In The Heart Or In The Head

by George Turner

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

In the Heart or in the Head is a brilliant literary memoir in which George Turner chronicles his chaotic growing-up in a family for whom fact and fantasy were equally acceptable and often indistinguishable. It is also the record of his development as one of Australia's finest novelists and his entanglement with science fiction.

Release date: January 24, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 253

Sample

This book was simple in conception but its growth has been complex and difficult. I intended little more than a lighthearted account of myself and modern science fiction growing up together in a loose friendship until, at the age of sixty-two, I finally declared allegiance by producing a science fiction novel. The connecting thread throughout was to have been a question: Why, in his sixties, should a staidly respectable writer with half a dozen ‘mainstream’ novels behind him kick over his Australian-tradition traces and turn to science fiction, that most suspect of escapist genres?

The short answer could have been that it was inevitable from the moment of my encounter with Lewis Carroll at the age of three—inbuilt predilection recognizing destiny. But the short answer omits all the passions, strayings and estrangements by the way; also it raises the further question of what Lewis Carroll has to do with science fiction. And another as to how we managed to meet so early in my life.

The last question finally determined the content when I fell prey to memory, an unfair trap for one who had paid little attention to his past, preferring to let it lie where it fell on the rubbish tip of years. Memory and its forgetful uncertainties, working together, created a need to know, to force time to disgorge. A simple tale of childish enchantment flowering in an ageing man’s pleasure became a search for the lost child.

Not every product of the hunt is recorded here. I am a novelist at heart, not a biographer or a burden-shrugging confesser, so whole areas of the past have been chopped away and discarded because they do not bear directly on my theme. My years with the Commonwealth Employment Service, with the textile trade and in the brewery would make long chapters of human goodness, wickedness and fallibility, but they are off the point. The six traumatic war years become a chapter mainly of rumination, because the personal adventures are rarely relevant. My love life—poor, straggling thing—might have been ignored altogether had I not come to an episode of black comedy that changed my whole existence and could not be omitted; with no willingness on my part, in it went. (Setting down villainies is much easier than admitting stupidities.)

About two-thirds of the way through, the book ceases to be autobiographical save in short bursts updating the passage of time; it begins to talk about the carnival-coloured world-within-this-world of science fiction fandom, that most smoothly disorganized of subcultures, then about the business of writing and publishing in the antic genre world, and finally about science fiction itself, what it is and does and seeks to achieve.

It can’t be pretended that these things matter as Shakespeare matters, or Einstein or Beethoven, but they have a real and pervasive importance and may come to have more. The justification for that statement is short, but it requires preparation, and it will have to wait two hundred pages or so until we are both ready for it.

It is a silly truth that very few people outside of a devoted readership know much about science fiction, and that what they do know is conditioned by films like Star Wars and The Thing (entertaining and harmless in themselves, but unimportant), television serials aimed quite properly at ten-year-olds (I don’t think Blake’s Seven could harm anyone), and the violently stupid covers of paperback novels, designed to claim the attention of the middle-aged ten-year-old.

That behind all this simplemindedness stands some solid intellectual responsibility and literary achievement, built up over decades of slogging against the current of rubbish, is not widely enough known.

The various critical areas have in recent years come to terms with the idea that a class of science fiction exists that should be taken seriously, and are treating the genre reasonably in review and criticism, but the magazine sections of newspapers are read by the already converted and the literary periodicals do not address a wide general public. All the friendly criticism in the language cannot counter the genial contempt engendered in the responsible mind by a ruthless commercial exploitation pandering to the lowest idiot denominator.

This is unfortunate, not only because too many remain ignorant of what a thoughtful science fiction has to say about today as well as tomorrow, but also because they remain ignorant of just how deeply the spirit of science fiction has penetrated their daily lives and swayed their thoughts and actions. Science fiction, existing in an unbridled intellectual extravagance because it answers extravagant popular needs, pervades every cultural activity, from common speech to poetry and the jargon of politicians, from rock music to opera, from real science to occultism and the horror film, from advertising art to gallery art, from architecture and sculpture to the design of children’s toys.

That is what much of this book is about.

It is also about being just another novelist in a profession, and a world, geared to superstardom.

Memory is not enough and I have never been a journal keeper. The past continually vanishes from recollection, uninteresting times because they are not worth revisiting, darker passages because the censor that keeps the unbearable under control has relegated them to oubliettes of repression. What remains is subject to the erosion of time and the distortions of viewpoint and, at least in the maternal branch of my family, to a compulsion to embroider until simple truth is submerged in a good story. Soon the good story becomes truth and no-one admits to remembering differently.

So we will be afloat on seas of probability—but this, in the world of a science fiction writer, or in the world of a mathematician or a physicist for that matter, is a normal and rational situation.

