and around the pub, all comparatively young, few of them, looking back on it, actually producing very much, but getting themselves onto committees and editorial boards and film funds and adult education programmes, yes, these were the early years of networking before the term was coined, the actuality achieved before the word.' (Introduction)

'Joe was convinced, or claimed to be convinced, which was far from necessarily the same thing, that Sam Samson was much older than he said he was. Twenty years older. What Sam claimed was to be younger by a few years than us. Joe was not having it. Whether he was threatened, or annoyed, by Sam’s rapid acceptance and success in the literary world or just perceptive, I could not tell. Certainly it was not a journalistic desire of setting the record straight and getting to the truth that motivated Joe’s insistence. Such alleged desires were one of the lies about journalism we were fed in those years. But Joe had not been a journalist for nothing. He had no more commitment to the unvarnished truth than any other journalist still in the business. Nor, for that matter, did Sam.' (Introduction)

'At this time I was editing a series of Asian writing. I had seen Ripley’s translations in literary journals in England. Or in one journal, anyway. Did I get in touch with him? I don’t think I did since I had no idea how to contact him. I think he must have seen or heard of the fi rst volumes and approached the publisher with a proposal.' (Introduction)

'It was probably in one of the corridors that the thing came up. Most treacherous business was done in the university corridors. Most business, indeed. Indeed most university business was probably treacherous. You would be walking along, blinking in the gloom, the memory of the bright sun still imprinted on your retina, and somebody would sidle out of a room and catch you off guard. I should have been on guard, it happened so often. But I wasn’t. These were still the innocent years, the naive years, the sun shone brightly outside, no one worried about skin cancer, the gloomy corridors were just the price you paid to pay your way, they were not something you thought about.' (Introduction)

'Down at the Forth and Clyde where we drank at weekends and night after night in the week, Andy would come round with a big brown paper bag selling deals. Those were the early days when people came round offering it to you. You didn’t have to go round looking for it. You didn’t have to engage in a house to house search, an endless hanging out or desperate pilgrimage. It just came and you paid your thirty dollars and there you were. You didn’t even have to go down to the pub to deal with Andy. He specialised in home deliveries. Saturday morning he would cruise round Balmain with his brown paper bag, dropping in for an hour, and then off again. He never stayed long, just that hour, just long enough to disrupt your morning’s rhythm, and then off again, leaving you stoned and disoriented and disinclined to resume whatsoever it was you’d been doing. Not long enough for a social call. Not short enough just to see if you wanted a deal and then to leave you alone with it. Just an hour’s chat. Who’s doing what? What’s up where? Where are you off to? What’s new pussycat?' (Introduction)

'That was the Christmas I chose Philip Agee’s Inside the Company, as one of my Books of the Year. Its account of covert operations in Latin America cast interesting light on recent events in Australia. I think it was the last time I was asked to contribute to the Books of the Year feature for any newspaper.' (Introduction)    

Wilding describes the process of being courted to participate in a British television documentary programme. He suspects the filmmkers have undisclosed motives.

'The bed sitting room, the afternoon light streaming through the window, the high-backed easy chair, the dark furniture around the walls, the mementoes, photographs, pot plants, dried flowers, little objects. The little objects I cannot immediately recall. They meant a lot to my aunt, they were the memory theatre of her life, all with their associations. They took her out of the room through space and time. To me they represented the fetishism of objects, they were just clutter. I could afford to reject all that, or thought I could. At the time I felt I had no choice but to reject it, the oppressive weight of the old world, old values, which I had travelled so far to escape. But every time I revisited the objects would all be in place, in still, silent repose.'  (Introduction)   

'It was an international conference on Masques and Masquing, a way to claim an overseas trip, or part thereof, from research funds or against tax. Everyone had a role, everyone was listed on the conference programme, a stiff powder blue production with deckle edges, a wedding invitation crossed with a menu for a Chinese restaurant. Even the people reading grace before meals got a credit. Convenors and chairpersons and responders and panellists, the raw material of a hundred and fifty curricula vitae, the raw material of a hundred and fi fty lives. At one point I’d backed out. I wrote and said I’d be quite happy to be a chairperson or panellist or something, I hadn’t realised about reading grace, but I’d like to withdraw my paper. But they seemed to have sufficient chairpersons and panellists and suchlike so they wouldn’t let me off the hook, ever so politely. So a hot summer writing a paper. And there I was in an undergraduate’s room emptied for the vacation, it was like being a freshman again, a new room, knowing no one, nothing to do except look out of the window till the bell tolled for dinner. Then the exquisite hell of communality, the risk of who you might fi nd yourself sitting next to, what silences or what terrors that might give rise to. It was palpable, the terrors were imprinted on the room, embedded in the ancient timbers, saturating the fabrics.' (Introduction)   

'You never make a fresh start. You are always carrying the lumber of the preceding into every new beginning. There is always the hangover of the past evening blighting the freshness of the new morning. So that you start already feeling sick. You have imported a continuity. Even when you don’t remember what it is. Just the dull ache. The consciousness of past bruising, the consciousness of past consciousness. So that waiting for the light plane to take us up and away, fresh seas, over fresh seas to the separation of an island, all that salt water in between, purifying, sterilising and yet also preserving, waiting there I felt the dull throb of the accumulated past. Even if I couldn’t specify it. Trying to focus on it I couldn’t define it, whatever it was, generating that unease.' (Introduction)   

'I had stopped writing apocalyptic fictions. They had begun to seem passé. How many end of the world scenarios could you produce? But that summer we went to Mont St Michel. There were warning signs about the quicksands in the bay, but our feet sank into the melted tar of the car park, it was so hot. We had come from Rabelais’s birthplace and the heat in the Loire valley had reduced that small stone home to silence. There were illustrations in the display case of Gargantua pissing, but outside our sweat evaporated before it even reached the surface of our skin. We slaked our thirst on supermarket wines, with that ineffable flavour imparted by the petrochemical refineries and cellulose plants along the Rhône valley.' (Introduction)