The Broken Book Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE BROKEN BOOK

  ‘One of the most beautiful books of the year.’

  New Woman

  ‘The Broken Book is wonderfully rich, complex and compelling. Susan Johnson has created an audacious and original novel with an awe-inspiring ability to explore emotional truths.’

  Daily Advertiser

  ‘A novel of great creative and emotional perspicacity that conveys in equal measures the vivaciousness and tragedy of Clift’s life.’

  Sun Herald

  ‘A bold narrative, in which we’re constantly reminded by the quality of her prose that this is an imaginative work … It’s a kaleidoscope of memory, jagged and disordered as the artist’s tragic life.’

  The Canberra Times

  ‘Every word is given its proper weight and every idea its own space.’

  Vogue Australia

  ‘Like some of the greatest writers of our age, Johnson weaves her narrative with fragments of memory, loss and longing … It is the best piece of literature I have read this year.’

  Manly Daily

  ‘The Broken Book pulses with the stark emotion and ring of truth that characterised Clift’s work … a beautiful book by a beautiful writer.’

  Who Weekly

  ‘I believe this to be a significant new novel, to be recommended to all who enjoy tales with depth, passion, conflict and believable, compelling yet flawed characters.’

  Australian Bookseller & Publisher

  Also by Susan Johnson

  FICTION

  Latitudes: New Writing from the North (co-editor, 1986)

  Messages from Chaos (1987)

  Flying Lessons (1990)

  A Big Life (1993)

  Women Love Sex (editor, 1996)

  Hungry Ghosts (1996)

  NON-FICTION

  A Better Woman (1999)

  This edition published in 2005

  First published in 2004

  Copyright © Susan Johnson 2004

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Johnson, Susan, 1956 Dec. 30– .

  ISBN 978 1 74114 664 6

  eISBN 978 1 74115 910 3

  CONTENTS

  Part One: Katherine

  Sydney, 1969

  The Broken Book

  Sydney, 1969

  Sydney, 1941

  The Broken Book

  Sydney, 1941

  Quotations

  Sydney, 1969

  Sydney, 1941

  Letter

  The Broken Book

  The Island, Greece, 1961

  Sydney, 1941

  The Broken Book

  Katherine Elgin’s World

  Sydney, 1969

  The Broken Book

  Sydney, 1942

  London, 1953

  Sydney, 1969

  The Island, Greece, 1962

  Sydney, 1942

  The Broken Book

  London, 1953

  Story

  The Island, Greece, 1963

  The Broken Book

  The Island, Greece, 1956

  Sydney, 1969

  The Island, Greece, 1964

  The Broken Book

  Sydney, 1943

  The Broken Book

  The Island, Greece, 1964

  The Island, Greece, 1965; Sydney, 1965

  Sydney, 1969

  Sydney, 1946

  Sydney, 1951

  Part Two: Anna

  Canberra, 2003

  Acknowledgements

  For Sandra Hogan

  I was conscious that not only my remarks but my presence was criticised. They wished for the truth, and doubted whether a woman could speak it or be it.

  VIRGINIA WOOLF, JOURNAL, 1909

  Beauty is only the promise of happiness.

  STENDHAL

  Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practise …

  E.M. FORSTER, A ROOM WITH A VIEW

  Part One:

  Katherine

  National Library of Australia

  Papers of KATHERINE ANNE ELGIN, 1923–1969

  Date Range: 1941–1969

  Size: 1.82 m (13 boxes)

  Location: National Library of Australia, Manuscript Section.

  Access: Partly restricted. Not for loan.

  Immutable: 11568464

  Correspondence, juvenilia, journals, journalism including: Katherine Elgin’s World; handwritten drafts, literary transcripts of poetry, short stories and novels including: The Broken Book—Na—106 leaves. The Broken Book is a fragment from an unfinished autobiographical novel that Elgin was working on before her death.

  Born August 31, 1923 in Kurrajong Bay, New South Wales, Elgin lived in London and Greece in the 1950s and 60s before returning to Australia in 1965. She died in Sydney on October 27, 1969.

  She was married to the poet and novelist DAVID MURRAY (1912–2002) with whom she had two daughters (Anna, 1947–; Elizabeth, 1949–1972). The papers of David Murray are located in the Archive Section, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas, Austin.

  Sydney, 1969

  (JOURNALS OF KATHERINE ELGIN)

  ‘I’ll tell you why I’m not writing,’ I said.

  But his attention had begun to wander, as it often does these days, and since he was no longer listening, I didn’t tell him. He was reading the paper but pretending not to in that infuriating way he has, half smiling, his eyes flitting absentmindedly back and forth between my face and the newspaper. I stopped speaking and waited to see how long it would take him to notice. After several minutes I gave up and pushed back my chair. ‘Mmm,’ he said, ‘what did you say, darling?’

