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The Clunes Little Book of the Book

 

A collectable limited edition book of 200 copies, each individually numbered and signed by all five authors.

 

Clunes Little Book of the Book (incl GST) in AU$:

 

Specifications: 191 x 125 cm; 64pp of Free Felt cream paper 120gsm; printed ends; case covered in Buckram, sectional stitched; dust jacket.

 The image shows the book without its dust jacket.

 

"We come away from the collection nourishing the insights and knowing something of the journey each writer - Frank Moorhouse, Arnold Zable, Nigel Krauth, Anthony Lawrence and Stefan Laszczuk - took on his road to professionalism. We discover the books that accompanied them and the ones they left behind.

What emerges is a warm and deeply reflective collection"

  

Content and extracts

Frank Moorhouse How Poe, Hemingway, Boguslavsky changed my life and Hazlitt could have.

He writes:

Later that year, for 21 shillings I bought my first hardback book from the giftstore in Nowra. It was Ernest Hemingway’s First 49 Stories. I could afford the book because after school I ran a car-wash business.

The stories were transfixing. I saw for the first time the pure power of the short story.

It was my introduction to a new way of story telling. Hemingway taught me that his simplicity was a way to complexity.

I decided that I wanted to be a short story writer.

I had my first story published in Southerly when I was 19. On the front cover, the editor Kenneth Slessor, ran the caption FRANK MOORHOUSE & TEN OTHER WRITERS. I was stunned and guessed it was some sort of joke. Slessor had published a poem of mine a year earlier. I got 1 guinea for the poem and 5 guineas for the story. 5 guineas was a week’s salary for a first year cadet journalist.

In my late 30s I had a lunch with Donald Horne, and told him that my life was in crisis. I had announced in the biographical note of my first book, Futility and Other Animals, that I was a short story writer and that ‘I do not intend to write novels’.

I told Donald Horne, then editor of The Bulletin, that all my life since the time with the vocational guidance officer in Nowra I had seen myself as ‘a short story writer’. I was trapped by my commitment to the form. I was a prisoner of the form.

 

Arnold Zable Companions on the road

He writes:

This is a tale of two cupboards, the first, in the dining room of a rented Victorian cottage, Carlton, circa 1955. Inside the cupboard, cobwebs and dust, bundles of letters bound by elastic bands. And books, in Yiddish, volumes my father had brought with him on the sea voyage from Poland. Instead of clothes he packed books – the works of Yiddish poets and novelists, Tolstoy in Yiddish translation, literary journals and Illustrated Week bound in annual volumes, dated from the 1920s to the mid 1930s. The binding was strong and enduring, and pressed between the pages an occasional flower father had picked in the forests of Eastern Poland.

The Illustrated Week made the deepest impression. I was drawn to the photos of world events, captioned in Yiddish, haunted by images of communities on the verge of annihilation. The first books I remember were of ghosts and preserved flowers.

The second cupboard stood in the office of a secular Yiddish language school, named after the writer, I.L. Peretz, the ‘father of Yiddish literature’ as he was known. The lessons were conducted on Sunday mornings, the cupboard held the school library, and Joseph Giligich, the principal, held the key.

 

Nigel Krauth Mys[h]elf

He writes:

The Corso is the main street of Manly, a famous beachside suburb north of Sydney. You catch a ferry from the city’s Circular Quay and arrive 45 minutes later on a wharf at the southern end of this avenue. It’s named for the Via del Corso running through the historical centre of Rome. Manly’s Corso runs through my historical centre.

When I was 12 years old I cruised The Corso in a raincoat, whether or not there was rain. My raincoat had splits in the side. They look like pockets, but are openings allowing access to your pants pockets. In class they allow the schoolboy next to you to handle your erect cock, even during Scripture lessons. They also allow you to cruise the newsagents on The Corso where, keeping your arms surreptitiously inside the raincoat, you slip a hand out from the pocket split to snaffle books displayed on the stands. Pocket books.

Describing it now, it sounds so crazily desperate. But I did this, for books. My pocket-money didn’t cover such reading material.

Initially I shoplifted something titled, I think, Playgirl. This wasn’t the now-known gay American publication, but an earlier Australian magazine displaying bikini-clad women in a pocket-sized format. I could grab a Playgirl through the split of my raincoat and be off in a moment.

I graduated then to Carter Brown novels. I loved Carter Brown’s purple passages, and quickly worked out that sex scenes occurred on page 56 and then again on page 124, no matter which of his novels I pinched. In developing an addiction for his Los Angeles settings, his ramrod detectives, his hothouse female clients, I didn’t know that bestselling ‘Carter Brown’, alias Alan Yates, was toiling in his flat two suburbs away from where I shoplifted his books. As the author sweated in Cromer, I stole his books on The Corso. I mistakenly believed Carter Brown novels came from 10,000 miles distant, on the real Sunset Boulevard.

Much later, in the 1980s, I met Alan Yates and told him my story. He said he was delighted I pocketed his books. But I wonder, did he ever walk by and see it happen, as I surreptitiously drew, for example, The Bump and Grind Murders into my raincoat?

