Manning Clark('s) House

I had only the vaguest idea of who Manning Clark was (something about several volumes of Australian history?) before I visited Manning Clark House last Friday for informal drinks with the Friends of Manning Clark House - a fairly nerdy but genial bunch. The house is preserved as Manning and Dymphna (a translator of some note) left it, replete with their 10,000 volume library, which inhabits every spare inch of space at eye level and above.  Tellingly, there is a bench in the kitchen where Dymphna apparently did her translating while cooking dinner for the many guests Manning brought unexpectedly home.  His study, by contrast, is accessible only by a ladder, and commands several square feet and the best views in the house.  This room contains probably half of the 10,000 books, as well as a large wooden desk that bears an inky mark in the shape of Clark's hand (he wrote with a quill and always blotted in the same place).  The division of space made me reflect on Virginia Woolf's thoughts on room, and how women rarely got one of their own.  When I probed my own ideas further, I realised that I, like most of western civilisation, tend to idealise the cloistered scholarly space, which has also traditionally been a male space; but perhaps there is something to be said for literary work undertaken in the thick of life as it is lived, in the full current of food, wine, conversation, family, community. Maybe the watermark in her work is more authentic than the inky one in his. Not being a mother of six children nor the wife of an eccentric academic, I should probably speculate no further.

This tender conceptual blue net

Friday Poetry is an idea I'm borrowing from Alison.  For my first Friday poem, I've chosen David Malouf's “Moonflowers.” Like all his poems, it's evocative and graceful, never obvious. I especially like the delicacy of the final thought. Though more truthful than the single narrative, sometimes the tender net is a perilous thing to cling to.

Gone and not gone. Is this
garden the one
we walked in hand in hand
watching the moon-
flower at the gate
climb back into our lives
out of winter bones –
decades of round crimped candescent
origami satellite-dishes
all cocked towards Venus?
One garden opens
to let another through, the green
heart-shapes a new season holds
our hearts to like the old.
The moonflower lingers
in its fat scent. We move
in and in and out of
each other’s warmed spaces,
there is
no single narrative.
And we like it that way,
if we like it at all, this
tender conceptual
blue net that holds, and holds us
so lightly against fall.

A truth universally acknowledged

Today is the 197th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice, which Jane Austen wrote at the age of 21.  While a lot of people will say Emma or Persuasion is the better novel, the enduring popularity of Pride and Prejudice is irrefutable.  Apart from the chemistry between Elizabeth and Darcy, I think this novel has an energy and momentum which the others lack; it glides where the others stroll. It feels effortless. Also, it's the funniest. No adaptation quite manages to capture the quirkiness of the humour in this one, nor the complexity of a comic character like Mrs Bennet, who is at once irritating and endearing.  My favourite moment in the book is a throw-away line at the close of one insignificant scene, where Mrs Bennet tells a young Lucas son that if she saw him drinking a bottle of wine a day she would take his bottle away from him. “He declared that she wouldn't. She continued to declare that she would, and the argument only ended with the visit.” Delicious.

Best Reads of 2009

One of my resolutions for 2010 is to blog more, so here's a look back at the books I read in 2009. The list I kept ended up somewhat erratic and incomplete, but here are my highlights, in no particular order:

1. Ransom, by David Malouf. I relished the lyricism of the prose, but more especially the message about the pleasure and meaning of ordinariness; how empty the trappings and postures of status are compared with the richness of actual experience.  A good lesson.


2. The Sin Eater, by Alice Thomas Ellis. I hadn't come across Ellis before, but I really enjoyed her witches' brew of wit, charm, cruelty, and sensuous attention to the symbolism of food.


3. In Praise of Slow, by Carl Honore. Perhaps ironically, I had to read this one for work.  Worried that it might be in that irritatingly repetitive journalese that so many good but simple ideas seem doomed to adopt, I was pleased by the intelligence and exuberance of this book, and I love the idea of slow.


4. The Limits of Power, by Andrew Bacevich. This is a compelling account of American foreign policy and national identity since World War II, written by a historian who happens to be an ex-colonel.


5. The Irony of American History, by Reinhold Niebuhr. Bacevich led me to Niebuhr, whom everyone should read.  This is a stirring jeremiad incising not only American politics but the American soul. Political ars predicandi at its best. 


6. Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy. A return to some of the Hardys I read for English Honours revealed this one as the most engaging and deeply satisfying. I think Tess is the greater novel, but you can't beat this one for sheer charm.