There Is No Proof This Actually Occurred

This article first appeared in Australian Book Review in November, 2004

In a poem called 'Sugar-Paper Blue', Ruth Fainlight, writes:

After school, pushing a metal scoop through the shifting granular dampness inside a hairy sack of jute, they'll find bags, then to their homework. You understand, there is no proof this actually occurred.

Writing can be dangerous. I once read that Ted Hughes tried to encourage Sylvia Plath to research 'facts', such as natural history, to give her material for her poems: it was safer that way. Facts could be made meaningful, but were not as visceral or raw. Private emotions were, of course, the stuff of her best poems. Peter Porter touches on this also in an essay on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath (ABR, August 2001). 'What was to be done with the great poems she was producing?  It was precisely a watertight bulwark between the fearless subject matter of her art and the personal despair of the feelings that produced it that she lacked.  Sylvia was a genius but she was also a distracted human being.  Such a writer can face the dreadful determinants of existence head-on in poetry yet be unable to bear the weight of feeling in her living person.'  As Plath's life and death show us mining one's own life for truths can be painful. But there is responsibility, too, in mining the lives of those whose lives are now considered history.

Is coincidence a form of connection? I like to think so, but then I would because in the writing of my next novel coincidences are constantly encouraging me. Like now: in trying to find the source of the conversation between Hughes and Plath for this essay, a conversation I am sure I have read, but have possibly imagined, I reread an article by Fainlight on her relationship with Jane Bowles and Sylvia Plath. Then, becoming curious about Fainlight, whom I knew nothing about, I found the poem 'Sugar-Paper Blue'. The poem is based on experiences Fainlight had in Leningrad in 1965, when she visited two survivors of the Siege of Leningrad, who happened to live below the poet Anna Akhmatova. As I read this, I became very alert: my second novel is set, in part, in Leningrad, and my heroine is a lover of Akhmatova's poetry. And here is another coincidence. My novel's heroine goes to visit Bowles in 1963 -- I know because I have written the scene already -- and on returning to the TLS article I see that Fainlight was there during this time. My fictional Anna, and this real woman, Ruth Fainlight -- well, it seems to me they must have met. I reread Fainlight's poem. 'You understand, there is no proof this actually occurred'. I think about this word: proof.

Working on this novel, Dharma Is a Girl's Best Friend, has caused me to wrestle with the ethics (and aesthetics) of writing fiction based on a real woman's life and, more broadly, including real characters -- potentially, Fainlight -- in my fiction. My heroine's life began with the life of a woman called Zina Rachevsky but I have gone on to create a fictional heroine who is different, in very many ways, to the real life woman who inspired her. I call my fictional heroine Anna. Actually, I call her 'my' Anna. In part to distinguish her from her real-life counterpart, but in part because I feel so close to her. My relationship to Zina became confused by the fact that before I knew much about her I was told she was a Russian princess. I assumed that meant she had lived in Russia, and I started to read about Russia during the war. Then I discovered that Zina was born in New York not Russia. In fact she never went to Russia at all. This is difficult for me because I have decided that Leningrad, and what happened there during the war, is crucial to the tale I want to tell. For this and other reasons, I have decided to avoid researching all the details of her life. I have decided the facts will stop me making the imaginative leaps any good fiction demands, that they will weigh me down with a kind of knowledge that does not leave me open to interpret the meaning of my heroine and her life more broadly. This is something to do with keeping the imaginative space, and its possibilities wide open -- that space, that I have mentioned before, where connections are made. Facts don't have to mean that you lose that space. Historian Rebe Taylor has been quoted as saying, 'You know you're coming to grips with your subject when its characters start to appear in your dreams,' which suggests the need for facts to become interpreted in ways that are intuitive and empathetic in straight history as well as fiction. But I am still working on how to keep that space as wide as possible in the face of 'proof'. This is similar to the way we can struggle to separate gossip about someone from the person themselves. Michelle de Kretser has spoken of relying on her childhood memories rather than returning to Sri Lanka to research her novel The Hamilton Case: 'I am really writing about a place and a world that no longer exists,' she says. Time in modern Sri Lanka was not going to get her to old Ceylon -- for that job she needed her memory, books and imagination. Most of the time I am okay with not having proof. I think I might even prefer it that way though, there have been days when proof has felt like a blessing. In my rough draft, Anna has an affair with a man who really existed. I didn't know that he and Zina had met, but he seemed like the kind of bloke she'd go for. In San Francisco, in a bookshop, I found the man's memoirs and multiple references to Zina in the index. At the very least, they were close friends. Standing there, in the shop, I was so excited I could barely breathe. To know someone like this, to have guessed their most intimate secrets, it is a kind of love. This has happened many times over. I think perhaps facts are like those granite rocks you step on to guide yourself across a river. Which means, I suppose, that the fiction is the river itself.

