The Bath Fugues Read online

  BRIAN CASTRO is the author of nine novels, including Birds of Passage (1983), Double-Wolf (1991), After China (1992), Stepper (1997), Shanghai Dancing (2003) and The Garden Book (2005), both published by Giramondo. A collection of essays, Looking for Estrellita was published in 1999. His novels have won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction three times, the NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction, the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction, the Age Book of the Year Award, the National Book Council Banjo Award and the Australian/Vogel Literary Award. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

  THE BATH FUGUES

  OTHER BOOKS BY BRIAN CASTRO

  BIRDS OF PASSAGE

  POMEROY

  DOUBLE-WOLF

  AFTER CHINA

  DRIFT

  STEPPER

  LOOKING FOR ESTRELLITA

  SHANGHAI DANCING

  THE GARDEN BOOK

  STREET TO STREET

  BLINDNESS AND RAGE

  BRIAN CASTRO

  The Bath Fugues

  FIRST PUBLISHED 2009

  FROM THE WRITING & SOCIETY RESEARCH GROUP

  AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY

  BY THE GIRAMONDO PUBLISHING COMPANY

  PO BOX 752 ARTARMON NSW 1570 AUSTRALIA

  WWW.GIRAMONDOPUBLISHING.COM

  © BRIAN CASTRO 2009

  DESIGNED BY HARRY WILLIAMSON

  TYPESET BY ANDREW DAVIES

  IN 10/17 PT BASKERVILLE

  PRINTED AND BOUND BY LIGARE BOOK PRINTERS

  DISTRIBUTED IN AUSTRALIA BY TOWER BOOKS

  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA

  CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  CASTRO, BRIAN, 1950 –

  THE BATH FUGUES / BRIAN CASTRO.

  9781920882556 (PBK.)

  A823.3

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED, STORED IN A RETRIEVAL SYSTEM OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS ELECTRONIC MECHANICAL PHOTOCOPYING OR OTHERWISE WITHOUT THE PRIOR PERMISSION OF THE PUBLISHER.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Goldberg Variations…are a set of 30 variations for harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach. First published in 1741…the work is considered to be one of the most important examples of variation form. It is named after Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who may have been the first performer.

  WIKIPEDIA

  It is, in short, music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music which like Baudelaire’s lovers rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.

  GLENN GOULD

  CONTENTS

  I

  Beckett’s Bicycle

  II

  Walter’s Brief

  III

  Sarraute’s Surgery

  Acknowledgements

  Beckett’s Bicycle

  …panting up the hills in bottom gear, refusing to give in, like my father.

  SAMUEL BECKETT

  1

  My friends, there is no friend, Michel de Montaigne had written. He had in fact said there was no perfect friend. When my only friend Walter Gottlieb asked me what I was writing, he received an outburst from me bordering on abuse, as I was on the inner path of my trance. What is it about? Gottlieb insisted. I turned his questions upon themselves. What would I be writing? How could I complete it now? Is not your interrogation ruinous? Here, take my work. Critique it thoroughly. Destroy my vision before it has had a chance to bloom. Explanation, I said, was shortening my breath, the plague of description poisoning my thoughts.

  I was in Paris at the time, having given up art fraud. I still had a passport and Paris was occasionally home. Walter Gottlieb was passing through. He said he had just made a pilgrimage to Portugal. I didn’t ask him any questions. He was on sabbatical from Sydney University and I knew he was working on something secretive from those little signs he made: a nervous flicking of his fingers. We went back a long way. In 1972 I had read High Modernism and politics in a Roman jail…two years in the company of Joyce and Gramsci, after being sentenced for supplying money to the Red Brigades. I gave up my art practice when the French mounted an exhibition of famous forgeries at the Palais Soubise. They catalogued my work in detail and I was released soon after, having achieved both fame and notoriety at the age of thirty-five. Walter Gottlieb found me a job. He may even have petitioned to have me released (rumours said Sartre also signed), though I didn’t presume Gottlieb was ever my benefactor. An artist, he said, offering me a cigar, had to do it tough.