 

Anthony Lawrence Paper trail

He writes:

I was living at home again. A few months later, mum met me at the front door and handed me a sheet of paper. ‘This is what you have to do if you want to become a real poet,’ she said. My first thought was that she’d been keeping the secrets of poetry from me all these years, and had finally decided the time was right to pass on her Black Knowledge. The truth, while not as bizarre, still intrigues and delights me. Mum had been confused and troubled by my constant writing of poems down in my room. There were pages all over the floor. The little Olivetti manual was a constant background noise. While I was out for the day, she’d gone through the Sydney telephone directory, looking for anything under Poetry. She found ‘Poetry Society of Australia’ and dialed the number. A man answered, and mum told him that she was worried about her son, who she thought might be a poet, and could he help. The man told her not to worry, and then gave her a list of things I should do if I was indeed serious about writing poetry. The list included: write every day; read anything and everything I could get my hands on; say no to my friends a bit more; cut down on the drink. He then suggested I come and see him. He was having a poetry reading and workshop at his house in Lane Cove the following week. Robert Adamson would be the first real poet I’d meet, and would become one of my best friends.

            The night at Bob’s house was both terrifying and exciting. Guests included Dorothy Hewett, Judith Beveridge, Nigel Roberts, Mark and Teresa Nolan (editors of the magazine Predator of the Marvelous) and the American poet Robert Duncan, who was staying with Bob. As well as poetry readings and discussion, two films were shown: Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen, and a documentary on Kafka. At the end of the night, Nigel Roberts came to me and said, ‘Your poetry needs work, but keep going.’ Then he said, ‘One day you won’t know whether to thank or curse your mother for throwing you head-first into the lion’s den of Australian poetry.’

            The next day I went through Sydney’s new and second hand bookshops, looking for Robert Adamson’s poetry. I found Canticles on the Skin, The Imitator, The Rumour, Swamp Riddles, Zimmer’s Essay, Theatre I-XIX, Cross the Border, and Selected Poems. I went to school on all of them, studying form, subject-matter, themes, the way the poems were laid out, where he ended the lines, and why. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just trying to locate, within these remarkable poems, signs and signals, anything to help me tap into a deeper knowledge of craft. Of these books, it was Swamp Riddles that completely captivated me and made me want, more than anything in my life, to write and one day publish a book of poems.

 

Stefan Laszczuk Stopping to smell the books

He writes:

When my mother died of a brain tumour, she left me her copy of Crime and Punishment along with Moby Dick, Ulysses, Catch 22 and the rest of her collected literature, I am assuming, with the intention that I would work my way through it all. Considering there are well over a thousand books there, I don’t hold out much hope of doing so. I do, however, like the smell they bring to my lounge room: that beautiful old musty, booky smell. When I was young, I thought it was an old person’s smell, but now I’m older I can appreciate it for what it is: the smell of knowledge. I guess you could also say, it’s the smell of my mum – and it’s nice to be able to wander into my lounge room sometimes and shut my eyes, take a deep breath and pretend for a second that she’s sitting there on the couch, about to talk with me. To engage me in some mildly witty mother-son banter. Like out of the blue telling me the first ever documented case of someone quitting smoking happened in 1679, and that the man who quit died a month later. And then asking me, with temporary fake indifference, if I’d thought about quitting anytime soon. And listening to me say deadpan: what’s the point if I’ve only got a month? And telling me the point is I should bloody well quit because smoking is disgusting and it kills you.

But while Mum never understood the joys of smoking, we did share at least one other somewhat undesirable habit –because as knowledgable as she was, it’s fair to say that Mum didn’t read enough either. Her personal, ‘non-literary’ bookcase was overflowing with volumes on meditation, inner peace, self-love, self-growth and general I’m-okay-you’re-okay-ness. The thing was, she was always too busy working or stressing at full throttle to have time to read about inner peace, let alone practise it. She might occasionally meditate but she was usually doing something far less relaxing, like, I don’t know – speeding down the freeway during a thunderstorm while playing Jacques Brel’s Au Suivant at full blast and arguing over the top of it with her hippy friend Barbara about the rights of underpaid music teachers versus the rights of whales.

A few years before she got sick, I began telling her, then asking her, then pleading with her to slow down. To sleep more than four hours a night. To stop stressing about the minutiae of existence. To protect herself from the evil, mental bitch who shared her office and bullied her. To not feel guilty about the people around her who couldn’t make themselves happy. To stop and smell the roses instead of quietly competing with the neighbours to grow the biggest grandifloras on the block.

I’m not saying she wouldn’t have got the tumour anyway. It’s just that I really believe she might not have burnt out so quickly if she had taken some time for herself. Even if it was just taking some time to read a book every day. She’d probably give me the same advice if she was around now. Still, we are what we are, to a degree. Or rather, we are what we do or don’t do.

What I did do the other day was sit down and read in my lounge room. I was reading something that Mum left me. It wasn’t one of her books though. It was a birthday card she gave me, circa May 2007 – about five months before she died. She was going through her own heavily drug-induced writing phase at the time – only her drug use didn’t so much consist of pretending to inhale spliffs as it did popping dozens of pills daily, just so that she could stay alive that little bit longer. Anyway, the pills made her handwriting shaky and her brain even shakier. I could just make out her message on the card. It read:

“Happy Birthday Setf. I will always so prud of you. Love Mum xxx”

She was always ‘prud’ of me, whether I deserved it or not. Some Mums just are. Some six years ago, when I had my first book published, she gave me a huge congratulatory bunch of her best home-grown roses. Six years later I’ve still got them – or what’s left of them. As the years have passed, they’ve dried to almost unbelievable fragility. Now and then a cruel and unexpected gust of wind will surge through my open window to scatter a few more crinkled crimson petals on my bedroom floor, or perhaps blow away a rose-head altogether. There’s been the occassional drunken or moving-house accident too, where my general young man’s carelessness has sent yet another old flower to an early grave. From the original ten roses Mum gave me, there are only four left. But those four roses still sit in our favourite vase, their old heads resigned to a gentle, but rigid, droop, atop a stack of her books on the other side of my bed, the side I stash the books I know I will never read, but that I will keep forever anyway.

 

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