The deepening late blue of sky appearing in the window-frame; blue juxtaposed with the green of curtains; blue, for nothing in glory, undiminished by the dirty surface of glass. Walking in Amsterdam – a sign reading ‘AURORA’ stopped me. I remembered what I had not remembered for years: the name I had given to the heroine of an early prose text, taken from the title of Boehme’s Aurora just as Gérard had taken the name Aurélia from a story by Hoffman.
*
In my own early prose texts I worked, out of Nerval and Lowry, with coincidence of events (“the linking-up of things”) as the subject-matter, and with juxtapositions, interrelational linking or cutting, as “method”. At the same time as this (1971 to 1972) I worked on a long essay on Nerval’s work, especially on the images in Aurélia; and on a shorter essay on Lowry, which I revised for publication after coming to London in 1972.
In terms of working operations, I tended towards a direct handling of material, cutting up my texts and taping them back together in different combinations. With the Nerval essay, I depended upon chance findings in books I would take almost at random within a limited area of selection, from the shelves of the library at Melbourne University.
*
Without any warning G— came and sat at our table in the Café Au Montmarte in Tottenham Court Road. My friend asked her about her dervish dancing lessons: Do you really whirl about? She said, No; she hadn’t got that far yet. My friend and I moved on to the subject of coincidence – marvellous happening – in writing, as subject and as method. I talked about my apprenticeship as a writer, in Malcolm Lowry and Gérard de Nerval. Breton’s Nadja and the I Ching came into the conversation too; though I have never really concerned myself with either, to be honest (which I wasn’t). We had put the woman into a distance, which was a fake distance (I knew exactly where she was). “And through the glass window shines the sun”: 6.15 of a winter evening, London, 30/10/75.
*
We were in a Greek restaurant in Notting Hill, and she was questioning me about the origins of my depression. What could I have said? That I grew up in a place that would make anyone aware of other possibilities depressed. Or that I grew up in a family whose members had almost no friends, in a household situated over a small brass-foundry that was operated solely by my father. Within that family I became conditioned to a brooding loneliness which I have never broken out of. Should I mention my early reading, the fact that I was immediately drawn to Nerval and Hölderlin, poets of loss and madness, whose visions helped to consolidate my own approach to a horizon, and the nature of that horizon. I am already sick of this particular story. I will only mention, for what it’s worth, that I ended up telling my friend that I wouldn’t be seeing her again. A terrible argument followed. And that leads to another story again.
*
“I have tried very hard”, she wrote, “to understand and to destroy the barriers I have, naturally, against you (not because you are you but because you are another human being), but I can’t do it, because I know you have so many weapons with which to wound me (and you do not use them sparingly). Only a fool or a total idealist throws himself into battle with no armour and no weapons and he probably gets destroyed.”
The image. Upside-down, you’re laughing; the motion of the swing’s caught. The image caught: irresistibly; laughter in a face, an image catching me transversely; the motion of the swing caught, forwards, and reversed, here, to backwards.
*
He said: Suppose you’d loved someone and you wrote out of that. Suppose that. A boy staring out of the window into the night, figures moving casually in the street below. A radio on in the darkened and humid room, intense music.
This is an attempted destruction of my own beginnings.
*
I walked to the top of a terraced park to meet them; but at midnight we found ourselves at a café, lost, the poorly lit streets all alike. In the heat people lay down to sleep on the pavement or on top of parked cars. Through large square gaps left in the pavement we could see the sewers; someone told me of a man who fell down one of these holes during a storm and was found in a river across the other side of the city, dead. The woman (impeccable voice, impeccable manners, English, upper middle-class), said to me, Look at the cat, (a skinny cat, obviously underfed), why don’t they feed it? The answer should have been self-evident. She wrote to thank me for my writing, saying it was wisdom. I am not that man. I am not that man, so, midnight, we found ourselves at a café, lost, the streets all alike. In the heat people lay down to sleep on the pavement. Some of them were not sleeping. They were sick, or decrepit; they couldn’t get up.
[Note: A slightly different version of this text appeared in David Miller’s There and Here, Frome, Somerset: Bran’s Head Press, 1982, out of print for many years now.]