Speaker 1: If you find yourself with a spare fifteen minutes, maybe
Speaker 1: eating a sandwich at your desk in the middle of
Speaker 1: the day, idly surfing the web, google Andrea Goldsmith. Go
Speaker 1: to her website and read her author by her. It's
Speaker 1: not your standard functional, CV or bloodless selling paragraph about
Speaker 1: her nine novels and are acclaimed rightly track record. What
Speaker 1: you find there instead is a mini essay brimming with
Speaker 1: warmth and invitation, gently confessional, generously cerebral. You'll find references
Speaker 1: to old love affairs and thwarted passions, career and travel,
Speaker 1: and all the stuff of life. The voice is charming
Speaker 1: and self deprecating, at times sharp, but always kind. It
Speaker 1: tells of Andrea's great love with her long term partner,
Speaker 1: the poet Dorothy Porter, and gracefully delicately pays tribute to
Speaker 1: that love and to the loss of Porter, who died
Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight. It's an excellent snapshot of
Speaker 1: what makes Andrea Goldsmith such a gem of a writer.
Speaker 1: I love her books, and her new one is called
Speaker 1: The Buried Life. It follows three characters, artists Kesey, Town
Speaker 1: planner Laura and Adrian, an expert on death as ever
Speaker 1: Andrea is unpicking the relationships between people, the undercurrents of
Speaker 1: doubt and faith that define our lives. But more than
Speaker 1: anything else, this is a book, like its protagonist, that
Speaker 1: is first and foremost concerned with death. I'm Michael Williams,
Speaker 1: and this is read this a show about the books
Speaker 1: we love and the stories behind me. I will come
Speaker 1: to death inevitably. I mean we will all come to death.
Speaker 1: But in this conversation today I will come to death
Speaker 1: at some point because it's it exerts some centrifugal force
Speaker 1: on this book in many ways. But I don't want
Speaker 1: to start with death. I want to with a lightning
Speaker 1: moment that one of your protagonists, Adrian, has while driving
Speaker 1: back from Adelaide to Melbourne. Could you describe that moment
Speaker 1: in the book for our listeners.
Speaker 2: So Adrian is a temperate sort of man in his
Speaker 2: early forties. He doesn't have grand passions. He's a scholar
Speaker 2: of death. Actually he's a sociologist of death. And he's
Speaker 2: driving back from a conference and it's winter, and he
Speaker 2: stops at one of those coastal towns that are dead
Speaker 2: in winter, and he's sitting in a cafe and it's
Speaker 2: on the top of a cliff and there's the crashing oceans,
Speaker 2: the Southern Ocean, crashing ocean is below. And he's tired,
Speaker 2: He's really tired, but he needs carbs to keep going,
Speaker 2: to drive back to Melbourne. And suddenly he becomes aware
Speaker 2: of a piece of music. And it's even more singular
Speaker 2: than that. It's a voice, it's a woman's voice, and
Speaker 2: it seems to be coming to him from a long,
Speaker 2: long tunnel, and it captures him and it takes him
Speaker 2: to a place that he's actually never been before. And
Speaker 2: yet this place that he's never been before, it sheds
Speaker 2: light on his current life. When the music stops, he
Speaker 2: dashes over to the woman who's serving behind the counter
Speaker 2: and asks, what is this music. He's not a musical person,
Speaker 2: he really isn't. And it's the final movement of Marla's
Speaker 2: Song of the Earth. Their upsheed the farewell. And this
Speaker 2: is a man who, for the past twelve months has
Speaker 2: been suffering the leave taking of his long term lover
Speaker 2: and finally, finally he's able to say farewell to her.
Speaker 2: And it was a piece of music for a man
Speaker 2: who's not musical.
Speaker 1: I love the delicacy of referring to Adrian as a
Speaker 1: temperate man, and I want to return to his emotional
Speaker 1: state and his ability or inability to articulate his own
Speaker 1: narrative about his life in a moment. But before we
Speaker 1: get to that, I want to know that lightning moment
Speaker 1: of work of art changing a person and opening them
Speaker 1: up to possibility in a way that they never knew before.