  Twenty years later I was back in Paris living on a writing grant and Gottlieb turned up again. Anyway, to satisfy him, I said I was writing my memoirs, a choppy musical dedicated to counterpoint, without the axes of time and place, collapsing in upon itself because the notes will inevitably run out, returning, elaborating, crisscrossing, double-handedly creating variations upon a theme. But wouldn’t readers be hindered? Gottlieb argued. No good turns came out of such curiosity. I was through with explanation. Montaigne was right. Scribbling was selfish and secretive; genius was in learning how to be a thief. Now, nearing the age of fifty-five, I, Jason Redvers, specialised in cataloguing the lives of others.

  Walter Gottlieb died within three months of our exchange. You can imagine how suffused with guilt I was. How right was he to warn of literary ambition! I was still idling in my studio, trying to write, when I received the news. I immediately began an apostrophe to my dear friend. His wife Marie rang from Double Bay in Sydney, requesting me to collect my things. Marie was an heiress. I could hear her rings clacking across continents. She recited an address – Colo Heights – where I might find alternative lodgings – it sounded colonic, gut-wrenchingly vertiginous. Might it not have been Apollo Heights? I had been occupying a room in the East Wing of the Gottlieb mansion where I’d kept a stretcher, a bicycle, some books and a jar of my kidney stones.

  Marie said that Gottlieb had suffered an infarct in his bathroom. She was proud of her medical terminology, but the possessive adjective meant they hadn’t slept together since their daughter’s drowning, which changed their lives forever. Retirement had not been easy for him. The cause of death was that having taken Viagra with his Prozac, Gottlieb had sought relief between Eros and Morpheus. This tug of war in the bath had proved too much. He must have swelled and choked next to the toilet bowl, his face turning red, then purple, then blue, a Francis Bacon triptych I once forged. I believe he owned an original. Poor Gottlieb. I had given him much in the past. Because I’m not a systematic thinker, I saw little use for writing stories about my life, so I spoke them to him in order to fill his priestly days…hours so solitary…like his journal, grey with drizzle…whence he gleaned nothing but beads of sweat and prayer from his great desire for fame.

  For years Walter Gottlieb had shuffled up and down the university corridor. I attended his lectures in the late sixties. (He was only five years older than me, but he looked ancient. I, on the other hand, possessed the youthful insouciance of a perpetual student.) There was one week when all he discussed was Jean-Paul Sartre. Then it was Simone Weil. I was only interested in whether the philosopher banged the nun. The contemporary novelist… Gottlieb began his discourse at the college high table one evening during dinner (it was warm, the wine was terrible)…was a bum – at best, a product of confession, he said. A novelist was nothing but a grafter, a hack, a grubber with prurient leanings and huge repressions. Novelists were at the end of the line in these, the closing days of the Western Canon. Wood-tongued theorists were taking over; tin-eared reproductionists; counterfeit drummers. To publish a novel, he said, was to make yourself suspicious. Unmediated personal expression in the face of disinterest. Nothing new there. Every kid was doing it, trying to become memorabl
e in the age of forgetting. They were all robots. Etc. Etc. And so the night wore on.

  In his daylight hours, Walter Gottlieb lectured on Montaigne and Disdain. In twenty years, the last two as an associate professor, Gottlieb had not published anything. He taught love during Lent term, friendship during Trinity, death in Michaelmas. Epicurus, Montaigne, Socrates; it was a hard road to take in order to arrive at contemporary literature. When he said Mann, we thought him hip. So modern, so chic. Literature ended in 1939, he would declare provocatively, a smirk creasing his face as if he’d suffered a stroke. Speech proclaimed his genius; rumour brought him fame; rhetoric fought off adversaries. He was Socrates. He always argued with a remote elegance bordering on self-pity. A malicious gossip ran in the corridors that he was pathic. I don’t know if there was a student hanging on his every word. Maybe they meant he was pathetic. But in truth, I didn’t care for any kind of public manifestation at the time, even of intellectual hatred. I was deeply into art forgery and was learning how to be a revolutionary. I didn’t think a state of serenity could ever be achieved by saying anything out loud…I was in flight from presence. For someone who was plotting a breakaway Department of Comparative Literature, Gottlieb read neither French nor German, spoke a slightly accented English, wore loafers and loved to boast he ate only wafers for dinner, holding up each sliver like a Communion Host before our bloated faces. (At high table there were only two or three disciples left.) I didn’t see him again until he turned up in Paris shortly after my release. Had he ever been a Jewish refugee, he had certainly eaten a lot of wafers since. He was catholic with a small c, he said. He was beginning to waddle. His centre of gravity was very low. He had not managed to get promotion and had sunk into a terrible gloom. Perhaps he suspected he was going to die. There are a few portraits of him in Paris still in existence. Not all of them by me.

