Fait Accompli

«a wilful distortionist»
                  — Gustav Janouch

IF YOU HAVE THE chance to buy a book illustrated by Francis J. Broadhurst, do it. From The Decameron:

A WHILE AGO I had an idea for a novel about a woman procrastinating about writing an essay on D. H. Lawrence. I’ve just had a look at Radio National’s Book Show website and seen this:

Geoff Dyer set out to write a serious study of his literary idol DH Lawrence but instead he ended up writing Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of DH Lawrence which is an exhilarating and excruciating journey through the twists and turns of his procrastination about not writing about DH Lawrence.

Two questions present themselves:
1. Why would you admit to having D. H. Lawrence as your literary idol?
2. How very, very dare you?

« . . . just how does someone like Likospastov get published? I’ll be bold and go further — how does someone like Agapenov get into print? Homosis? What on earth is homosis? And why ‘Kaffirs’? Pure rubbish, I assure you!»
                                                                            — Bulgakov, Black Snow (tr. Michael Glenny)

WRITERS WHO LOOK LIKE frogs:

1. Michel Houellebecq:

(He actually is a Frog)

2. Anne Enright:

Booker-winning amphibian

When I was at high school, one of my friends (who provoked consternation among our compeers by reading Being and Nothingness — aged 14 — during recess, barefoot and supine on a grass embankment) predicted that I would become a right-wing shock jock, railing against «the dissipated culture of faggotry» and so forth.

Complete lunacy, obviously . . . though I did submit a poem to Quadrant recently (it went unpublished: thanks, Les, you fucking bastard) . . . and I do read The Australian . . .  

Any way, each month I was visiting the Quadrant website to see whether our obese, depressive, Asperger’s-afflicted, persecution-complex-suffused, pre-eminent poet had changed his mind. [He hadn't.] Once in a while I’d find a good poem. This is from the May edition:

«The Tropical Paradise of Margaret Mead»
John Whitworth

“As the dawn begins to fall among the soft brown roofs and the slender palms stand out against a colourless gleaming sea, lovers slip home from trysts beneath the palm trees or in the shadow of the beached canoes, that the light may find each sleeper in his appointed place.” That is the twenty-three-year-old Margaret Mead in her ground-breaking classic of anthropology Coming of Age in Samoa (1928). I confess I have never been to Samoa myself, but then, according to the great and good Raymond Tallis, a sojourn of less than six weeks sufficed for “one of the Founding Mothers of Romantic Primitivism and … an inspirer of much New Age garbage”.

Let us go to far Samoa where a tropic moon
Lights the soft, brown roofs round a blue lagoon
And the palms are dark against a gleaming sea.
           As the dawn begins to fall
           How the birds begin to call,
How the scarlet parrots call to you and me, you and me,
How the yellow parrots call to you and me.

And lovers in the shadows of the beached canoes,
In the grumous purple shadows of the beached canoes,
          Are lying thigh to thigh,
          As the moon rides high,
And the slender palms stand out against the sea:
          Young lovers in their blisses
          Trading lingering last kisses,
Slipping home before the light can find them gone,
          Where the palms grow slim and tall
          As the dawn begins to fall
Slipping home before their families find them gone.

Should we go to far Samoa where the scarlet parrots call,
          Oh how happy we would be
          You and me, you and me,
For we know that in Samoa it’s a paradise for all;
          By those shadowy canoes
          What can anybody lose,
Where the palms stand out against a gleaming sea?

           There’s a whole lotta lovin’ going on, going on,
           Such a whole lotta lovin’ going on!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

So I got to thinking what John Whitworth might be like, and the image I got was one of extreme crustiness, ruddy-faced from Port, covered in cancerous nodules from the cigs / pipe, sprawled in his favourite armchair by drink and the weight of this chardonnay-sipping world.

Alf’s mentor, Gary, is just like that.

Pallamawalla is decayed and dying

NOTES TO EVOKE THE death and decay of Pallamawalla.

UNDER THE VOLCANO WAS one of the thousands of books I have been meaning to read. So I tried, and ended up abandoning it on a train (it makes perfect sense that Lowry was a hopeless soak, because it is exactly the kind of novel a rambling alcoholic would write), half-read: but not before copying out this superb sentence.

The sentence makes its appearance in Fait Accompli when Alf quotes it at his boss in an attempt to bamboozle and irritate him.

The mother of one of my friends makes an excellent plantain curry. I must ask her for the recipe . . . 

Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli

FAIT ACCOMPLI WILL CONTAIN mythological references (I am also going to use cosmogony and cataclysm as motifs) — Egyptian for the most part, because one character, Victor Boulos, is of Cairene Greek extraction — so I have been scanning dictionaries of mythology etc.

How relevant Aztec beliefs are to a rural New South Wales setting needs careful consideration, though I am quite taken by tlamictiliztli, techcatl, and Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli. [Using Aboriginal myth makes more sense, and not only because the (unnamed) Kamilaroi will be a sort of character in the novel (they were noted for being tall and bellicose, and I like that).] I foresee using Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli as a method of defamiliarisation, perhaps in the opening sentence of the extended chapter describing the town (and, perhaps, its place in the world).

The town is called Pallamawalla, which is a euphonious corruption of Pallamallawa, a town in northern N.S.W. Pallamallawa is certainly not the inspiration for my fictional town: I have never been there, and I only discovered its existence, one day at work, because it has a school.

Incidentally, the note about Roman auspicia was taken because the presence and absence of birds forms part of the aforementioned chapter, and I’m also thinking about the minatory possibilities of birds for a future novel (provisional titles: Straight Bat / Firm Handshakes) — I was inspired by a news item about a plague of Little Corellas in Victoria.

To return to the use of Aztec references: one risks it being seen as a Lowryan imposture, an impression that will only be reinforced by my intention to quote from Under the Volcano. But I’ll save that for the next post, because it deserves stand-alone status.

«. . . that eternal, awful doubt»
                            — A. L. Kennedy