Jean-Paul Kauffmann scoured Provencale in France tracking the scent of Eugene Delacroix, the painter of the Jacob Wrestling the Angel. This fresco, which can be found in St Sulpice in Paris, was created 150 years before Kauffmann attempted to hunt the artist down, which means such traces were hard to find. Harder still, Kauffmann was not just looking for signs of the artist's existence, but for those signs to indicate the meaning of the artist, and his work. 'There is an old hunting term, connaissances, referring to the footprint of the animal being hunted ... one always leaves some trace behind, be it ever so tiny, which will be found whenever the determined instinct of the hunter is applied to the task.' Last year I followed Zina's footprints to India where she lived only forty years ago, but the rate of change is so great in that country she might have well lived there 400 years ago. Following in her tracks has led me to a street in Darjeeling, outside a youth hostel that possibly stands on a spot where she once lived for a year. It was already dark when I got there because I had got lost searching for the house. Indeed, I had walked past this spot several times throughout the day. Certainly the place showed no signs of having been a villa occupied by a hippy Russian princess in the 1960s. But then, what should such a place look like? Especially here in northern India where the monsoon can causes buildings to be born, age, collapse, and be rebuilt, within a decade. I think of temples I visited in Japan which are described as a thousand years old but sparkle with new paint and stand sturdy on their new wooden pillars. It was explained to me then that a building does not have to look old to be ancient: continuity does not justify shabbiness and rebuilding does not destroy tradition. This is a concept I didn't really understand at the time, and struggle with still, standing in this place willing things to offer up their history with a capital 'H'. I tried to feel something. I was sniffing the air like a dog for some sign of Zina, but all I smelt was the coal smoke that hung heavy in the air. I walked back through the evening to my hotel, the Hotel Windermere. The butcher shops were just closing and through the still open wooden shutters I saw the dark yellow light of what I took to be oil lamps and flashes of red as men lifted down the animal carcasses for the night. It occurred to me that if Zina walked this path, at dusk, forty years ago, she would have seen the same thing. You understand there is no proof this actually occurred. From Darjeeling I went to Kathmandu, where I interviewed someone who knew Zina, only to be told that many people who knew Zina struggled to respect her and had trouble believing the claims made regarding her spiritual realisations - the very spiritual realisations that had attracted me to her story at the outset. In my final days overseas, on a trip I had only made to follow in this woman's footsteps, I lost all interest in the project. I stopped working for six months.

'In you the journey is,' says the Rabbi giving a eulogy in the first scene of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. It is the eulogy for a grandmother who travelled from the villages of Russia to live in the metropolis of New York. It is also an apt description of the act of writing a story, be it one's own, another's or an imagined one: to write such a story is to enact it in some way and it changes the author in the process. The act of writing, like pilgrimage, can be both an emotional journey and a physically gruelling one as well. Zina stayed at the Hotel Windermere, she had led me there, too. When I returned from my vigil outside the youth hostel, I went to the bar for a drink. I had been invited by the Tibetan Hotel Manager, Mr Tenduf-La, the man who had, earlier that day, told me where to find the house that Zina once lived in. I also met two Korean Samsung executives, Tommy and Ben, who I ended up travelling with to Kolkata; and Captain Yopan Yogan-du, the former aide de camp to the current King of Sikkim. The King is the stepson of Hope Cooke, the New York socialite who stayed at the Hotel Windamere in the early Sixties and became the Queen of Sikkim until India invaded Sikkim in the 1970s. The Captain and I spoke long into the evening about this invasion while Mr Tenduf-La spoke to an English couple who, for reasons that eluded me, seem to think it okay to tell him that they were scared of the locals. Listening to his scathing charm, I came to think of him as a kind of Tibetan James Bond.
Apparently Zina would come to this bar each evening dressed in a black cat suit and strike up conversations. After my drink, I went back to my room and wrote notes for a scene in which Anna meets a strange group of people at the Bar and has unexpected conversations. .I decided she knew Hope Cooke and ordered Cooke's autobiography, Time Change, on the internet. There was no experience I had in that place that has not become intertwined with Anna's. Often, it is unclear who started what. For example, I read books Zina read and visited places she had visited. I also made authorial decisions about places Anna needed to visit and take myself there. I am reading Russian history, Buddhist texts, Beat poetry in part because Zina did, in part because of where Anna needs to go, in part because these are always things I have wanted to do and the creation of Anna gives a manageable shape to my desires. I make this sound more romantic than it always is. Zina's interest in theosophy is not mine. A far more fearful person than Zina or Anna ever was, I have read extensively on taking hallucinogenic drugs but leave the acid trips to them. Anna, who lived through the Siege of Leningrad, will see things far more terrible than I have ever seen.

