Listening to Verdi
A gesture
Letters
Working it out

Listening to Verdi

Estelle sat in a broad and commodious chair I’d bought from a departing teacher and had had recovered for three pounds. I have it still. I sat on the other side of the room, after putting on side 1 of Otello, and we listened. The opening is tumultuous, Otello enters, he stops a fight, then he in turn is arrested by the arrival of the woman he loves. They sing, because that’s what people do in operas, and how they sing. He says, ‘Let war, thunder and the world be engulfed if after infinite wrath comes this infinite love!’ Desdemona says, ‘You led me to the shining deserts, to the burning sands, to your native land; you told of the pains suffered, and the chains and grief of the slave.’ She says she loved him for the spirit she saw, blazing inside him, and he loved her for pitying, for feeling, in response to the things he told her. This is human passion raised to great heights and the two of them, black man and white woman, are swept up. He is afraid, he says; it may be that in the unknown future of his fate there will never again be a moment such as this. Desdemona has a woman’s answer, which means, I fear, that it is an answer bound to be thwarted:

‘May heaven drive away care, and love not change with the changing of the years.’

They kiss, Otello and Desdemona, they look upon the stars, and they go in, clasped in each other’s arms. It is, however, and unfortunately, only the end of Act One.

From my chair on the other side of the room, near the gramophone, I said, ‘How was that!’ and Estelle, shifting in her chair, picked up her wine for a sip before saying, ‘Hmm. Well!’, which told me she was as moved as I had been. I put some wood on the fire, and poked it till it blazed. Words are best avoided, at times. Simple little actions can fill time just as well. We were taking in what we’d heard. Then the talkative side of me took over. ‘I’ve been telling you what I’ve been reading about the late Verdi ...’ ‘Ssshh,’ said Estelle, and put her glass down. ‘Let’s sit quietly before we go on.’ So we sat, on what was a mild evening, with the fire lit more for companionship, or focus in the room, rather than need of heat, and when I sensed that we were ready, I put on Act 2.

I can look now through the libretto of Verdi’s Otello without being able to remember where, exactly, we were in the excitement of the opera when I sensed that something had changed between us. I don’t remember Estelle signalling to me to turn the music down so that it must have been at the end of a side, as we used to say in the days of long-playing discs. The first words I can recall were Estelle saying, ‘We’re in trouble. What are we going to do about this?’ I realise now, looking back, that I was flushed with that state known as denial. She looked at me from the other side of the room. ‘Come over here.’ I shifted my chair to be beside her. We took each other’s hands. Estelle was nearly as troubled as I was. ‘I swore I wouldn’t let this happen.’

> back to TOP

A gesture

Yet we had a gesture to make towards each other, and we did. She came back the following night, in black, all black, this time, and we sat on a divan I’d pulled near the fire. It was a good fire, lit early, and built until it had a deep bed of coals under the logs. I don’t think it occurred to either of us to compare our love with the fire, glowing strongly but doomed to be dust by morning. We certainly knew that our love had never been allowed to peak until that night and it would have only the one chance to do so. We sat side by side, feeling the quiet of the night outside creeping into us. It is a lovely feeling to be with someone one loves with certainty, knowing that a surrounding silence is an assistance in concentration on a feeling that’s of great importance but which has never been fully felt, because never fully allowed, before. We sat beside each other, each feeling the developing certainty in the other, until we embraced, kissed, then stood to put our clothes on the floor. I walked to the bedroom to get a contraceptive, I walked back. We lay back. The divan was ours. Each was the other’s. I was hers. She was mine. Space is an indefinable, because elastic thing. ‘Had I but world enough, and time ...’ This was our time, and a simple, single divan was world enough, set, as it was, in a world amplified to the limit of our thoughts. We loved, it would damage others, it would be hated, because thought impossible, indecent, by the township around us, by her family and mine, so we had allowed ourselves – or she’d allowed herself, and I’d allowed myself to be ruled by her decision, the only one within her range of possibilities – a gesture of love. We gestured, twice, quickly, then we dressed again, then we took ourselves to the chair by the fire where she’d sat for Otello, and we squeezed into it – there was room enough, with the two of us pressed together – and, simply by being close, and fulfilled, we gloried in each other, triumphant in our love!