Relativity of truth asserts itself from the moment of birth. Though West Australian, I was actually born in a Melbourne suburb: the parental home was in Kalgoorlie, but since my mother bore me while on a visit to Victoria, it has always seemed too much of a quibble to explain dual statehood to anyone who asks.

We lived on the goldfields, half-way between Kalgoorlie and Boulder, fairly in the middle of the great mining strip, though that section was by then worked out and silent. Beside the house a red poppet-head rose to the sky in steps and landings; behind us yawned a vast, unfenced open-cut mine, still scratched at by fossickers. The open-cut fascinated me, forbidden because of its fencelessness; from its rough rim I could gaze down and down into the rock-tumbled heart of the world, and fancy what strangeness lurked.

A visit after half a century showed the poppet-head as a poor thing to eyes grown indifferent to the up rush of cities, and the open-cut a large but unimpressive hole in the ground. The two realities coexist, but it is the childhood memory that dominates with its images imprinted in the age of wonderment; poppet-head and open-cut are for ever vast. Romance ‘recollected in tranquillity’ defies facts.

The house sat solitary in an acre of ground, the nearest neighbour a quarter mile beyond the open-cut, an enormous distance to a child’s eye. It was verandahed back and front against early and late sunlight (for Kalgoorlie summers can be ferocious) and locked in by trellises of purple, paper-flowered Virginia creeper and sweet yellow honeysuckle. Down one side grew a vegetable garden, where pea vines climbed wires and stakes to wave their tendrils higher than my parents’ heads.

Do I really remember that? Perhaps not, but an old sepia photograph insists that it was so.

In the paddock of a back yard—an acre is empire-sized when you are young enough—were a hen run, a pigeon loft, a duck pen and a huge firewood pile, which was my favourite playground. (In Kalgoorlie in the 1920s we had wood stoves, and kitchens were hell-holes.) There was also, in the furthest north-eastern corner, an outdoor dunny—no other word fits those sweatboxes—wherein a clamped-down lid and lashings of turpentine defeated neither smell nor flies. It was, for very short legs, too far away for the taken-unaware, so I deposited my tokens in secret but nearer places—usually discovered within minutes. Essie, the maid, would not tell on me, but the simple, retarded outside man, Jack, would bellow ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ in mixed malice and glee until my mother arrived bearing punishment, the featherless end of a feather duster.

Life was adventurous but unshared; in my empire I played alone.

I had a brother, Frank, fourteen years older and attending Melbourne Grammar eighteen hundred miles away. It was an exile demanded by the cultural snobbery of the time. The sons of the well-off could not easily be entered for Eton or Winchester (it took more than money to power that leap) but they could be sent to the swankier Australian boarding schools, and were. A local education lacked status in Kalgoorlie ‘society’, and my mother does seem to have had some social position. My father was a mines accountant, which made the Turners Somebody on the Golden Mile, and Ethel Turner* was not one to miss out on being Somebody to the hilt. Side effects of social position were for brother Frank exile to distant Melbourne and for her the alienation of her eldest son. The drawing of morals may be left to the uninvolved.

Social position provided no companionship for a small boy. The perfunctory petting of the town dames at my mother’s ‘afternoons’ was no substitute. The nearest of these lived beyond the open-cut, and venturing round that dangerous deep brought quick punishment. During my first six years I had only the very occasional company of another child; I am told that when at these rare meetings I was urged to play with strange children I would either hit them or burst into tears.

I learned self-sufficiency, accepting company only on my own terms, making friends with reluctance and then treating them with brusqueness or outright rudeness when I wished them elsewhere. Later regrets cut no ice with them and drew no tears from me.

Sixty years on, it still happens.

I had a dog. He was small and grey and hairy and produced a bright pink erection when I patted his tummy. He was my beloved and only friend—and I feel guilty because I can’t remember his name. He did not last long, and the manner of his passing is clearer to me than the short joy of his life.

He died by pointless accident. One of the few pleasures my father actively shared with me was an evening climb to the second stage of the poppet-head, to gaze over miles of countryside where the towns of Boulder and Kalgoorlie balanced either hand, and catch the sundown breeze. It was a perilous climb, because the steps were treads only, with no risers in the spaces between; my father would hold my hand all the way. One evening the dog followed us up and fell through the steps to break his back on a rusting boiler twenty feet below.

This is, I think, my first floodlit true memory; it was my first acquaintance with death.

It became, when we returned home, an acquaintance with life, which can be infinitely more terrible. My mother stormed from room to room, abusing my father for what she swore was criminal carelessness, while he pleaded ‘But my dear Etta’ and got no further. It was a dark moment, with the quality of bleakness whose meaning becomes clear only after years have passed. I don’t recall the accusations, only the storm of words at the heart of them and the pre-defeated protest, ‘But my dear Etta’.