It is assumed that Catherine, the heroine of my first novel, Geography, is highly autobiographical. This is, in part, because I chose to write the novel in the First Person. I did not make this decision lightly and to-ed and fro-ed between First and Second Person for a couple of drafts. I knew that the decision to write in the First Person would leave me vulnerable to charges (well, that is what they feel like) of writing autobiography but I wanted Catherine to feel immediate - like a friend who was telling the reader her story - and was not prepared to sacrifice her credibility out of fear for my own. So, while the manufactured intimacy of that approach heightens the sense that she is me in many ways she is not. Catherine and I grew apart over the years I wrote her. In the face of certain incomprehension to early drafts in which I tried to describe the banality and boredom of obsession by being, I suppose, banal and boring, I made Catherine's judgment worse and more erratic than I like to think mine ever was. More alarming things happened to her. The more separate we became the more I could imagine her in different situations and places to those I had ever been. Her character developed what at first I called logic, and then I called a personality. At times, she was more assertive in the face of her misery than I have been and, at times, she was far more desperate. I don't mean to suggest that my character developed magically. To be honest it was through a real effort on my part to become more separate from the story, and finding the best heroine for the job of telling it. In other ways, surprisingly, she taught me things: she read books, saw films and went to places I had never been. Catherine read Proust's In Search of Lost Time so finally I began to read that classic myself. Catherine fell in love in India, but I hadn't been there for fifteen years. I went to South India and had new adventures, so that Catherine could have hers. People who have read Geography assume that I met my partner in India. No, my partner -- already met and loved -- and I planned our trip through southern India together. But whatever the similarities and differences between Catherine and myself, there is clearly an ethical difference in mining my own life for fictional material, and mining the lives of others, especially when that person is not alive to give her permission.
Conversely, while my second novel is not autobiographical the choice to write about Zina is clearly driven by something quite personal. Helen Garner refers to this in Joe Cinque's Consolation when she says, 'A story lays in wait for a writer. It flashes out silent signals.' In choosing a person or subject to write about we enter a partnership that can last for years if not a lifetime. It is a relationship that will change us and one we should choose wisely. As I describe this process I realise that it sounds confused, as if boundaries are blurring all over the place but that is not how it feels. Perhaps I should describe Anna as my imaginary friend. I had them as a child. They had names. They were separate from me. My niece Pia has an imaginary dog, as does her friend Harry and recently their very bemused day-care worker told my brother that she had had to break up a fight between these dogs. The day-care worker acted out separating the dogs then tying them up. Pia and Harry looked on, sobbing. 'For a moment,' the day-care worker told my brother, 'I thought the dogs were really there.' Pia tells me that the dogs are tied up to this very day.

Jean-Paul Kauffmann was taken hostage in Beirut in 1985 and held for three years. During that time he was tortured, underwent mock executions, watched a close friend and fellow hostage die, and was held in solitary confinement. The books he has written since include The Black Room at Longwood, about Napoleon's final years in exile at St Helena, and The Arch of Kerguelen: Voyage to the Islands of Desolation, about one of the world's most remote islands, 3000 miles south-west of Australia. He writes about places where man is, inevitably, in solitude. In The Angel of the Left Bank, Kauffmann, who is a religious man, writes of the creation of a work in which a man wrestles with his faith in the form of an angel who will not tell Jacob its name. In St Sulpice where Jacob Wrestling with the Angel was made/painted/enacted, the wall was so damp it sucked up preparations and paints like a sponge: this was a painting that kept disappearing. Kaufmann writes at great length of Delacroix's wrestling with a blank wall but whenever he talks of this I imagine not Delacroix but Kauffmann, staring at the same wall day after day, trying to keep madness at bay. It seems important too that the angel cannot be named because in this very act of tracking Delacroix, Kauffmann loses himself. He quotes Wittgenstein. 'Am I really the person who bears my name?' When it seems his obsession with Delacroix has become a kind of madness, a friend advises him to stop, to 'forget him' and Kauffmann experiences this command as total erasure of self. My point is this: we choose characters, historical and fictional both, that will take us where we need to go and allow us to revisit places we have been already.

The closer I come to the end of Anna's life, the more Zina's real life becomes relevant to my novel. It was, after all, the story of Zina's death that first made me curious about her though even these facts are complicated and there are multiple versions of the truth of Zina's final years. I am also writing about the lamas with whom Anna studied and one of the lamas Zina studied with is still alive. In fact I have been taught by him. I know that some people will read Anna's life as Zina's and Anna's friends as people Zina really knew. That said, Zina Rachevsky was not a public figure and nothing of her life would be known to the general public. I can't help wondering whether the fact she isn't well known means I have even more responsibility to present my case clearly than I would if the facts were widely known, as they are in the Ern O'Malley Affair, the subject of Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake. These concerns are connected with something that I, and many writers struggle with: an audience's relationship to your work. The publication of Geography has been a lesson in what I knew theoretically -- when a book is in the public domain you lose all control. No matter what I say - perhaps the more I say - the more some people will just read it as a memoir. So, alongside this question of how to write fiction is this question: how is it read? Readers do not always understand that is no proof that what they are reading actually occurred.

