It’s interesting reading a book that tugs at things that are obviously much more about me and my issues than they are about the book itself or, being a memoir, about Louis Nowra and his issues. (And he does have issues; like a cliche, they are the meat and sauce in his memoir's sandwich.)
There is a life in which I am paid to write: plays, articles, reviews, novels, and screenplays. Anything. I’ve never consciously thought about it this way before, but in some sense I guess I’ve always had this idea that there is a parallel life happening in a parallel universe where I and not some other geezer has that something that means I, and not he, is being paid to write. In this life I get projects, or people take up ideas I’ve come up with and they become projects. Money circulates. I get to travel to different places, where I meet people who are interested in these projects, or not. The “not” group are friends, or people who aren’t interested in past projects, but are just vaguely interesting in some way, and this in turn will percolate through this creative filtering and mixing and become the material for the next projects.
I am fully aware that the main thing that separates me from this parallel life is laziness, or lack of commitment, not to the craft, but to the process of putting stuff out there, getting rejected, making mistakes, getting feedback, and getting better. Knowing this, I’m generally relatively happy to plod along, writing, and trying to produce something that I will use as my (as they say in the movies) calling card. It sounds so pretentious, when really it’s just the desire to write something good enough to get noticed.
I am generally happy with this. (This is especially true at the moment, when travelling, writing and running are pretty much all I’m doing! – albeit on a self-employed basis.)
Reading Louis Nowra’s memoir is an act of reading someone who has lived this life. Reading his self-congratulatory awareness of himself as a cliché, becoming an alcoholic writer, running away from people who always have shit stories to show him and don’t know anything about writing or his need to get away from them, made me cringe. Reading his pitying dismay at how much his uncle loved theatre and worked at being successful without succeeding, and how he never would have bothered to try so hard, made me cringe. Cringe inwards towards a frustration with myself, and with a sense of injustice that an ordinary storyteller without any great insights about himself, the people around him or society, could end up one of Australia’s most celebrated playwrights, be invited to lecture at Yale, be able to afford to travel simply to get away from what he was doing before (which was being in a relationship), and spend his money drinking himself stupid every day and giving up writing for three years (twice) and flying to Moscow to get drunk and fall in the snow, and then write about it, and then get it published, and have me read it.
There are lessons about The Life of a Writer (with interesting correlations to Malcolm Knox’s creation of The Life of DK). It seems ridiculous and unfair in some way that Nowra could spend the first decade of his writing career writing plays that no one liked or went and saw. How does that become a career? What kind of stubbornness or self-belief or vision does that take? He discovered his father’s voice, which was lighter and more likable and actually attracted audiences, after his first three year absence, and realised in the process that he had been writing in his mother’s voice for the first, unlikable, period of his career. Again, I find it amazing that this learning could happen in public: that softness and humour and the ability to write something attractive to an audience (which isn’t to say funny or Disney-like) would be something he learned after a decade writing plays and having them performed.
But then again, this is me reading me: I don’t want to be embarrassed, and Nowra seems to have courted it and never really felt it – both at once. He is aware that he is occasionally a dickhead, but in his memoir he seems defensive or proud or muddle like a teenager about these incidents. Explanations, excuses and a kind of share the blame approach seems to be his path to an alcoholic’s kind of forgiveness: the “let’s move on” type. It’s all just a story. The insights about women, family, men, relationships, film-making and himself all left me thinking more about how his mind works and what it misses than anything else. I wondered what he saw when he looked at the world: women with breasts who were impossibly sexy, men who were impossibly stupid, a world he could only cope with from a distance, doused in alcohol. It’s bizarre to read this simple minded accumulation of anecdote – even when they are good anecdotes of madness, drunkenness, violence, love, confusion, and a kind of vague searching for understanding. But he isn’t, it seems, perceptive – that trait that is supposed to be the quality a writer practices just as much as the act of stringing words together. When I read Telling True Stories, which is about really good journalism, or narrative non-fiction (which is what Shooting the Moon sort of is) I am filled with awe and a kind of ambition to be like those guys, who take notes and craft great stories, who get voices right and can tell and communicate the difference between a person who talks to strangers and one who doesn’t. They notice. Nowra seems to bluff and fog it all up and end up with the life and money and time to look down on and deride the idiots around him. Comparatively, he comes off as a shallow prick.
But in amongst the incidents and the simple analysis of why he was cruel, or got drunk, or punched some police officers… there are those moments which in the story seems incidental but tell me much more about his work ethic and his approach to writing (which after all is a huge part of his life) than much of what he chose to include in Shooting the Moon. There’s one scene where he is working with someone else (I don’t remember who) and they have been staring at the cards pinned to a basement wall, shuffling them around, adding and subtracting, for four months before they think they have the structure of their screenplay worked out. This is not written as any kind of fast or slow timeline. It is just mentioned in passing that this is how long they took doing that step before they got into the chaos of the next step of writing and actually trying to make the film. But four months just looking at structure, moving cards around: that’s a sensible and disciplined writing process; that’s craft. That, I admire.
There are other scenes where he is translating works (either from other languages or other forms, from novels to plays, for example) where I can see that his work ethic and discipline is simple and productive. He does the work.
So he inspired me, in that backhand way that reading and being frustrated does. He would pity me my interest in writing and my lack of commercial anything – I can’t even call it failure or success, it’s just a nothing at the moment. And in my frustration, I started writing more and more. Planning. Thinking that if I can have a good structure done in four months, and then get stuck into writing the way I want to for another few months, then I’ll have something to start with, and see what happens. And I’ll try along the way to train my ear to hear and eyes to see like the reporters in Telling True Stories, who always have respect for their subjects.
And with that last line I’m caught in a muddle, aren’t I? I don’t know Louis Nowra. I’ve read his memoir, and as he presents himself to me I seem to act in just the same way as he does with the people he writes about. I presume I can see through him. I can’t. But maybe thi sisn’t him. That’s probably the difference between a memoir and an autobiography, or anything that really aims to be true non-fiction. It’s all a created thing, but a memoir is consciously saying that this thing is a mirage. The mirage, then, is what I read. Maybe Louis Nowra isn’t a dickhead after all.
Either way, thanks for the motivation.
Four bottle of gin, two pencils, a notepad and typewriter, to go.