Being There

  About the Book

  We appreciate best the miracles that are being performed, by real beings, when we are there, as at the circus, to take part in the moment at risk. Some quality of physical anxiety in us increases our attention and makes the performance on every occasion then a first one and unique.

  After exploring the idea of home, where and what it is, in A First Place, what it means to be a writer and where writing begins in The Writing Life, David Malouf moves on to words and music and art and performance in Being There.

  With pieces on the Sydney Opera House, visual art, artists and architects, and including Malouf’s previously unpublished libretti for Voss, Mer de Glace and a translation of Hippolytus, this is a various and stimulating collection of one man’s devotion to the world of art, ideas and culture.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  I

  The Stigma, a Happening, 1965

  Being There

  Opera

  Something to Sing About

  Nabucco

  Growing up with the Stars

  The South

  Questions on the Way to an Exhibition

  Second Nature

  An Angel at Bennelong Point

  Glenn Murcutt’s Tough Lyricism

  Bill Henson

  ‘The Careful Surveyor’, Mandy Martin, Peripecia

  William Robinson

  A Slow Dance to Unheard Music

  Passing Show

  II

  Two Libretti: Voss and Mer de Glace

  Introduction

  Voss

  Mer de Glace

  III

  Introduction

  Hippolytus

  Also by David Malouf

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE FIRST PART OF Being There is a product of the lively cultural world we live in. Written over nearly fifty years between 1965 and the present, these talks, introductory essays, articles are ‘occasional pieces’, a response to the invitations that come to a writer who also happens to be an opera and concert-goer to have his say on a local orchestra, a controversial production of a Verdi opera, or opera in general, or an exhibition or the movies or the fellow artists across a wide field – painters, architects, video artists, photographers – whose interests, in one way or another, speak to his own. These encounters, either as a performance to be attended, or as works to be attended to and lived with, constitute a form of experience that like any other feeds back into the work we do; if not directly, then through the energy we get from them and take back to our own moment on the page.

  So much for the discursive pieces that make up the first part of the book. The second and third parts move on from analysis of what we get from an occasion, by being there as observers and listeners, to the creation of the occasion itself; in this case in the form of two libretti, Voss and Mer de Glace, which are published here for the first time, and a version of Euripides’ Hippolytus.

  My thanks once again to Meredith Curnow and Patrick Mangan for their wise and patient editing.

  Sydney 2014

  I

  THE STIGMA, A HAPPENING, 1965

  TO BE SEEN IN Charing Cross Road covered with chicken feathers is currently one of London’s most enviable status symbols. It marks you as a member of the Stigma Club and an initiate into its shocking mysteries. The Stigma, or the Experience as some people call it, is available daily in the basement of Better Books for the price of a shilling.

  Better Books has already established itself as something of a novelty among the Charing Cross Road bookshops; poetry discussions, an automatic coffee-machine, tables among the paperbacks where one can write or read or gossip with one’s friends. Now it reaches out in an entirely new direction. The basement has been converted into something like the Crazy House at the National Show or a poor man’s Madame Tussaud’s. Enter if you dare. We pay our shilling and sign the book. Under the Censorship Act, because of the nature of the exhibition, it can be presented only to a private club. Confronted by an eight-foot-high wall of London telephone directories, we turn shoulder on, push hard between the pages, and are in.

  Beyond lies a labyrinth of waist-high chicken-wire cages, each of which contains a fetish object: a girdle, a brassiere, football headgear, a surgical truss, all cobwebbed or covered with wax drippings, along with such fashionable relics as an Art Nouveau door-knocker and a tin helmet from World War I filled with fresh brains. A voice in the ceiling intones four-letter words and other obscenities: ‘HIRE purchase’, ‘DEEP freeze’. On a pin-screen above, half-dressed Edwardian beauties rub shoulders with thalidomide babies, Hiroshima victims and Algerian torture scenes.

  At the end of this introductory chamber, behind a hessian curtain, is a cosy suburban sitting-room where four or five strangers, including a youth in a donkey jacket and a clergyman, are standing about like guests at a wedding party or a wake, waiting painfully to be introduced. We join them.

  There is something oddly disconcerting about finding oneself with a set of strangers in such a very intimate space. The walls of the room are papered with pink and white roses. There is a plastic mask of Jesus, and a poem in a laminated frame, but the drawers of the bureau desk are open, and have been rifled, as in the aftermath of a burglary, of all but a few girlie magazines, and the walls, between the pink and white roses, are scrawled with graffiti of the sort that promises detailed ‘personal services’ and extraordinary dimensions. We gather round, and very self-consciously examine them, but no one notes down the telephone numbers.

  Through a curtain composed of strips of diaphanous plastic we pass now into another much larger chamber, half-dark, high-ceilinged, with the dripping walls of a grotto or underground cavern. There are pools of stagnant water to step over and it is hung from ceiling to floor with swags of what appears to be flayed skin. At its centre three bald and naked wax-dummies, grouped like the Three Graces round a female deity in a vast brown-leather armchair. She too has the head of a shop-model on a stick; wears rubber falsies; and in her lap, between the splayed brown-leather thighs, is a bedpan filled with raw and stinking liver. When I flee through the only available exit, the floor opens under me and I fall three or more feet into complete darkness.