  If he had listened I would have told him that creativity is energy, which, if he had cared to hear, he would have understood.

  Creativity is a bodily energy, I would have said, ‘And I no longer have the muscles for it.’ I would have added: ‘I have lost my nerve.’

  I might have said: ‘I no longer have the energy to pull out the proper length of gut and hammer it to the page.’

  And: ‘I’ll tell you why I’m not writing. It’s because I no longer have the necessary energy to grow my own hair.’

  Once, he might have laughed.

  Actually, I am too tired to explain anything.

  I wonder how I grew so tired, so muscleless. I am so very tired. I wish to sleep and never wake up.

  Once I had the energy of a thousand girls at play. I could demolish time, run through space, eat up the world. I kept the pulse of movement along my legs; the backs of my calves were full of waiting motion. I remember my body being perpetually braced, as if everything inside me was primed and ready to spring. My body was my gift, a seam of girlish courage ran the length of me, lighting my days.

  This inexhaustible energy was also in my head, in the ringing cells of my brain. I walked as if floodlit, alive with ideas,
blossoming with stories. This energy was a form of happiness, and for years and years I believed it was simply a matter of casting out a shapely net to haul it in. O, once I was a ball of fisted, happy energy, a roar of love.

  I have been tired for so long. Somewhere I have always been waiting, and waiting is an enervating habit.

  I have used up my teaspoon of hours.

  I have lost my muscles.

  I have lost my face.

  I am forty-five years old and the dirt of the grave is fast upon my tongue.

  Once I lived in some perpetual present moment, never thinking of the future, wilfully refusing to imagine what lay ahead. Now I am stranded in my bleak future, everything behind me, everything spent, a clock that has used up all its ticks.

  These thoughts passed through my head last night as I lay too long in the bath, idly watching the soap growing softer and more waxy, a bloom of cloud. The January heat sends me to the bath morning and night; last night I lay there for perhaps two hours, the water growing colder, knowing I should get up. Yet I could not rise and thought instead: I would like to stay here and slowly melt away. I understood that I was comforting myself with thoughts of my own extinction, yet the idea of melting away seemed exquisitely peaceful. I lay there fat and dumb in the cold milky water wishing I could pass away, without having to lift a finger to assist. Pass away. Such soft effortlessness, such dreamy pleasure.

  A clock, a disappearing block of soap, I am sinking beneath my own metaphors. I cannot help myself—on the desk in front of me is a ball of twine and it occurs to me that my life is like that balled knot and I have come to its end. I can imagine the feel of the frayed, rough end of the string between my forefinger and thumb, pulling hard but finding there is no more string. David has always been scornful of my metaphors, his own writing is leery of them. I remember in London when I was learning French I was thrilled to discover that the French language was a sea of metaphors—for example, there is a phrase you can use when someone dies that translates as ‘he felt the lead under his wings’. I suppose it prosaically refers to a bird felled by a hunter’s pellet, but nonetheless I love the image of the translucent weightless wings of some breathless angel becoming heavy and cold.

  David has always loathed, too, what he calls my air of ‘restrained hysteria’ and I thought of this as I lay in the cold bath last night dreaming metaphorically of my own death. Months ago, when I could still work on The Broken Book and it seemed for a fleeting moment as if that poor flogged character Cressida Morley had finally sprung into breathing life, I furtively passed him the first few chapters. I hate anybody reading my unfinished work and it is a measure of my despair that I gave them to him at all. He said he found its tone off-putting, florid, ‘resonant with a beseeching quality’, entirely too overwrought for his tastes. ‘Your Cressida veers perilously close to purple,’ he said, ‘I’m not convinced the faux melodramatic tone works. And I think The Broken Book is a questionable title. It’s too explicit.’ Is he right? Should I change the tone? The character’s name? After David’s reading I looked at it again—Christ, what was I thinking? I planned to write an imaginary autobiography, a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a story that revealed a portion of our hidden selves. But where does autobiography end and fiction begin? Is Cressida only an etiolated version of myself when I wished her to represent the whole of evanescent, amorphous life?

  I don’t know any more. I seem to have lost the art of judgement, the ability to know my own mind. It was cruel of David to ask why I wasn’t writing if he already knew the answer. He is still writing, he is still sailing on the ship, while my metaphors capsized long ago. His book is already safely bound for the shore, almost finished—his rendering of me, of the girls, of our shared life, all carefully stowed. His Cressida Morley has breath, muscle, gut; my Cressida has died upon the page. I don’t know why, only that I cannot move the story forward. I should have changed her name. How did we end up both writing about a character with the same name?

  Too late, too late, for us and for me. I am becoming undone, I am becoming beseeching—and I cannot imagine ever finishing a book again.

  No longer can I attempt to unravel the knot, on the page, as I have always done. I cannot write, I cannot write to save myself now. I cannot even remember how it was that I came to lose my fists.

