What Poets Need. Finuala Dowling

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СКАЧАТЬ least they wouldn’t offend anyone.

      I was wrong, of course. Monica read the volume from cover to cover and found it deeply offensive. She read every poem as a sly, veiled criticism of her, and of our life together, particularly “Pestle and Mortar” which she claimed was an unabashed exposé of our sexual problems. All news to me. She said it didn’t surprise her that the book contained not even the smallest love poem to her, nor a dedication, because she’d always suspected that I didn’t love her. I was a weakling, a parasite. I just sat around and did nothing. I should wake up and smell the coffee. Get myself a life, “pull finger”. She wasn’t going to subsidise me any longer.

      She was shouting at me, which was not in itself unusual, as she’d frequently lambasted me in the past for my inattentiveness to her long monologues about trade and industry, or for forgetting her dry-cleaning. What was unusual was that on this occasion I answered her back. Once I’d raised my voice, I felt quite exhilarated. So this was how bellicose people felt: the thrill of drowning out your opponent, pumping out abuse. When you’re shouting, you open up a direct vein to all your repressed rancour. It is like being drunk but without losing the power of speech.

      I told her that she was a grubbing materialist, a harpy who had betrayed the ideals of feminism by aping the grotesqueries of the male mafia. That she must be mad to think I’d write a love poem to someone who regularly and unblushingly called for the playing fields to be levelled, that I was happiest and always would be happiest when she was out of town.

      After we’d said all there was to say, we were quite polite towards each other. In a mutually understood ellipsis, I started to pack my things. Monica even brought a cloth to dust off my suitcase which, unlike hers, hadn’t been anywhere recently. The truths we’d just revealed had left us both as embarrassed as a post-one-night-stand couple. The near decade we’d spent together could be as easily erased as a film of dust on a piece of luggage. Suddenly I was awake, looking around our townhouse in utter surprise. Had I really lived here? Had I padded across these thickly carpeted floors to brush my teeth on those cold tiles more than three thousand times?

      I moved into the spare room of a Karoo Books colleague, Martie Oliver. Her house was very messy and full of peculiar little dumb-waiter figurines in colonial dress who seemed always, solicitously, to be offering one a tray to put one’s glass on, as well as some less tangible form of companionship. I found them kind and supportive. Martie seemed genuinely touched by my “Valediction to the Dumb Waiters” poem, with its refrain:

      Goodbye, little men –

      men of kindly acumen.

      Monica didn’t attend the launch of The Secret Life of Things. During Red’s speech, a man stood just outside on the patio talking loudly into a cellphone about his planned camping trip in the Golden Gate National Park, as if he felt it necessary to remind me in this way of how unimportant I was. I wondered for a moment if Monica had sent him, but then came to the unflattering conclusion that Monica simply didn’t care enough about me to be vindictive.

      It’s a mark of my naivety that I was completely unprepared for the bad review I got in one of the Sunday papers. “Although ostensibly a study of the ornaments in his home, in The Secret Life of Things John Carson writes about the only thing he knows well: himself, himself, himself.”

      I would have thought that one copy of the reflexive pronoun would have been enough. The reviewer had been at the launch. Her name was uneuphonious: Tizzy Clack. She described me as “an incongruous figure in cowboy checks, looking furtively towards the door as if at any moment his favourite calf would come leaping in”. She went on: “As the attention to detail in his poems is almost foppish, one could be forgiven for thinking this flannelled Carson before us was an impostor, a charlatan.” In her closing salvo, she said the collection might appeal to “the sort of people who enjoy crossword puzzle clues that lead them triumphantly to obsolete words like ‘brumal’.”

      Lots of people saw the review and they all asked how I felt about it, as if perhaps I might have found it insightful and sartorially useful. It’s true I wear checked shirts. I feel comfortable in them and I don’t consider them worthy of comment.

      The review left me indignant. After I’d read it, I went straight to Martie’s loo and scrubbed it with Jik. Martie said, “If only more writers responded to bad reviews like you do.”

      As might have been predicted, Red Moffat found both the review and my response to it hilarious. He said Tizzy Clack was a twenty-three-year-old English Master’s graduate who was looking to carve a journalistic niche for herself. “It’s not about you,” said Red. “Never get lost in the illusion of centrality. It’s about her.”

      Herself, herself, herself, I quipped.

      “That’s the spirit,” said Red.

      Saturday 17th August

      8.30 am

      A soupy day down here at the coast, with a thick sea mist in which the smell of kelp is so strong you feel you are moving about in a cold bouillabaisse. Yesterday was a very full day so I’m writing this early to catch up on Friday’s comings and goings.

      I fetched Ryno’s dog from the kennels. The absurdly named Sir Nicholas is a light brown labrador cross with speaking eyes. (Ryno went through a stage of knighting things: the dog’s honorific was the only one that stuck.) Mrs Cloete gave Sir Nicholas an old cushion to make his first night in the shed more comfortable. When I went out to check on him this morning, I saw a snow dog, a cloud of little white feathers with two dark, soulful eyes looking expectantly at me. He must have ripped open the cushion in the night – probably thought it was what we wanted him to do, a strange custom of the establishment.

      I told Mrs Cloete I’d take Sir Nicholas for a walk after dropping Sal at Holy Cross. The old woman said she’d just get her walking stick and then she’d join me. I feel I must be wearing a sign around my neck saying Please take over my life.

      On these winter days, Kalk Bay is its old self, the one I remember as a child. Back in the Seventies, many of the houses were closed up in the winter, or inhabited by mysterious recluses. The atmosphere of stately eccentricity was heightened by two asylums – Victorian honeymoon hotels gone to seed and leased by the state – and one private nursing home. Alzheimer’s patients regularly escaped and collared me, or called to me from latticed balconies: “Let me out! Let me out!” Perhaps these lunatic women had stayed here before as brides, I thought. There was no coffee, décor or antiques to be had in the Main Road, but two banks, a shoe shop, chemist, haberdasher, butcher, bakery, hairdresser, post office. A mountain stream, forced underground, briefly reappeared in the park, where we children would dam it and upset the council. Someone still kept chickens: you heard the rooster crow every morning. The pancake Kaya of today was then the station’s newspaper kiosk, run by an Hellenic supporter we called Billy Bookstore. He was exceedingly grimy. Beth told me he once went to the False Bay hospital to have some of his dirt surgically removed, but I didn’t believe her. On the days of important soccer matches, Billy shouted, “Hellenic! Hellenic! Hellenic!” On other days he was morosely silent, or incongruously sang a tune that went “I’m in love with a gambling man”.

      The bazaar which is now Hennie’s Market was closing down its old departmental operation, where separate aisles sold pointed shoes with covered side buttons, Dutch remedies or fabric by the yard. I would stand in the toys aisle and already, at ten or eleven, recognised that the playthings being discounted were collector’s items. More than a generation out of date, still in their vintage packaging. Never bought because you could get cheaper, newer plastic toys from the CNA in Fish Hoek. Still, the wind-up rabbits with their tin drums and the miniature steam engines had an aesthetic appeal that made me want to own СКАЧАТЬ