  Five years after my release I returned to Australia with a woman who was to become his wife. Marie was an art dealer with Christie’s. Gottlieb found a new lease on life. He wore polo shirts and a baseball cap, squirted soda into his scotch and considered flying lessons. He insisted I should rent the East Wing of their Double Bay double-storey villa on Sydney Harbour. The fee would be very modest; Marie was making a fortune. I was wary at first and only went there on weekends − floated by the marina in a rubber dinghy listening to seagulls and the Gottliebs’ incessant squabbling, watching the harbour water, which was never completely calm.

  While there, I bought an old bicycle from a garage sale, a Swift Safety, circa 1928, with rusting rims and torn leather saddle. It was said to have belonged to Samuel Beckett. Somebody had brought it out from Ireland, dead clover still stuck in the sprockets. I repaired it as best I could and rode it like a hippo treading water, slowly. Crosswinds were the worst. Soon I was reaching the mountains from the sea then squeaked home in time to take my tea beneath the jangling spars of unused schooners. Out-of-town millionaires appreciated my watchdog insomnia. I disturbed their children deflowering one another in the stoop. I frightened prowlers with fireworks and warned off sightseers with a water pistol. I wore cricket whites; a cap, gold-embroidered with the word Security. Since the rich were only threatened by the thought of poverty, they trusted me to some extent, and when I warned them the sea was tatterdemalion or the wind boreal, they noted my Brahmin weather eye. In any case, I supplied vocab for their boardroom bullying, once told them a story they thought taxing, about a great white whale. Still, Moby Dick became a much used phrase on the floor of the stock exchange…along with red herrings, white elephants and flying pigs.

  But nothing could excuse my meanness to Gottlieb, who died without literary success, a clutch of mysteries still in hand. Marie had not mentioned the beautiful woman from whom he’d regularly bought dried flowers, nor could anyone explain that large hourglass he lugged home like a signal lantern, clogged with grey, wet sand. Looking back, I can now see his infatuation with Fabiana. She must have been the muse who lit his hidden self.

  I returned from Paris but I didn’t make it to Gottlieb’s funeral. The week before I was to vacate the East Wing, I resolved to ride from the War Memorial to Colo Heights. My state of mind was cenographic, as I planned a humble tribute to my friend. Gottlieb’s death revealed to me my own. Any future project seemed inane. I began at dawn, on a marathon during which I expected I would die. I wove unsteadily out towards Windsor, then along Bells Line of Road, a haunting rosary of dead explorers who’d navigated the rise and fall between light and shade, through a miasma of blue eucalypts and rank rainforest. I felt fit. My legs were good. I crossed the Colo River where children had been lately drowning. Soon I was mending a puncture by the side of the Putty Road. The sunlight was now agony. I heard wings; explosions; bombs. I might have been in Guernica. Despair broke in at noon with the Angelus of migraine.