  And this: once, on the island, Panayotis told me his most secret dream. We were drunk, it was late, and David had gone home in disgust. Everybody else had left the taverna and it was just Pan and me, drinking and smoking, telling each other everything. I remember he was wearing his blue fisherman’s cap, even though he wasn’t a fisherman, and that the first cold fingers of winter were upon the air. For some reason the thought of winter panicked me—I felt frightened, full of foreboding. It wasn’t cold enough, though, to move indoors and we were at a table facing the harbour, a new bottle between us.

  ‘Do you know, Katerina,’ he said to me in Greek, ‘my dream is to sit down at the table at lunchtime and eat a whole chicken by myself. I will not cut off the finest part of the breast for my wife, I will not slice off both legs for the children. I will sit at the table and eat every last bit up, the whole chicken, by myself.’

  He looked at me with an expression of such longing that I was pierced by a vast, unfathomable grief.

  Pan would be an old man now. I wonder if he ever realised his humble dream.

  Did I ever eat the whole chicken?

  The Broken Book

  (FROM KATHERINE ELGIN’S UNFINISHED AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL)

  Once there was a girl in a country at the far end of the earth who thought she was not very good. In fact, she believed she was stupid, bad on the inside, and everybody in the whole world would guess. Sometimes she wasn’t even sure she existed and could not have said what her truest feelings were, or indeed where she ended or began. The girl felt she had no proper shape, no sides as it were, and she dreamed of being more fixed, more clever, of winning the admiration of brilliant unknown people. In the future, when she grew up, her life would be as beautiful as a book, peopled by interesting and fascinating things, sweeter than music or love. Everybody would love her and life would be like a flower pressed between paper, perfect in outline, every line careful as if etched. In this book of life no one would get old or sick or scarred, no one would be found cruel or wanting, and every husband would be perfect.

  The not-very-good girl was called something plain like Kath or Mary or Joan. When she grew up to live in a book she promised to call herself Cressida, a name rich and strong in allusion, belonging to a different kind of girl altogether. A girl called Cressida might be fatally alluring, full of life and wit, a repository for a thousand men’s dreams.

  So it came to pass that the not-very-good girl grew up and became a writer and lived her truest life in a book. She lived her best life on the page, deep between the beginning and the end. Inside the book she was her own God and she made everyone do exactly as she liked. In the book she had everyone’s attention, everybody listened, everybody had to pause to hear what it was she had to say. The not-very-good girl called herself Cressida just as she had promised and as Cressida she put all the glamour and excitement and adventure onto the page, all those flowers, all that life, compressed into a clear and final shape. In the book even pain could be said to have a meaning.

  Cressida had colour in everything, cheer in adversity, passion, love. She travelled to exotic lands with reckless men, and imagined her life as one big risk that paid off. She had the children she wanted, a life other people envied, achievements of which other people only dreamed. She even became a character in other people’s books and in other people’s imaginations, for her reach was legendary and lasting.

  And so it was that the not-very-good girl left behind her ordinary, more shabby self. In the book she perfected herself, and its pages proved the safest place to hide. She buried herself so deep in the book no harm could ever find her.

  It happened then that Cressida became the girl in
the story who woke up one day and said, ‘Every morning is the same. I place my feet upon the floor. I walk to the bathroom, wash my face, look at myself in the glass.

  ‘I want to be the girl who sees the world, who marries the right man, who wakes each morning to something new and exciting. I want to be the girl who dared to dream, who flew so high she felt the breath of angels.’

  Let Cressida say, ‘I know! My book will be my boat, my wings. My book will be the engine of my hopes.’

  So the newly created Cressida Morley, who was no longer ordinary, stupid or not worth listening to, went to her notebook. She took up her pen and wrote, ‘Where to begin?’

  Look upon the cloudless dome above our heads, the unblemished sweep of Australian sky. I am ten years old, invincible, standing on the bottom curve of the earth, the downward sphere of the world, already straining towards the blue feast of the sky.

  Here are the things I love:

  My father.

  My mother.

  My sister.

  The sun.

  Lightning.

  Mangoes.

  Peeling off the wisps of transparent skin from my sister Hebe’s sunburned shoulders.

  The ocean.

  Picking my nose.

  Swimming.

  The scent of jasmine.

  Daytime.

  Watermelon.

  Doing a really big poo.

  Dancing.

  The smell of seaweed drying along the waveline.

  That delicious moment just before I fall asleep.

  Stroking that bright button between my secret lips down below.

  Being admired.

  The blowhole.

  Here are some things I hate:

  My father.

  My mother.

  My sister.

  Being laughed at.

  Not being taken seriously.

  Steak and kidney pudding.

  The smell in the dunny when the can is too full because the dunny man hasn’t been.

  Singing in the school assembly.

  Peggy Gordon.