  The space I find myself in offers no way out. The walls on all sides, and the ceiling close overhead, are of some smooth yielding stuff like leather-covered foam, and the same material underfoot allows me no chance even to kneel, let alone keep myself upright. I wallow, and already panicking a little, roll this way and that, feeling round the walls; and discover at last what appears to be the inner-tube of a rubber tyre. It is blocked, but when, like a swimmer, I extend my hands and open it up a little, I find I can push my head through, then my shoulders, and by wriggling my hips begin to make my way – in real panic now – down what turns out to be a six or seven foot tunnel. The sense of relief I feel when I burst out of stifling darkness into the air again, and stagger upright, is extraordinary.

  I find myself face to face once more with the young man in the donkey jacket, who is engaged now, very seriously, in adding to the graffiti, using one of the blunt indelible pencils that hang on strings from the walls. He is covered with feathers. So, I discover, am I.

  Behind him a stack of television sets blinks and pulses with light.

  In a little niche at knee-level, a shrine to St Winston: a minuscule bust painted black.

  On a table, assorted pamphlets offer a guide to modern living. ‘Nine ways to prevent shop-lifting’, I rather guiltily observe.

  It is all an elaborate joke, of course, and initiates will recognise the terms of reference: De Sade, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroug
hs, Rauschenberg, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the Theatre of the Absurd.

  The Stigma makes no claims for itself and fits into none of the usual categories, but its effects are highly calculated and to serious ends. The cobwebs, the wax drippings, set these up-to-date objects at a certain distance that allows us to see them with new eyes. It is like breaking, years from now, into a late twentieth-century tomb. A joke, yes, but not a meaningless one. The shock of absurdity is as good a means as any to sudden illumination, and the more physical the experience the better. The Stigma provides its own catharsis, and that word, to the Greeks, meant something more physical, and less sweet-smelling, than cool appraisal.

  Outside, across Cambridge Circus, the streets of Soho: the strip joints, betting shops, Italian delicatessens and espresso bars; the medical suppliers, their shop-windows full of surgical boots and braces, bedpans, enamel kidney dishes; the gentlemen’s clubs; the men’s shops with goldfish in tanks under the paving and real birds in the windows; the newsagents with the usual morning papers in French, Italian, Arabic, and outside, hand-written cards offering every variety of ‘personal service’, with or without ‘rainwear’. No girls on the pavement.

  Six years ago, when I first arrived in London, the streets here, and in nearby but more affluent Mayfair, were lined with them; you could see six-foot-tall stiletto-heeled Africans on Curzon Street in real leopard-skin coats, with a couple of hounds on a golden leash.

  The girls these days are upstairs at first-floor windows, half-naked and armed with pea-shooters to attract the attention of potential clients below.

  Emerging from the Stigma into Old Compton Street on a sunny Saturday afternoon is like pushing through into the biggest, most nightmarish Happenings of all. No membership required to subvert the Lord Chamberlain’s Act. No token fee.

  Canberra Times, 1965

  BEING THERE

  FOR A WHILE BACK THERE, like children with a new toy, we were in love with the perfection of the great performance on record, the repeatable certainty of it, and with the perfection too of the listening experience. We closed ourselves off from all extraneous noise, even the sound of our own breathing, and with no effort at all allowed these impeccable events to happen in our head, to come pouring up out of a place inside us we had not known existed, like secretions from some previously undiscovered musical gland.

  Well, it is still good to listen to music that way, but we have come back, most of us, to the real world. We have rediscovered the quite different pleasure of listening to music as it is actually made. In the infinitely variable environment of concert halls, each one itself an instrument to be played. In the presence of musicians and their conductor. As listeners among others, finding in all the variable contingencies and the risk they offer to perfection, even in the effort needed to tune our ears and attend, a quality of excitement, of heightened being, that the other kind of listening lacks.

  We have come back, in the cities we live in, to the gloomy old concert halls we knew when we were young, or to the smart new ones, seeking real presence and a sense of occasion. To share as fellow citizens an experience that is only available in the big city, as unique a product of our civilisation as the skyscraper or the cantilever bridge. An orchestra, in the person of its conductor and each of its ninety to 120 players, performing one of the great works of our heritage, making music, but in an environment that has not been bled of all those elements of noise out of which organised sound arose – the street noises we have just stepped away from, voices in the foyer, the whispers and shuffling before the conductor is quite ready, the slight disturbance of the air that is created by 2000 men and women breathing, even the occasional cough; that substratum of undifferentiated sound against which made music has to assert itself, and against which we bring ourselves to attention. Somehow, to experience the fullness of what music offers we have all to be there. Presence is everything.