Speaker 1: Have you experienced that yourself, Andrew Goldsmith?
Speaker 2: Yes, I have a few times, in fact, quite a
Speaker 2: few times, through two particular art forms, poetry and music.
Speaker 2: Poetry which is the metaphorical arm of language, and music,
Speaker 2: which I kind of think of, is the metaphorical arm
Speaker 2: to life and what they do both of them. Because
Speaker 2: of this metaphorical aspect, it seems to me they take
Speaker 2: the mind, the mind that's not being bothered by social
Speaker 2: media and various other things, takes it to a place
Speaker 2: that hasn't been before, and it seems to make connections
Speaker 2: so that you come back to the present, you come
Speaker 2: back to your life. And yes, there's illumination something that
Speaker 2: is different. It's happened many times, and it's happened once
Speaker 2: in the visual arts, and it was when I stood
Speaker 2: in a room full of Rothkodes.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I could say that that's a moment right
Speaker 1: to the solar plexus.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. I stood in this room and tears started rolling
Speaker 2: down my face, and instead of doing what I'd normally do,
Speaker 2: which has turned my mind to it and try and
Speaker 2: work out what's going on, I said, no, just go
Speaker 2: go with this. Go with this.
Speaker 1: Do you think you're particularly open as a human being
Speaker 1: to that kind of engagement with art? Do you think
Speaker 1: that's a muscle that you develop and then once you
Speaker 1: have it, you're more open to it.
Speaker 2: It's an interesting question. I mean, I think it's very
Speaker 2: very much LinkedIn with the imagination, and from early childhood
Speaker 2: I found a home in the imagination, and it's having
Speaker 2: a ready imagination, which is to say, an open mind.
Speaker 1: You are one of those novelists who write about other
Speaker 1: art forms beautifully. Well. I think sometimes it's a hurdle
Speaker 1: that writers can't find the right words to evoke the
Speaker 1: kind of emotional response you might have to visual arts
Speaker 1: or to music. And music has always played such an
Speaker 1: important part in what you write. But I'm curious that
Speaker 1: you've identified those lightning moments for you coming from poetry
Speaker 1: rather than prose. Is that exclusively the.
Speaker 2: Case no, No, poetry is all about concision. So it's
Speaker 2: not by chance that when people are suffering, when they're
Speaker 2: in pain or this suffering grief, that they reach for
Speaker 2: a poem and it sues, I mean, or it illuminates.
Speaker 2: And that's certainly been the case for me. And there's
Speaker 2: a lot of there's quite a lot of poetry in
Speaker 2: this new book. Not reams of it, but epigrams, because
Speaker 2: poetry manages to say in two lines what a novelist
Speaker 2: would take a chapter to do. I've always looked to
Speaker 2: poetry to help me understand the complexities of life. I'll
Speaker 2: put it that way. Fiction has taught me about people
Speaker 2: who are not me, taught me about places and feelings
Speaker 2: and responses that are not me. I escape into fiction,
Speaker 2: but maybe poetry escapes into me.
Speaker 1: I love that distinction, all right. So people who are
Speaker 1: not you who you can hide in in fiction. Agriin
Speaker 1: seems to me, as a protagonist, to be a prime
Speaker 1: example of that, particularly as we discover him at the
Speaker 1: start of the book. You know you use the temperate.
Speaker 1: At one point, he reflects that his relatively recently ex
Speaker 1: partner would call him emotionally constipated. He is a man
Speaker 1: not terribly in command of his own emotional state and
Speaker 1: what drives in There's a scene very early on where
Speaker 1: one of his friends discovers for the first time that
Speaker 1: he was orphaned at a young age, that had lost
Speaker 1: both of his parents, and the friend is offended, and
Speaker 1: Adrian is a little put out by this. This is
Speaker 1: just normal to him. This is the world as he
Speaker 1: sees it, and it doesn't cross his mind that that
Speaker 1: act of sharing stuff about himself is an act of
Speaker 1: generosity or an act of love. And I want to know,
Speaker 1: have you that strikes me? You were not a person
Speaker 1: who would hold back in sharing personal stories.
Speaker 2: Oh, totally hold back?