  I was at the entrance to a public road, the kind of unsealed byway I seldom explored, hollowed with ruts, the median peaked with gravel, bends raked with corrugations. Such tracks were always disappointments, ending in tips or quarries. Where you expected soft glades and groves you often came upon police and their sniffer dogs searching for bodies in sunken shafts. Spindrifts of dust rose up from the cleared hills. I read anxiety everywhere. I tested my tyres for a mile or so and thought how deliberately Gottlieb had pressed on with his poetry; how he fiddled on board his sloop on weekends, hunched in the bleached transom penning lines reminiscent of more famous harbour poets. In the East Wing of his house I used to watch the red glow go down behind him and hear the tiny bell in the tower of the Stella Maris convent pealing five times from a distant hill. I would sip a martini and look up at the regularly departing jets etching contrails into a deeper blue. The moment was significant; the gathering clouds threw up a tableau: a scene at Gethsemane; a soaring crucifix: for Gottlieb’s tiny, stooping figure spoke to me of passion, failure and futility, and of the tragic deafness of the world. It was a very Australian moment…with olives.

  I did not realise how rapidly I was descending. Freddy Mercury’s lyrics buzzed in my ear: I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride it where I like. Mercury: my father injected it, I don’t know why. No wings sprouted from his ankles. He once owned a bicycle shop in Macau. I, though, flew; from the past. The vegetation was suddenly looming up above, and the road was speckled with light and shade and the Swift was bouncing over treacherous tree roots. I tried to correct my discomfort by gliding from one rut to another − a fatal error, for I should have held my line − and came down heavily on my side, rolling into a creek full of pickled stone. For some time, although I had no idea of time, the bittersweet world of the half-coma manifested itself in gentle constriction and gay abandon not dissimilar to that experienced in love. I peeped into a golden corona of light, blindingly soft. Then upon regaining full consciousness and experiencing the first stabs of pain, my first thought was of Gottlieb’s little daughter, I don’t know why. The water was cold. I may have been drifting towards the darkling river-bend; all around, the contrapuntal chittering of grebes. But it was of Blimunde I first thought, when consciousness brought back the anxious world without. Blimunde, one of Gottlieb’s twin daughters.

  I attended university at the age of thirty. I was a slow learner obsessed with badminton, having spent several years swatting shuttlecocks on the international court. Gap years, the young would now say, justifying my laziness. Gottlieb was already a rising star, a senior lecturer defending New Criticism, an old school in brief renaissance before French theory poisoned the Ivy League. He wore sky-blue cardigans and read closely for tone, not for feeling. But when language was totally severed from meaning, when The Word finally separated from The Thing (a nut pounded since the 1920s), something harder cracked; a synapse failed to fire among the believers and those who spoke in toneless paradiddles began to sound more brilliant.

  A slow learner always plumped for loyalty. I think there were five of us who still refused to believe a poem was all sociology and subtext, let alone symbols and syntagms. We d
id not see any social function for any of it. We liked it for itself. Held in the oral stage, we sucked language like a lozenge. Besides, a poem was less to carry, could be dissected endlessly for sweetness and light. It didn’t have to mean anything, but it contained secrets, perhaps even exuded its inheritance. Such dubious legacies may have been dangerous in greater minds, but none of us was ready for Gottlieb’s mental challenges, though we pleased him, at least, by nodding at the right places. He oiled his bat. Took to the crease against the French. A short man with an enormous mane of greying hair (you could have sworn a Persian cat was curled up on the lectern), wearing braces and spectacles, he delivered his lectures in a powerful bass voice. A talking bow tie, Beethoven-like, he used his deafness to record deep structures in the resonances of ideas. He handled himself well:

  Regard the Intentional Fallacy − the text means only what it says. The author’s intention is irrelevant. Meaning can only be textual, without personal reaction. Now that was put forward by Wimsatt and Beardsley in 1954. What then, was this French nonsense about the author being dead? A copy, no doubt.

  Gottlieb would adjust his collar and push up his chin. The glint in his eye said he was having fun.

  Maybe meaning is merely a copy of itself…its self-importance. The author knows all that. Knows it’s all smoke and mirrors. Knows that you know that meaning is always a manipulation, that there are only copies, echoes of previous profundities, so powerful that you want to be deceived because you are literary; you assent more than you dissent because you have been chosen. Go with it. The Greeks gave us mimesis. Have you never cried at the movies, at the copy of reality, knowing the light outside would make you foolish? You see, we are all in the know.