  Presence – body. Our own body. The body of the hall. The body of musicians. The body of listeners. These phrases mean something. They put the emphasis where it matters.

  The truth is, we get a heightened apprehension of this most abstract of the arts when we are most physically present, attending with the whole of ourselves not just with our ears. We appreciate best the miracles that are being performed, by real beings, when we are there, as at the circus, to take part in the moment of risk. Some quality of physical anxiety in us increases our attention and makes the performance on every occasion then a first one and unique.

  Especially dear to us, as music lovers and listeners, are our home orchestras, the orchestras we grew up with, who share with us the life of the place and are themselves so much part of it. I can scarcely imagine living in a city – could it really be called one? – that did not have at least one decent orchestra. The programme of the Sydney Symphony when it is announced tells me partly what kind of year it is going to be in the city – like the long-term weather forecast.

  Two or three times a week sometimes I go off to the Opera House to hear what Stuart Challender will make of Debussy’s Jeux or the Mahler Fifth, or how the orchestra will deal with Lutoslawski’s Funeral Music with the composer himself in charge. Being in the hall with the orchestra playing gives me as keen a sense of what it is like to live in Sydney as the view from South Head when the yachts are running or the surf at Bondi. It is the sort of feeling the Athenians must have got on a late summer afternoon at the Dionysian Festival, or the Milanese from their football teams.

  The Sydney Symphony has been shaped over the years by some great conductors: Ormandy for a time in the thirties, later and most definitively by Goossens, again by Nikolai Malko, Charles Mackerras, Willem van Otterloo.

  Its permanent conductor these days is Stuart Challender, who has managed something almost impossible in Australia, to become a star on home ground. He has done it through the abounding energy and precision of his performances, and the excitement he can create by leaping, as he does, on to the platform. Something of the local spirit is in him too.

  Imagine the conditions of a concert night in Sydney, the dusk at Circular Quay with the skyscrapers of the city behind, the first lights on the Harbour; at interval the big ferries wallowing just under the plate-glass windows. Something of the pulse of the city will also be there, and the attentive listener may catch it in the sound of the orchestra itself. Music may be a universal language, but, for those of us who speak it, retains always a trace of the local tongue.

  The Australian Listener, November 1988

  OPERA

  WHAT IS IT ABOUT MUSIC, and especially music for the voice, that so moves us?

  All music takes us back to the body, to the percussive rhythm, which may itself derive from the beating of our blood, of clapped hands, stamped feet, clicked fingers, the striking together of sticks or stones, or to breath set free in song. Music that strays too far from either song or dance, as some experimental music has done in our own time, runs the risk of failing to be felt. It is here that we need to look for the peculiar power of that form of sung drama that we call opera. Further back, I mean, than its historical beginnings in the Florence Camerata, and the attempt of its founders there to reconstitute the effects, as they conceived them, of classical drama; further back too than the artificiality of its conventions as they have developed over nearly four centuries, to this very human, and natural and bodily thing, breath.

  That the form is artificial can hardly be denied. In opera we are in a world where the natural mode of expression is song. Not simply for what is normally spoken, the everyday exchanges between individuals, but for what is unspoken as well; mental apprehension and reflection and all the action of heart, mind and spirit.

  That what is sung in opera shares with speech the use of words ought not to confuse us into believing that what the music expresses is what is in the words. The music has a drama and purpose of its own. What it gives voice to, beyond mere social exchange or the expression of highly charged particular emotions – devotion, doubt, desire,
jealousy, pity, anger, resolution, triumph, grief – is the spirit in action. When we respond to ‘Ah, ich fühl es’ or ‘Una furtiva lagrima’, or ‘In questa regia’ or Cherubino’s ‘Non so pìu cosa son’, the quickening of emotion and energy in us that we find so exhilarating and actual is a physical response that has to do with our own breath as well as the singer’s, an apprehension in both cases of what breath is and stands for. Combined, as it generally is in even the ‘simplest’ aria, with an appreciation of the extreme physical difficulties that are being dealt with, and with so much ease and grace, the effect is a unique sense of lightness and tension, of body being emphasised because it is being pushed, in one direction, to the limit of its possibilities, but at the same time overcome; of breath, that necessary and utilitarian agency of life in us, set free in an action of its own; a virtuoso physical exercise that is at the same time an expression – one of the most intense imaginable – of spirit.

  Other forms of virtuosity offer us a similar sense of enhanced physical being, acrobatics for example and many other sports, and one of them, ballet, uses this to embody the action of spirit; but the emphasis is always on body. In ballet it is the body itself that we identify with, in all its gracefulness and power. In opera the body takes second place (which is why we are so willing to ignore the physical imperfections of singers) but only so that we may be the more intimately aware of it as the source both of the emotion we are experiencing and the agency that carries it. It is this acute awareness of the body’s identity with breath that creates the special pathos of opera, and I mean especially of those moments of high vocal power, of breath resonating in the body and with the whole living power of body behind it, when body itself, at the point of death for example, is at its weakest. But more of this in its proper place.