Speaker 1: Oh yes, Oh you like Adrian in that respect.
Speaker 2: No, I think I do it with more panash or
Speaker 2: what I'll do is I'll filter. I'm a great filterer,
Speaker 2: which is another reason why it's great to right. I mean,
Speaker 2: my novels are all character driven. So no, I don't
Speaker 2: see myself like Adrian at all. Adrian's mother died when
Speaker 2: he was four. His father committed suicide when Adrian was seven,
Speaker 2: and he says, this has no bearing on his life.
Speaker 2: And you can say it was buried, or you can say, well,
Speaker 2: this was the sort of person he was at the
Speaker 2: beginning of the novel, and he's not at the end.
Speaker 2: I mean, a buried life seems to surface for him.
Speaker 2: But it was enough for him to say, well, of
Speaker 2: course I haven't told you Mahindra his friend about my parents.
Speaker 2: This is my normal. And he actually cites a colleague
Speaker 2: whose mother had a long, long, long affair and Adrian
Speaker 2: was horrified, but the colleague said, but that was my normal.
Speaker 2: And I'm very interested, particularly in a novel that also
Speaker 2: delves into fundamentalism, both of religion and thought, how one's
Speaker 2: normal can become entrenched and kind of blind you.
Speaker 1: It seems to me that the great, kind of beating
Speaker 1: heart of this book, the counterpoint to those unexamined normals
Speaker 1: that we endure in our lives, is friendship. This is
Speaker 1: one of the kind of great novels that I remember
Speaker 1: reading about the strange business that is adult friendship. When
Speaker 1: we think that we're reconciled with who we are in
Speaker 1: the world, we think we know what our interactions with
Speaker 1: other people are. So open ourselves up to someone new
Speaker 1: and to have to give an account for our lives
Speaker 1: to someone new. Is this exhilarating? Thing, and I think
Speaker 1: you capture that so beautifully.
Speaker 2: I've delved into friendship in most of the novels, particularly Reunion,
Speaker 2: which is about a group of friends. Here as it
Speaker 2: evolves the Lynchpin. There are three main characters. Adrian, a
Speaker 2: woman Laura, who's a town planner in her late fifties
Speaker 2: who's been long married to her husband, whom she met
Speaker 2: at university. She fell deeply and blindly in love and
Speaker 2: that has not changed. And the third person is Kezy Kaziah.
Speaker 2: She's in her late twenties. She was raised in a
Speaker 2: fundamentalist Pentecostal community on the outskirts of Melbourne, and because
Speaker 2: of the choices she's made, one of them is to
Speaker 2: do with her sexuality, she has been banished from that
Speaker 2: community and also exiled by her family. And the interesting
Speaker 2: thing about friendship is that I actually see Kezy the youngest,
Speaker 2: the youngest being the full crumb, the lynch pin. They
Speaker 2: all become friends, there's and more, but I see Kezy
Speaker 2: as that full crumb. And it was nice to give
Speaker 2: it to the young one.
Speaker 1: I'm interested in that phrase. Nice to give it to
Speaker 1: the young one. When you write a book like this,
Speaker 1: and as you say, very much a character driven book.
Speaker 1: Do you create the characters and then follow it where
Speaker 1: it takes you, or do you have a more schematic approach.
Speaker 2: It's very organic with this book. The first character was Adrian,
Speaker 2: and I've long wanted to write a relationship between an
Speaker 2: older woman and a younger man. So Laura came next,
Speaker 2: and in fact Kezy was the third. Because I've got
Speaker 2: deeper into the novel, I understood that I wanted to
Speaker 2: explore this notion of fundamentalism in relationships. I mean that
Speaker 2: black and white, it's the opposite to uncertainty, that the
Speaker 2: human project is all about uncertainty, and yet we chase
Speaker 2: against it instead of embracing it. And one way of
Speaker 2: getting rid of the uncomfortable chaf is by seizing on
Speaker 2: an ideology or religion or anything where all of the
Speaker 2: answers are there. And I think it also happens in
Speaker 2: relationships too.
Speaker 1: I think it absolutely does so when building the character
Speaker 1: of Laura, because the key thing about how she defines
Speaker 1: herself when we're first introduced to her is her marriage.
