Wainwrights’ Mountain

For more than thirty years I’d been telling myself I’d write this book one day. It never seemed to get any closer until one morning in 1991, when, under the shower, I could feel words forming in my mind. I had to put them down. Without drying myself I went to the front room, where I’m writing now, and scribbled on paper ‘In the beginning was the need to say there had been a beginning. Beginnings take place in the present. The beginning is always now.’ I looked at the words. I didn’t know what they meant, nor why I’d written them. So I dried myself, got dressed, and went to work.

I went to work for weeks, in fact, before the second revelation came. I was in the car park at my work, locking the car, when it came to me that the three sentences that had come to me under the shower were the motto under which the whole of the Wainwright story would be written. I felt weak at the knees, and put a hand on the car. I’d been saying for years that I’d write it one day, and now it was ready to be written. I felt inadequate, but I knew that only the writing would deliver me from my burden. I would soon be climbing the mountain I’d been looking at for years.

The climb started very slowly. Six months after I began I had only seven or eight pages done. This was unlike me. Had it been a false start? I looked at what I’d written, many times. It seemed fine. Nothing happened. I now think that the book’s fugal form – two family stories intertwining – was evolving in an area of my brain that wasn’t accessible. In December 1991 and January 1992 the thing began to move, at last. From then until the beginning of April 1993 the book wrote itself at the rate of about one chapter per month. The form, as I’ve already said, was a fugue, but the incidents making up the two stories, particularly that of the Bowden and Morris families, based for the most part in Melbourne, my home city, were unpredictable. On most days when I sat down to write I had no idea what would come out, just as I was amazed, rereading what I’d written the previous day before I began the latest additions to the story, at what I found. The flame, or spirit, people hovering about the Wainwrights’ clearing and their lives, and the whacky events of Chapter 9, Love and death (shoot it out in a bungalow), are good examples of the things that were as amazing to the writer as to anyone else.

I well remember a morning when I had left the door open between my writing room and the rest of the house and became aware that Rachel, my daughter’s friend who was living with us at the time, was peeping around a corner to see if I was all right. It occurred to me that I had been laughing riotously as I reread yesterday’s production and that without realising it I was probably laughing a lot as I put down whatever came into my mind. ‘It’s all right Rachel,’ I said. ‘It’s just something funny!’ She seemed reassured and went away; what she told her friends I have no idea. Just something funny! The whole process of writing Wainwrights’ Mountain was a visitation of a long series of moods and ideas over which I exercised no control, only complete obedience. I was working for Victoria College (now part of Deakin University) while I was writing the book, and I was at the end of Chapter 13 when a woman from the Business Faculty whom I’d been working with, called Vona Beiers, came into my room one morning. She’d been to the funeral of a child, the daughter of some friends, and it had affected her deeply. She told me about it and I listened, amazed. I’d brought my book to the point where Don, the child of Juliet Courtney Morris, was about to die, and I, as novelist, would have to arrange a suitable funeral for him. Vona gave it to me. In a few minutes and over a cup of tea she brought me Don’s funeral which I set at a cottage across the road from the Redlynch Hotel, on the edge of Cairns, where I’d been with my daughter on a number of occasions. It could hardly have been easier; the book was writing itself.

The Wainwright story had been told to me many years before by Sid Merlo, a Bairnsdale house painter, and one of the loveliest people I’ve known. When I described him in my first book, Hail & Farewell! I called him Tim. Tim was the name I used for the man who tells the same story to my character Doctor John Grey, whose activities as a young man examining the mountains and whose reaction to the tree house story make him something of a representative for me as a young man. John Grey also gives me an opportunity to show another sort of love from the madness and ecstasy of Luke and Lily in Chapter 9 (see above). John Grey is a long-haul sort of man and it is his steadiness, his judgement and persistence which give Juliet the room she needs to develop. She has left home impulsively, shaken by the story her mother has told her about the death of her father. She’s soon in a brothel and hating it. She goes north with Jesse Bowden and something wonderful – too good, it turns out – appears. He sets off on his great ocean trip and she never sees him again. The following period is awful too, because her son Don is neither dead nor properly alive. This trap is worse by far than the brothel. It’s in this period that she takes on John Grey as her lover, but both of them know that when Don dies her life will move into another phase and how this will affect them they cannot be sure. Terrible as Juliet’s pain is in this period, she is also maturing, and the last chapters of the book are about the development of another sort of vision, contrasting with that of Giles Wainwright, who separated himself from the world so he could look down on it. This isn’t open to Juliet, nor to John, who have to accept everything life brings them, and develop inside themselves so they can deal with it. If I had to choose, this would be, in my mind, the preferable form for vision to take.

Lucy Wainwright, however, gets no choice. She is the first female child of Giles and Annie to survive and she is given the task of keeping the family’s journal. She is their in-house recorder of truth. It’s a heavy burden and she’s relieved to be able to give it up but when she does so she is effectively resigning from life; thereafter she is hardly more than a voice, a memory, a reminder of a life in an earlier time.

In showing her in this way I have to admit that I have drawn on, and greatly exaggerated, the version of Lucy’s life that I gathered from Sid Merlo, my informant years ago. In my early book Hail & Farewell! I described being taken by Sid to Lucy’s cottage in the bush. Neither Sid nor I knew then that the Lucy who lived there was not the Lucy Sid remembered from his childhood in the area, but another Lucy from the next generation. Her story, too, was a distressing tale of isolation but its link to the Giles and Annie Wainwright story was not as direct as Sid and I imagined. Three people with Gippsland connections have been good enough to set me right on this, but a story, once told, refuses to un-tell itself. What happened to Lucy in Sid’s imagination and then in mine is a good example of what the mind does when it gets hold of a story. Stories have lives of their own, and I’ve carried the Wainwright story for many years, allowing it to develop in its own ways. The logic is obviously something to do with the way I see things but I also feel that the story has lived according to an inner logic of its own. You may feel that in saying this I am trying to avoid responsibility for what I’ve written, and I suppose I am. I’ve never felt ‘in control’ of the Wainwright story, merely a ‘carrier’, as with someone carrying germs, or genes, or both.