Leaping Into Waterfalls: The Enigmatic Gillian Mears, Bernadette Brennan 1964-2016 (52).
This is a beautiful cover image but I’m in two minds about the biography. Overall I think it is flawed because it’s being written too soon, with many of the participants in the life of Gillian Mears still alive. There’s an obliqueness to some of the story; particularly about relationships between family members but others as well. No doubt due to people’s sensitivities. At least that’s what I’ve surmised -I might be completely wrong. Gillian Mears had no compunction about using her family members as source material for her fiction. Which led to any number of rifts some of which are recounted here. Mears was obviously charismatic but the focus here on lovers and her response to her illness makes her come across as quite mad. You don’t get to see much of the loving, supportive aunt as described by her nieces and nephews. Nor really an understanding of why so many people – men and women – fell in love with her. But maybe mine has been a superficial reading. A more attentive one has led to this review which is overwhelmingly positive. And the book is currently on the shortlists of a number of prizes.
I’m pleased it took me back to Gillian Mears writing which I have on my shelves – untouched from when I read them years ago. Short stories published in Heat magazine which I’ve collected throughout the nineteen-nineties. It was good to go back and re-read Gillian Mears’ short stories. Heat is about to be resurrected and I’m looking forward to receiving another edition, that should be in the post as I write.
I liked Calm Abiding And The Monk From Sarnath, in Heat 10, 1998 very much. This recounts, in fictionalised format a visit the author made to to Vipassana Insight Meditation Centre in Tibet. It’s described by Brennan as ‘ a hopeful story of faith, pragmatism and mortality’. I’m not sure I agree with that summation but it’s beautifully observed. You feel for the female narrator and are interested in the characters she meets.
I also liked Bird O Circle, in Heat 11. This won Short Story of the Year in 1998 and Peter Craven put it in his Best Australian Stories 1999. He is quoted in Brennan as liking ‘the way it makes the intense ache of nostalgia and the way it whispers around images of violence and sensuality.’ The editor of Heat, Ivor Indyk is also cited as saying ‘the modulation of tone is masterly, sometimes masterly, sometimes really menacing, anxious, at other times lifting, light – full of intrigue, or full of promise’. I agree with both of those comments. It’s set in Paris where an aimless young woman is befriended, and possibly saved from dissolution, by a man in a flea market. Again, nicely observed and you’re pleased for the character.
I didn’t like In The Heart of the Sky, Heat 15, 1999-2000 at all. It was, says Brennan, inspired by Djuna Barnes ‘The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy’. It was also much lauded, wining the 2000 Gleebooks 25th anniversary short story competition. It’s about abjection and sexual despair and I thought it was awful. The protagonist submitting to various sexual humiliations is a man. I don’t think it would have been publishable if it was a woman – certainly wouldn’t be now (I hope). Brennan talks about a friendship between Mears and Emma Sorensen, now a writer who was then a student investigating female abjection in Mear’s work. She became friendly with the writer and her interpretation apparently upset Mears who said she was trying to move away from it – unsuccessfully on the evidence of this short story I’d say.
Alive In Ant and Bee,
The best of her writing was this biographical essay published in Heat 13. New Series. The edition of the magazine was titled Harper’s Gold which was the colour of the ambulance Mears called Ant and Bee and in which she travelled extensively. This was shortlisted for the Calibre Prize in 2007 and is quite lovely. When the story was published in 2007 Mears, always hard up for money, used the publication fee to install power steering in the ambulance. She’d bought it in 2004 and used it to preserve as much independence as possible she experienced terrible physical deterioration due to MS. She was forced to sell it in December 2011. She wrote the story in the middle of this period in 2006. It is a beautifully written description of her life travelling and camping around New South Wales and South Australia mostly. I remember it from reading it all those years ago. Brennan calls it ‘A hymn of praise for life, bush camps, animals, solitude, freedom. That’s the danger in writing about a writer, they may write more beautifully than you about the same thing! Anyway it’s a lovely essay.