Many novels draw from, and distort, real historical events of course. There is, as I have mentioned, the recent Carey's novel. Another is One Last Look by Susannah Moore, which is based, in part on the diaries of Emily Eden, who, with her sister Fanny, accompanied her brother George Eden (Lord Auckland) to India in 1836 after he became the Governor-General. Moore's character is called Lady Eleanor and she has a highly eroticised, possibly incestuous, relationship with her brother. Her sister Harriet, who I presume is based on Fanny, takes an Indian lover. Moore's point is, in part, that there was much that was left unsaid in Emily Eden's diaries, and, more broadly, was unspoken in the lives of Victorian women. She is writing, as she did in In the Cut, about desires that cannot be articulated. Emily Eden herself went on to become a novelist in the style of Jane Austen. Clearly Moore is right that Eden both represented, and was conscious of, the extreme constraints on women of that class, in those times. Moore distances Eleanor and Harriet from their real-life counterparts by renaming them and while their lives both do follow the arc of the Edens' (for example, Lady Eleanor and her family go on a ten month trip overland to Afghanistan, mirroring the Eden's extraordinary journey) it also differs in many obvious ways, such as the way the Eden sister's lives unfold on their return to England. I wonder though, how readers will take this. Will they assume that George Eden did, in fact, have an affair with his sister? The reception of My Life as a Fake was affected by the reader's knowledge of the scandal surrounding Australia's most famous literary hoax. Ern O'Malley was created in 1943 to expose what his creators/authors, James McCauley and Harold Stewart, saw as the excesses of modernism. However O'Malley was declared a genius by editor Max Harris and at this point, the fictional O'Malley began to take on a life of his own. Carey's book, too, heads off in strange and unexpected directions. While highly regarded by many critics and readers, there was a recurrent complaint in the reviews that the book lost its way in the sections set in Malaysia. That is, in the sections where the book departed most obviously from its fabulist factual roots. Perhaps because this is where the book is weakest, but you also have to wonder if it is because it is at that point that the novel goes off the map. The rules are unclear when history and the imagination are joined in such a way. How should it be read? Especially given that one of Carey's central questions seems to be: what is fiction? The critic James Bradley wrote: 'Unlike True History of the Kelly Gang, which cleaves close to the events that underpin it, adding dimensions within them instead of playing fast and loose with the facts, My Life as a Fake appropriates and reinvents the historical incident that underlies it ... But it [the unsettling nature of the novel] runs deeper than simple questions about the novel's structure and origins. Despite his continuing ambivalence about the sustaining myths of the nation in whose imagination his writing is so deeply rooted, in McCorkle, Carey has created an expression of this ambivalence that exceeds its own frame of reference ... The fraud is the true poet, the true poet a fraud.'

You could argue that all an author can do to signal that they intend to depart from the 'truth' is change the name of the characters from their real one to an imagined one, as Moore has done, as Carey has done and as I plan to do. But that is certainly no guarantee that the readers wont continue to read fiction as fact. It is unclear to me whether detailed Acknowledgements or Author's Note, which delineate what is 'real' and what is not, such as the one Moore has provided, and I am considering, clarify the situation or confuse it. If we become defensive and try and map out the intricacies of how our fiction works, the author is accepting simplistic distinctions of fiction and non-fiction that undermine the way the novel will be read. A recent review of Colm Toibin's The Master by Kerryn Goldsworthy caught my eye because it articulated the anxiety I was feeling about my own project. 'There are grave and obvious dangers in writing fiction about "real" people and events. It might even be argued that these two levels of meaning are antithetical; certainly they have a natural tendency to pull each other out of shape. Fiction that does not deviate from the facts of a life tends, like life itself, to be unstructured, while historical events in the process of being fictionalised are often falsified as well. All too often the best qualities of both are lost, and you end up with a bad novel that misrepresents the truth.' She goes onto say that Toibin has, in fact, written a very good novel. I believe that Susannah Moore has also written a good one -- but as to her representation of 'the truth', I cannot say. When I think of how descendents of the Eden family might feel on reading One Last Look, I feel slightly squeamish. When I am thinking of my own work these concerns descend upon me in the middle of the night like so many demons, they will not let me sleep. In the cold hours before dawn, I struggle to distinguish between genuine ethical dilemmas and the usual workaday doubts of a writer. I do know this: not writing is not an option.

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