Speaker 1: She has more or less subsumed everything else about her identity,
Speaker 1: about her imaginative life, about her sense of possibility, to
Speaker 1: this marriage with a man who she believes is a
Speaker 1: perfect husband. I don't want to give away the pleasures
Speaker 1: of narrative in this book and the ways in which
Speaker 1: stuff unfils, So I'm going to be a bit circumspect
Speaker 1: about how to say this. But Laura and Tony's marriage
Speaker 1: was that written as the product of marriages. You've observed people,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: I just want to say one thing. When we meet Laura,
Speaker 2: we actually meet her in her work role, and she
Speaker 2: is strong, and she's in control. She is everything that
Speaker 2: she's not when she's with Tony. And we also learn
Speaker 2: when she first met Tony and why why she just
Speaker 2: fell for him. As for the relationship that does develop,
Speaker 2: one very dominant partner and the other one that subsumes
Speaker 2: themselves despite being so capable and intelligent and having friends
Speaker 2: and all of those sorts of things, but subsumes themselves
Speaker 2: in the marriage under the husband. I've seen it in marriages.
Speaker 2: I've seen it in relationships where there is no marriage.
Speaker 2: I've seen it between sisters and brothers. I think it's
Speaker 2: very very common. I mean, in any relationship striving for
Speaker 2: that equality, it's very very hard. It's very hard, and
Speaker 2: particularly if I mean Tony has tickets on himself. He's
Speaker 2: shared those tickets with Laura throughout their marriage, really, and
Speaker 2: he knew which buttons to press with her. That's the
Speaker 2: other thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, it's a kind of chilling portrait, partly because
Speaker 1: it's you know, I think we've all had that thing
Speaker 1: of having someone we love with the partner who we
Speaker 1: can see diminishes them or holds them back from what
Speaker 1: they're capable of. It's quite a distressing thing to be proximant.
Speaker 2: To, it is, and you can't when someone's caught in
Speaker 2: a situation like that, they are caught, they've got all
Speaker 2: of the answers. You cannot say anything. You can't because
Speaker 2: they'll do what Laura says, I mean, Laura turns around
Speaker 2: and says, you don't understand.
Speaker 1: I think one of the things that's so delighted me
Speaker 1: in this book was you don't fall into any of
Speaker 1: the ubiquitous traps about generational misunderstanding or disagreement. Even though
Speaker 1: case he is younger than the other two characters and
Speaker 1: significantly younger than Laura, their friendship is firstly has real
Speaker 1: integrity to it, but the ways in which they relate,
Speaker 1: the ways in which they understand each other, the ways
Speaker 1: in which they view the world, has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with generational divide, and I think that's really lovely. Did
Speaker 1: you have to work at that or is that reflective
Speaker 1: of the kind of friendships you have?
Speaker 2: It's something that I don't know how common it is.
Speaker 2: I actually didn't even think in those terms. It was
Speaker 2: more that Kezy she's only twenty eight, but she's been
Speaker 2: through a lot, and she has understandings that a lot
Speaker 2: of much older people don't have. And Laura actually needed
Speaker 2: those understandings. And maybe it's the very difference of Kez
Speaker 2: that allowed Laura then to take what she was seeing
Speaker 2: and hearing and relate it to her own her own situation.
Speaker 2: But certainly, I mean in the real world, I mean
Speaker 2: I have friendships with younger people and I really really
Speaker 2: value them.
Speaker 1: When we return, Andrea reveals why she's always been fascinated
Speaker 1: by death and shares some of the poems that make
Speaker 1: it all make sense to her. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: I don't want to give anything away, but suffice it
Speaker 1: to say death isn't only an abstraction in this book.
Speaker 1: It's not only the subject of Adrian's field of study,
Speaker 1: He and the other characters in the book have to
Speaker 1: contend with a very real death that occurs late in
Speaker 1: its pages, and that contrast between the theory and the
Speaker 1: reality is almost like an assault, as this brutality to
Speaker 1: it after ages of thinking about it philosophically, thinking about
Speaker 1: it poetically, the prose of death is a very different creature.