The Grass Sister, Gillian Mears
I had this book on my bookshelves and think I read it years ago but I really didn’t remember much about it. It sold well Brennan tells us, some 20,000 copies upon publication and was well reviewed. But it upset family members; especially an uncle and aunt and Mears’ older sister. I liked the first three quarters or thereabouts during which a woman is investigating, through letters and memories what has happened to her sister. The protagonist is living with her father, embarking on a relationship with a woman in the neighbourhood and helping out an elderly neighbour. Her sister has disappeared in South Africa., leaving her boots beside a waterfall. Is she dead or has she just taken herself off to another life? Once the narrator and her father travel to South Africa I found it less enjoyable. We’re back in abusive relationship territory and I found it uncongenial. The subject matter seems to confirm the Sorensen thesis about Mears’ preoccupation with female sexual abjection. A pity because the writing is quite lovely. And this was a beautifully produced book.
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor
I’ve read other Elizabeth Taylor books – At Mrs Lippincote’s and In a Summer Season both of which I enjoyed a lot. I liked her more famous Angel a little less – the protagonist, the angel of the title, is rather awful. But they are all very beautifully written. She’s been called the unsung heroine of British twentieth-century fiction. This like the others is beautifully observed – places, characters, situations. It focusses on a widow of modest means who takes up residence at a hotel full of similarly placed older persons. Nothing much happens but you feel for the characters – even the ostensibly unlikeable ones. Her nephew doesn’t visit and when she meets a young writer rather down at heel, he takes his place. The little rivalries, strategies for keeping up appearances, disguising setbacks and so on are all portrayed with sympathy. The fate of older people as they age is rather topical. Hotels like the Claremont might come back into vogue given the state of our aged care industry. This has just been republished and Elizabeth is having something of a revival. Here is a recent very positive review of both this novel and the author in the New Yorker.
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
The sticker the librarian has put on this book would indicate it has been catalogued under the mystery section. Presumably on the basis of the title. They obviously hadn’t read the book – or anything about it! This is a classic, published in 1927. Willa Cather is recognised as one of the great American authors, most famous for her Prairie Trilogy published in the early nineteenth century. She featured in the book Wagnerism which I loved (see my blog). Cather was a Wagnerian and the middle novel in the trilogy, The Song of the Lark features a Wagnerian opera singer! On the basis of this book, I’d quite like to read it. But this is the novel recognised as her masterpiece. Incredibly beautiful writing it seems to be quite a straight forward book about the trials and tribulations of a pair of priests sent out to New Mexico when it has just been absorbed into the United States. But over the course of the novel weighty cultural, religious; even economic and spiritual issues are explored. This is pioneer life in all its complexity. The Archbishop of the title and his friend are both French Jesuits. Their role is to repair the Church’s administration of this new territory that has fallen into a state of some disrepair. Copulating, corrupt priests abound. Poverty is all encompassing. Evocative descriptions of the landscape in New Mexico bring to mind Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings. There are sympathetic descriptions of the characters who inhabit the territory- the different Indigenous tribes, Mexicans, Spaniards, Americans and other immigrants. Mexico and Spain have left their mark. The Archbishop and his off-sider deal with a variety of experiences as they minister to old and newly converted Catholics in their large and unwieldy diocese. Their different characters emerge vividly – the Archbishop is an intellectual, and a progressive one for the times. His companion is of a more practical bent. Indian practices and beliefs are very sensitively described. There’s a fictionalised Kit Carson and other characters based on real people. In fact it all reads like a factual account of missionary and pioneer life. I was convinced it was based on reality – and so it turned out when I googled. The Archbishop in the novel is based on Jean-Baptiste Lamy, the first Archbishop of Santa Fe in New Mexico. The novel sticks fairly closely to his story as described in his Wikipedia entry.
Kate Sommerville says
Thanks for these comments and reviews. I read an article about Gillian Mears when she died. The connection was MS although my experience of the illness is relatively benign.
I purchased ‘Leaping into Waterfalls’ last year but haven’t read it yet. Will start tomorrow. This biography will be the first in my project of reading one book a week.
Jenny Doran says
Great project.