She didn’t stay late; I didn’t go to the car to say goodnight. There seemed no need. A few days later Estelle, Richard and their children left the town, a van travelled the highway a little before or after them, and they settled in her mother’s house in a suburb, far away.

Letters began.

> back to TOP

Letters

Letters began.

I seized them from my mailbox and took them away to read them privately. I want to add ‘in deepest concentration’, but that would hardly be true. I was like a man who gobbles down water then wonders why he’s still thirsty. ‘Can’t get no satisfaction,’ Mick Jagger sings. Take it slowly, Mick! Slowly! I’d read the letters over and over, day after day, until I’d sucked them dry, then I’d write, proudly, commenting sometimes on what she’d said but mostly on events around me. I was still obsessed, remember, by the world. I didn’t understand very much, I was locked up in myself, and I’m inclined to think that I couldn’t understand anything much in those days unless I could relate it in some way to myself. My urge to enlarge, to grasp, the region I was in was a commanding one. Fulfilment, for me at that time, could never be partial. Looking back, I see my love for Estelle as a trap. We needed to pass quickly through the stage of lovers possessing each other, obsessed with each other, and then to use each other freely, a base, with permission to walk in and out of each other’s lives at will. I might have given Estelle that if I’d understood it at the time, but I was locked in the ideas of marriage that had surrounded me from birth – the habits of my family and all the other families I’d known, both in my upbringing and in Gippsland, where I was. Impossible! People couldn’t have the freedoms I was imagining. Estelle couldn’t. She understood freedom and the loss of it better than I did. I asked her to make a mountain trip with me; I had places to show her and things to discover ... besides, mountains were a place of ecstasy for me, and my idea of love was ecstatic too. I spoke before of gods; mortals could enlarge themselves by loving, it flowed through the veins of being and one became more than a single human. One flew, one soared, saw more than earthbound people saw, and one was more than human. Feelings were a festivity of enlargement. One could be more than one!

Two? Estelle tried to make arrangements for the trip we’d planned – her children, time away – but she couldn’t. Her mother, who would have had the children, was troubled. Estelle couldn’t come. Daughters depended on their mothers and the freedom she was crying for hadn’t been handed down.

Her letters spoke of the silences of her mother, and her grandmother. Each of them took it for granted that they couldn’t speak. Each had been widowed young. Each had had to shoulder a heaviness of responsibility. Children. Being in charge. Making do. Never an indulgence such as Estelle had briefly dreamed of, and was now renouncing. We were doomed, though we struggled on. She sent me poems she’d written and I pored over her words, marvelling at the passions that words could point to. I told her what I was writing, and what I planned to write next time a holiday gave me days to myself.

We came through, painfully enough, and each with a considerable sense of loss. The ways of the world had blocked us. We hadn’t been hard to squash. Each of us understood too well the forces closing us down, we evaluated, and saw we had no chance. There are only a handful in any generation for whom defeat isn’t inbuilt in the mind. I ask myself why this is so. Were we right, Estelle and I, and was the world around us wrong?

> back to TOP

Working it out

We came through, painfully enough, and each with a considerable sense of loss. The ways of the world had blocked us. We hadn’t been hard to squash. Each of us understood too well the forces closing us down, we evaluated, and saw we had no chance. There are only a handful in any generation for whom defeat isn’t inbuilt in the mind. I ask myself why this is so. Were we right, Estelle and I, and was the world around us wrong?

I find myself wanting to interrogate Othello, and the composer and the dramatist who presented him. I want to challenge the power of art and ask if perhaps it hasn’t failed us. What a fool Othello was. Why do I, did I, bother with him?