Speaker 1: There's an amazing passage in this late part of the
Speaker 1: book where Adrian is reflecting on that gulf between imagined
Speaker 1: and real death. And I asked Andrea to read it
Speaker 1: to us.
Speaker 2: But I know nothing about death, nothing about death in
Speaker 2: the hand, death in the heart. I don't know how
Speaker 2: to watch someone die. Death has been and he paused
Speaker 2: and took a deep breath. A curiosity for me, a fascination.
Speaker 2: I've been half in love with easeful death, but there's
Speaker 2: nothing easeful about death. I knew nothing about how death
Speaker 2: attacks you, colonizes you, how it brings on horror and
Speaker 2: sadness and futility and anger. I know nothing about death.
Speaker 1: That bit really jumped out at me because that gulf
Speaker 1: between the imagined. I mean, you talked about how the
Speaker 1: ability to be moved by art is about imaginative, subtleness
Speaker 1: and capacity. But the gulf between what we imagine and
Speaker 1: what we experience is a vast one always. And I
Speaker 1: think that's why that passage so jumped out at me.
Speaker 1: Is it suggested that there's the poems, there's the beautiful
Speaker 1: kind of words that are said about it, and then
Speaker 1: there's the reality.
Speaker 2: Yep, absolutely absolutely got it. I think also what feeds
Speaker 2: that is that sense of the sense of rupture, and
Speaker 2: there's nothing, there is nothing that compares with that.
Speaker 1: As we've touched on already, Adrian is a scholar of death.
Speaker 1: He is a great pains to say that that's got
Speaker 1: nothing to do with being often at a young age.
Speaker 1: That's just a coincidence. But he is fascinated by death.
Speaker 1: And I do know that that is something that you
Speaker 1: draw from a personal fascination. Tell me why. And death
Speaker 1: is such an important, interesting, flexible subject to play with.
Speaker 2: Like uncertainty, which is common to us all, so is death.
Speaker 2: And I've always, for most of my life I've been
Speaker 2: captivated by the mysteries of death, but also that so
Speaker 2: many people are frightened of death. And to me it's
Speaker 2: been I've said this to my father decades ago who
Speaker 2: he had a friend who had cancer and the prognosis
Speaker 2: was not good, and my father was quite distressed about
Speaker 2: it because his friend was very, very depressed. And I said,
Speaker 2: you need to let Charlie know that you do it
Speaker 2: in your terms. You're alive until you die. And I
Speaker 2: have a great, great belief, and it's here in this
Speaker 2: book too, that you live until you die, and the
Speaker 2: idea of a process of dying is an oxymoron. You
Speaker 2: live and then you die. That's not to say there
Speaker 2: might be suffering and pain and a whole lot of
Speaker 2: other things, but the people who suffer death are the
Speaker 2: people who are left behind. And this all seemed fairly
Speaker 2: clear to me quite young. At the same time, of course,
Speaker 2: there are mysteries about death, so I wanted to plunge
Speaker 2: into it. I mean, I do believe that religion would
Speaker 2: be on its knees if we didn't have such a
Speaker 2: great fear of death. I think the poets, in particular,
Speaker 2: they've found death a great subject to explore because it's
Speaker 2: totally open ended, which of course is one of the
Speaker 2: things that scares people. You know, there are over two
Speaker 2: thousand requiems that have been written. So music is there too,
Speaker 2: so to me, it's just it's this vast universe that's
Speaker 2: there to be explored.
Speaker 1: I understand you've sat with now four different people as
Speaker 1: they died, and it's right.
Speaker 2: But there've been other I've been uncommonly unlucky. Two of
Speaker 2: my closest friends from school died before their time, and
Speaker 2: of course my partner, Dorothy did. I was there when
Speaker 2: my father and mother died. So I mean there's been Yes,
Speaker 2: I've had my fair share.
Speaker 1: There is and I again don't want to give anything away,
Speaker 1: but in this novel there is death, and not just
Speaker 1: in the abstract or as a field of study, but
Speaker 1: as a reality that the characters have to endure and navigate.
Speaker 1: Did you always know that that was going to be
Speaker 1: part of the story you were telling or did that
Speaker 1: take you by surprise?
