Michael Wilding

2RES-FM MONDAY ARTS LIVE

BROADCAST 7 NOVEMBER 1994

MICHAEL WILDING

Meredith Symonds: In the studio now we have two very special guests - one particularly special guest, Michael Wilding and John Davies. Welcome to the show. And John I think I'll hand over this to you. This is not my area of expertise so could you - ?

John Davies: Right. Thank you Meredith. Yes you're right - only one important guest, Michael Wilding. Among his previous publications are "Aspects of the Dying Process", "The Short Story Embassy", "The Phallic Forest", "The Paraguayan Experiment", a number of other books - he is represented in numerous anthologies and published around the world. He has also recently edited an anthology of Australian Short Stories from Oxford University Press. But we're mainly here to talk about his new book of stories "This Is For You". Welcome Michael Wilding.

Michael: Thank you.

John: It's a very direct title. It stand out on the shelves - "This Is For You". It's the most direct title I can remember since Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book".

Michael: It caused terrible problems with Angus & Robertson in production because a little memo would come down from the editorial office to Production saying "This is for you" and they'd say "Yes - what is? Tell us what it's about." And it went back up you know.

John: It's a good title. I'm slightly daunted. In one of the stories you talk about the process of having a book out and giving interviews. Is that a pre-emptive strike against would-be interviewers?

Michael: I'm very glad for any interviews John. I'm delighted to be here.

John: There are a few things. Different things. Some of the comments that have been made about you. I think of two. JP Donleavy: "Twenty first century writing for twenty first century people". That's pretty good. But another one people might not have heard - Robert Adamson said of you that your short stories should be read several times - like poems - particularly to appreciate their structure.

Michael: Well I've worked with Robert - oh for years - more years than I really want to think about. And we've done a lot of readings together and one of the good things that came out of the old Balmain readings, readings that we did at the Opera House and Cafe L'Absurd and so on - we put on prose readings, we put on poetry readings, everybody called them poetry readings and I used to go in and add - add prose readings. And the good thing about reading with poets is, for a prose writer like myself, you've got to focus on the precision about language - that poetic attention to each word. And I learned a lot from reading with them, performing with them, doing readings with them. And I think one of the things you can do with a short story is get that extra density of language that's - you can do it with a novel but with a novel you've got other problems of sort of long narrative structure, plots, construction and so on but you can learn from the poets in connection with short stories to get - to get this richer network of allusion and reference and ambiguity - I think that's probably what Robert's talking about.

John: Right. Some of the subjects - apart from the techniques - some subjects that seem to crop up in the book - one, a fairly wicked sense of ambivalence about friendships - no offence to anyone intended -

Michael: No, no!

John: There are lovely lines like "An appeal to friendship is no open sesame around here."

Michael: That's the story called um - I can't remember what it's called now - this is a story called "The Imagination" which is based on a character which is not a hundred miles from Robert Adamson. Bob used to come around and visit you know in the early hours of the morning with a fish he'd claimed he'd caught, and we never knew whether he'd caught it or it was bought in a fish market, and beat on the door and say "let me in" you know - he'd want to rave on. These were the good old days of the world when poets used to come and harangue you at breakfast and read poems for you and so on - ah - and it was always a bit ambiguous - I mean the sharing their literary achievement with you - it always had a bit of tyranny about it so - yes - there was something ambiguous about friendship, in that literary context anyway.

John: There's another element too - many of the characters seem to be a little adrift - a little past their first youth and in some ways substituting friendships for beliefs. They're not sure what they believe in any more - friendship is something they feel they should value, and they're not sure if they even like their friends any more. Is that kind of drifting uncertainty in many of the people and sometimes outright paranoia - ah -

Michael: There's a great line in that movie about the Beat generation - "Heartbeat", based on Caroline Cassidy's memoirs of Neil Cassidy and Jack Kerouac and there's a line in there where Robert Giroux the publisher says to Kerouac "These are less than liberal times", which explains why he is wearing a suit. Ah - well I think we are back in less than liberal times so even if people know what they believe they're not always quite game to admit what they believe. So I think we're back in an era where the sub-text or the implication or the suggestion has to stand for a full proclamation of a political or social face. Ah - and this sort of unfortunate fear about coming clean on where you stand - this haunts the world of the 90s I think - it's not the world of the - I think in one of the stories I say "Can the 60s have flashed by so quickly?" you know - 25, 30 years you know. A moment! People I think have to be a little bit more cautious what they say. And even in saying that you sort of give away too much I think.

John: You have some devastating comments about - particularly about people who live in California. Maybe that's too easy a shot to take just at the moment. Is there a section in one of the stories you wanted to read at all?

Michael: Yeah. There's a story - I went to a short story conference in Paris and at a reception one evening I was explaining to some theatre producer - I was trying to explain my cultural credentials and I said I'd been to the Balzac Museum, the Maison de Balzac, and I'd been to the Victor Hugo Museum, the Maison de Victor Hugo, and he looked at me fixedly and said "Ah - but have you been to the Maison de la Vie"? - have you been to the museum of life? And this really shook me. So the next morning when all the sessions were going on in French, which I didn't understand very well, I wrote a story. This is it.

Michael reads "Maison de la Vie

"I've been to the Maison de Balzac and I've been to the Maison de Victor Hugo."

"Ah," he said, " but you must go to the Maison de la Vie. It costs 10 francs to enter the Maison de Balzac, 10 francs to enter the Maison de Victor Hugo but the Maison de la Vie..."