There’s a lesson that’s both moral and mortal to be listened to, here. Human societies are sheep-like, sticking instinctively together and treating the individual who separates himself as an object lesson in curiosity. If he stands alone, what will happen to him? Ah, you see! Foolish sheep, entrails torn out by dogs, eyes pecked out by crows. Protection lies within the mob. Stick with everyone else. Don’t be daring. Stick together, do what everyone else does, and if anything goes wrong, appeal to those who look the same as you do. Individuality that’s too gross invites destruction, the curse falls on the ones that are alone ...

... and all the rest of it. You’ve heard it a thousand times. It’s rubbish but it’s also the way things work. It’s true because everyone makes out it’s true and that’s what makes it true. A new truth can’t be born unless people suffer for it. Exponents have to suffer, even die, before a path, a practice, becomes viable. Who wants to die for a feeling?

Who wants to kill? Othello did, and what a fool he was. At the end of the play, and the opera, Iago’s dragged away for punishment, so the herd-audience, the sheep-audience, have a victim they can blame, but who’s to blame but themselves? Who gave Othello his glory and who tore it from him?

Answer, the mob? No, answer, the mad Moor himself. He claimed too much. He claimed, and took, more than he could control himself to manage. Nobody writes plays, or operas, about self-control, self-management, but it’s the central virtue, personal and social. It’s one of life’s mysteries that when we bring up children we know that we have to let them make mistakes, and learn from them, but at some point – Where? Where? Where? – we intervene. We say no. Don’t try. Don’t see what happens. Play it safe. Stay within the bounds.

I rarely play Otello now. I rarely read the play. The only lessons I’ve still to learn are how to write like Shakespeare, or music like Verdi. It’s 10am as I sit here writing; I won’t learn those lessons by morning tea! Writers develop the art of living in other people’s passions, and I suppose that’s what I’m doing here. I’m treating my younger self as an ‘other’, I’m looking at him, and the woman he loved a while, and I’m drawing something, some riches, from their pain. They did give each other love, they did sit in each other’s arms before a fire, filled with a burst of glory they’d ... stolen? snatched? ... from an ungenerous but indifferent world, so they did know each other deeply for a short time. I think Othello/Otello is a lesson in loss, and I think the best way to think of loss is not to complain about what might have been – because it was never, as they say, on – but to rejoice in whatever it was you got away with, if you were lucky enough to get away with anything at all.

> back to TOP

I think readers will quickly see that the two central figures in this memoir, Estelle and the narrator, are pretty close to helpless. They find themselves in love without having made any ‘decision’ to take that considerable step. What can they do? Follow their feelings? Deny their feelings? Estelle decides that they can make a gesture of loving towards each other, and then no more. This they do. But what about the writing? It seemed to me, writing about the incident over forty years later, that it would best be handled by getting as much distance as possible between the surging passions and the telling of them. This would help to convey the helplessness of the protagonists. If it had been my intention to rage against the circumstances of the two people, my approach to the writing would have been different. The narrator could have seethed, complained ... but such an approach really wouldn’t do. The reader would ask why the narrator hadn’t acted differently if he wanted to complain in his prose. Therefore the writing had to be as abject, as almost helpless, as the two people in the memoir. The simplest and best way to make the central figures small was to show them against the far better known Shakespearean/Verdian figures of Desdemona and Othello. The two people that the memoir recalls couldn’t reach those dramatic heights because they were too aware of them. They were possibilities, but unobtainable, therefore the passions of the two who love each other briefly must be constrained. Hence the scale of the writing. This is the sort of thing that can only be done – achieved, I want to say – many years after the events that gave rise to the wish to write, because it’s only when one is well and truly beyond the powerful reach of strong emotion that one can manage it, control it artistically. Or so it seems to me. I wonder what Shakespeare would have said?

> back to TOP  > back to WRITING BOOKS