Speaker 2: No, it's not. I mean, I just love the way
Speaker 2: novels develop, and the reason why you do twenty drafts
Speaker 2: is because you know they have to find their center
Speaker 2: and the death that happens towards well, actually we know,
Speaker 2: we know those problems fairly about the middle of the novel,
Speaker 2: but the death happens at the end. It wasn't there
Speaker 2: first up. I mean it's quite interesting that it was
Speaker 2: in Adrian's exploration of death that I realized the possibility
Speaker 2: of bringing in a death. You know. He says at
Speaker 2: one stage that he's written hundreds of thousands of words
Speaker 2: about death, but not about suicide, and yet his father
Speaker 2: committed suicide, and when it comes to a death that's
Speaker 2: close to him, he actually says that he knows nothing
Speaker 2: about death. Very different when it's up close.
Speaker 1: Of course. I mean, on that note, are there certain
Speaker 1: poets or poems that you particularly return to, things that resonate?
Speaker 2: There are some poets, I mean, look, Dylan Thomas's Do
Speaker 2: Not Go Gentle is a fairly good example, but there
Speaker 2: are some other ones that I've just loved. Douglas Done,
Speaker 2: English poet wrote a collection called Elegies after the death
Speaker 2: of his wife. They provide consolation. But as soon as
Speaker 2: you talk about consolation, as soon as you're talking about that,
Speaker 2: that quiet tutors you're reading, you're going places, and yes,
Speaker 2: so it's illuminating to Edward Hirsch has written a collection
Speaker 2: called Gabrielle. It's about the early death of his son Gabrielle.
Speaker 2: So these are sweets of poems. Ted Hughes's Crow poems,
Speaker 2: and I have to say Ted Hughes's birthday letters. They
Speaker 2: are full of regret and anguish and all of those
Speaker 2: sorts of things. And yes, while a lot of the
Speaker 2: poems are not specifically about Sylvia Plath's death, they kind
Speaker 2: of are. I mean they've written a long time after
Speaker 2: she died. I have a seven page a four seven
Speaker 2: page list of death books and death poems just so
Speaker 2: there are a lot in there. You know, I have
Speaker 2: looked to my fellow and sister writers in exploring this topic.
Speaker 2: Has been I mean, I must say, when I first
Speaker 2: realized the novel was going to be about death, I thought, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, you've got so much good stuff to read
Speaker 2: and music to listen to, this fabulous death music.
Speaker 1: I like that you've added your own, your own book
Speaker 1: to the library of great literature about death. It's a
Speaker 1: wonderful novel and it's such a thrill to read it.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Michael, Thank you.
Speaker 1: Andrew Goldsmith's latest novel is called The Buried Life, and
Speaker 1: it's available at all Good bookstores this weekend. Before we go.
Speaker 1: Instead of a reading list from me, we've got a
Speaker 1: treat from this week's guest. The seven Page list of
Speaker 1: books and poems on death that Andrew mentioned is available
Speaker 1: as a link in our show notes. Go and have
Speaker 1: a read, and then while you're there, rate and review
Speaker 1: us and share the episode with friends and loved ones
Speaker 1: before they go as ever, shop for the books we
Speaker 1: mentioned at your local independent bookstore, or go to a
Speaker 1: public library one or the other. Next week I read this,
Speaker 1: I'm sitting down with writer Sonya Orchard to discuss her
Speaker 1: new memoir, Groomed. It's her first book of non fiction,
Speaker 1: and amongst other things, it revealed to her far more
Speaker 1: about the novels she's written than she ever could have imagined.
Speaker 3: All three of my earlier works have a theme of
Speaker 3: someone not understanding what's really going on. All of them
Speaker 3: have got sort of unreliable narrators that tell a story,
Speaker 3: and it becomes quite clear to the reader that the
Speaker 3: narrator is not seeing what's really going on.
Speaker 1: Read this as a Schwartz Media production, made possible by
Speaker 1: the generous support of the Ara Group. The show is
Speaker 1: produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis
Speaker 1: Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher. There may have
Speaker 1: been a spot of Marla in there, this week as well.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, See you next week.