,
Vol. 18, No. 2,
December 2004 (pgs 183-184)
Andrew Peek
Island, No.
97, Winter 2004
Graham Henderson writes big, risky fictions. Some of them come off,
others don’t. His best stories combine imaginative flair and
luminous,
rhythmical prose with a readiness to exploit the mythopoeic. They
feature wonderful sentences like: ‘That blue, there was no
name for it,
no colour on earth to mirror it; it was almost like a huge breach in
the constant world of the visible.’ Less successful stories,
on the
other hand, offer: ‘In my mind her small dark nipples kissing
them, her
body light as a flower, above me, beneath me, penetrating invisible
sorrowing ecstasies,’ which left me entirely locked out of
whatever
processes, psychic or otherwise, the speaker is supposed to be going
through.
The earlier stories in the collection are among the strongest, together
with ‘The Glass Man’, a dark tale of creativity,
love and healing, at
the book’s end. ‘The She-Wolf,’
‘The Place of the
Paintings’ and ‘The Ice’ all reminded me
of William Golding’s
remarkable 1955 novel The
Inheritors,
a sci-fi work that goes back, rather than forward, in time.
‘The Place
of the Paintings’ is particularly impressive. It explores the
workings
of artistic consciousness at a profound level, in the person of an
artist recording narratives of animals, landscape and people around
him. Like the other two stories, the setting is ancient and tribal. As
is the case with Golding’s novel, the reader is offered
radically new
perspectives on art, belief and identity. The challenge is to use the
sophisticated possibilities offered by language and contemporary
narrative form to evoke the oral and preliterate. The results test and
extend language to remarkable effect. Later stories explore characters
drawn from Homer, the Bible, ranging widely and in what might be
described as a Laroussian fashion through world mythology. To
redramatise the story of Lazarus from his point of view is a big ask,
as the execution of this tale called ‘Lazarus’
indicates.
According to the cover notes, ‘Sand’ is about a
female Odysseus. I
found it difficult to follow and, even with the aid of the cover note,
the connection with the Odyssey remained unclear to me.
‘Room’ is a
five-page, paragraphless dramatic monologue incorporating allusions
from the Great Transmutation of alchemy to the World Tree of the
Kabbalah and many points ancient and modern, in between. I had trouble
coping with the narrator, a crucial component in any dramatic
monologue, and this went hand in hand with a broader lack of artistic
discipline and control in the use of mythic sources.
There’s no lack of ambition in these fictions but form and
content
don’t always support each other as effectively as one might
expect to
find in, for instance, something comparable by Borges or Edgar Allan
Poe. In addition, errors in spelling and tense indicate a lack of
finish. Talking of ‘finish’, the last narrative, a
‘Postscript’
entitled ‘Asylum’ and billed by the cover note as a
confession of the
‘wellspring of [the author’s]
inspiration’, is rambling and, if in
reality autobiographical, poses problems for the reader. In an
acknowledgment to his book Henderson thanks family and friends for
their love through the ‘last fourteen years’ of his
‘illness,
schizophrenia’. The critic’s first rule is to avoid
naive connection
between life and work: in this case, though, I was left wondering if
Henderson’s editor had spent enough time pondering how they
worked
together.
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Short Fiction
Lucy Sussex
The Sunday Age,
26 October 2003
The fantastic is not only found in enormous tomes with dragons on the
cover. Indeed, it is increasingly found in
‘mainstream’ or ‘general
fiction’, as with this book.
Place
collects Graham Henderson’s favourite stories written over
the past 20
years, although less than half have been previously published. The mode
here is elliptical, languid, even Borgesian (said writer being
namechecked in the book). Nor is it particularly Australian, the
sensibility and settings tending to the European. We get an ex-sideshow
freak, cursed with the ability to cough up glass; cavemen; even an
alien. Pick of bunch: the five and a half pages on the Biblical Lazarus.
Back
to top
Patricia Cornelius (playwright)
I have known Graham Henderson for over 30 years. We met at Rusden State
College where we were both enrolled in drama. He was a very beautiful
young man - lithe and strong and marvellous. While most of us at 18
years of age were grappling with uncertainties about what we thought,
what we liked, how we fitted in the world, Graham appeared to have no
concern for any of that. He was the most opinionated young man I have
ever met. He knew about art, he read widely and profusely, he was
forever engaged in passionate debate about it, he was an inspiration,
he was a thorn in the side of many lecturers who were facile in their
teaching and not up to the task. He was hot headed and arguments could
end with a smashed plate or in illumination as Graham expressed the
power of art with inspiring eloquence.
He was already writing, he was sculpting, drawing, painting, always
reading. For a while there he tread the boards and his acting was
vibrant and terrifying because he revealed everything about himself, he
went deep, he placed no restrictions on himself, nothing held him back,
and his performance was formidable. His Marat is unforgettable.
His writing is like that. It goes deep and it doesn’t hold
back. It
shocks us, it delights us, sometimes it is vulgar, sometimes sublime.
It transports us into imaginative and surreal worlds, we traverse
mystical and wondrous landscapes, we travel strange sometimes
claustrophobic passageways into memory, we visit states of euphoria,
and of despair. He seduces us with magical images, the birth of
Eugenie, a pearl in the filth. We fall in love with his characters, the
Infanta of Manao from the Street of a Thousand Curses, and Cat
o’ Nine
Tails, a sailor turned boxer. And if not in love, we are captivated as
with the Glass Man who coughs up glass and holds up the pieces and sees
a minute and magical landscape.
Graham has written more than 20 plays and as a fellow playwright I am
always devastated by his work, as he reminds me of how theatre is the
country of metaphor and allegory and internal and grand worlds. His
plays are unique and I regret how few realise the power of his profound
dramatic works. I regret more the loss of his friend and the many time
director of his work, David Branson, who did realise it, and who died
not long ago.
I feel privileged to be part of the launch of
Place of the Paintings
and other
stories this evening. It is a wonderful collection which spans twenty
years of Graham’s work and is a great testimony to the
dedication to
his craft, to the loyalty to his unique vision which is at times
breathtaking and at times overwhelmingly melancholic.
[Reads from the beginning of the first story, ‘The
She-Wolf’.]
[Reads from the post script, the beginning of
‘Asylum’.]
Later in ‘Asylum’ Graham writes:
That
one hour of writing is valueless. In that one hour you take us deep,
you astound us with your imagery and your control. In that one hour you
capture our hearts and souls.