"Is free?" I said.

"No, no. Nothing is free. But with the Maison de la Vie you have already paid the entrance fee. Now all that is required is the supplement."

"How much is the supplement?" I asked.

He laughed. "If I could tell you that I could tell you everything," he said. "It depends on the hours you travel. It depends on the speed or convenience with which you wish to go. If you wish to pass through with minimum inconvenience then it'll be different from stopping at every station."

"What, more?" I said.

"Perhaps," he said. "Perhaps not. It depends. More for which? Which way do you want to travel?"

"Well," I said, "it depends."

"On the price?" he said. "You would determine the course of your life according to the price of the supplement? You are some sort of rich boy? Or a clochard maybe. Maybe you would rather sleep on the grilles of the metro. Then it will only cost you one ticket. Four francs maybe, less than five francs. That way you can sleep warm at night."

"And alternatively?"

"Alternatively? For some there is no alternative. For some it is better neither to travel not arrive, for some it is better to sleep on the grilles of the metro than walk the banks of the Seine and gaze at the cold waters. You've seen them. Surely even you on your way to the museums have seen them, leaning on the parapets, walking slowly and indeterminately because, after all, there is nowhere they are going except to the terminus. Which the Seine offers but it is a cold way to go. So they look at it. Meditatively, you suggest. Singing strange songs, you imagine, singing familiar songs, would that be preferable? While the current sweeps past. There is no further entrance fee for that. But the exit charges: to die without insurance, that is something else again."

"Exit charges?"

"But of course. You throw away your ticket, how are you going to get out? The Maison de la Vie lies all about you and you are trapped in the tunnels beneath. Or swept past on the current and you see, on the embankment there, everything you ever desired: second hand books, girls, postcards and pavement cafes."

"Is that all I ever desired?"

"Maybe just the postcards now," he said. "Mementoes of where you might have been. You can scribble on the back and who is ever to know whether you were there or not, whether you intended to go but failed to find the time, or maybe saw from a distance the tower, the windmill, the national costume. Or maybe it was one of those second-hand cards, those pre-owned antiquities of a pre-lived life. And an inscription in faded ink. "We met here beneath the pyramids aeons ago." And who will ever know whether you did or will, whether the pyramids were ever there, or will be. And without the price of the postage you will carry the card around from Maison to Maison, increasingly crumpled in your pocket, between the passport and the shredded tissues, the address a fading will, the insignia of kisses and dying hope, the address smudging, running, like mascara dissolving in tears. "Is this," you will ask, "a life?" Souvenirs of Victor Hugo holding his head, always his hand on his head, fixed in an eternal sadness; or Balzac in his Capuchin's robe, eternally ready to write, but the writing table immobilised in the Maison, not to be touched, highly polished and free of ink, free of paper. You will sneak a touch when the attendant is in another room. The tears will flood up into your fingers through your arms and gather in the corners of your eyes: for the unwritten novels, for the unlived life, who can tell you? The attendant returns and you are asked not to touch. You sniff back the tears. They remain unshed. In the Maison de Victor Hugo the quills are beneath glass. The ink, if it had been there, would have turned to powder. Buy your cards, buy your posters, buy your umbrella in the boulevard to shelter you from the tears of the sky. It is dry in these Maisons, but even you will have to walk along the streaming streets when you leave."

John: Thank you Michael. In another story you write about a possible, fairly near future where the world is so commodified and so on that people won't even dream any more unless they're paid for it - basically. That's a frightening thought - a glimpse of something and it seems not too improbable sometimes.

Michael: I don't think it's too far ahead. It actually came from - I got a commission to write a story for a book of urban fantasies it was called and I thought - well, if they're paying me for them I'll write 'em, you know. I read it once at the Goethe Institute as a future fantasy and I remember Vicki Viidikas saying "That's not a fantasy - that's not the future."

John: Coming up fairly soon, now that you are in the process of having a new book out - you'll be reading at Ariel probably on the 30th November?

Michael: 30th November at Ariel and December 6th at the Balmain Town Hall. Back to Balmain.

John: And a little bit about Paper Bark Press, which is a venture that you and Robert Adamson have been involved in for some time.

Michael: Paper Bark we set up as a poetry - initially as a poetry press - and we had a certain format. Bob's wife Juno does photography so we used a photographic format, black and white format for the books. We've done ten books now. And we worked through the traditional book trade but there are problems with that if you're a small press - it's very hard getting widespread distribution. It's very hard to get your production costs down as cheaply as a multi-national can. So we've come up with a new product - I'm talking the language of the trade! - we're producing slim little books that we're going to sell at readings. We're not selling through the book trade because the cost structure with all the discount you have to give would make them too expensive for their size but these are books we'll sell only at readings for about $5. I've done a selection of stories: "Book of the Reading". Robert's doing a selection of poems, "A Future Book", and these will be like programme guides, like - well, like programme guides. And we hope this is a new way forward for Paper Bark and we can actually keep going. We can fill in an area of publication that isn't being filled at the moment and survive whereas we might not be able to through the traditional methods.

John: They look very good - they've got a small format containing stories or poems according to whatever's on at the time. "A Book of the Reading" with a nice photo of the author on the front.

Michael: And on the back.

John: And on the back indeed. Another one. More casual on the back. So they'll be available around various venues when things are happening. Thank you very much Michael for joining us.

Michael: Thank you John.