My father was fifty-one when I was born and my mother about thirty-five; since Frank was already fourteen the reasonable conclusion is that somebody was careless. Whatever the fact, my mother had the guardian-tigress attitude towards her young, and my father was allowed little say in discipline or rearing. I have this on the authority of uncles and aunts, of whom there were great numbers, hangovers of the late Victorian era of determined fruitfulness. He was permitted access only under supervision and controlled conditions.

He was a small, fat man. The only photograph I have seen, that with the towering pea vines, shadows his face too heavily to show personality or stir recognition. I know that he stood only five feet and half an inch, a half inch shorter than my mother, that he was bald at twenty, that he was a Baptist, was educated at Wesley College in Melbourne and sang a high tenor in some church choir. My mother claimed, after the inevitable catastrophe, that he was a drunk and a skirt-chaser, but I soon found that her opinions of anything and anybody were extreme, biased and unreliable. I think she gave him a rough time of it. There are flashes of other rows after the first, but no flash of all three of us ever doing something enjoyable together.

Yet it was he who with a single beneficence influenced my future more than did my mother in thirty years of sullen skirmishing. She left only scars, but he read Alice in Wonderland to me.

In the Kalgoorlie house was a smallish room between the dining-room and the kitchen called, in proper social usage, the Breakfast Room; it was in fact the room in which we did most of our daily living. In 1919 one did not use the dining-room save on social occasions, when it assumed capitals as the Dining Room; between times it was preserved in a splendour of woodwork and leather, with glassware glistening and untouchable in display cases. When not on public view we huddled in the all-purpose breakfast room (without capitals), and it was there that my father lifted me to his lap and into the enchantment of the most magical of all books.

It seems that when he had finished it in a one-chapter-a-night ritual, I demanded that he at once begin again. And so he did—and again, so the family legend runs, and then again. The legend credits me with learning the book by heart and ‘reading’ it aloud to audiences who presumably oohed and aahed in accesses of boredom, even with the showman touch of turning the pages at the correct words. Turner legend is brittle stuff, enriched by many a lively flourish but cavalier with fact.

Behind this legend lies the truth of an influence that has lasted all my life. Alice set me on paths that have been strayed from but never forsaken.

For good or evil, particular books have influenced my life. Joy cannot be understood without an apprehension of misery, so another book counterbalanced Alice with a monster whose grip also endured.

May Gibbs published Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in 1918; it captivated me with its illustrations when it was read to me soon after Alice. Its supersweetness seems too coy for the modern child but it still appears in the bookshops at Christmas, and in that innocent day I loved the Gumnut Babies in the colourful pictures. But I feared their enemy, the Banksia Man.

The Banksia Man was the villain, a terror of matted hair and malice in endless pursuit. May Gibbs’s illustration—the bushy cob of the banksia tree with eyes glaring from the tangle as it ran on knotty legs—was my vision of horror and evil. It haunted my dreams; for a shameful number of years I feared the dark and the lurking beast.

One day—I would have been about four—my mother sat combing her hair while I watched; it was a daily ritual. In the fashion of the time her hair fell waist-length—thick and brown, it covered her head and shoulders, tumbling and concealing to make a mystery of her face.

This day was different from all others. Perhaps we were making a game of her hiding behind her hair, or perhaps I was unwontedly quiet; whatever the reason, suddenly she swept the tumble aside and her dark eyes glared out while she growled in pretended menace.

In a shock of knowledge, fiction and reality met. I saw the Banksia Man alive behind my mother’s hair. I had no words to explain my screaming or she the secret knowledge to do more than comfort without comprehending. It was a cruelty of blind chance, but the sudden gap between us was never bridged.

Years later, in the Melbourne Botanical Gardens, I at last saw a living banksia tree with its conelike flowers of bundled, curly hair; it is not a repulsive thing, just quaint and harmless. Nightmares retreated before the uninteresting reality, but the barrier raised in a moment of love had been fixed for ever. To a very small child there is no such thing as a token terror.

Kalgoorlie was a long time ago; its remains are a dead dog, parental brawling, a book of disturbing influence and another of endless charm.

Of these death is the least interesting. Thomas Mann noted in The Magic Mountain that ‘A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own’; the deaths of others can spark emotional loss, or relief (when truth is told), and nearly always represent a nuisance in practical terms; one’s own death, being simply an end of participation, is by virtue of the fact beyond fussing over. Having observed the passage into impersonal stillness, I have found little in it to require contemplation. The way of it, perhaps—but pain and fear are other matters.

The parental brawling is gone along with the brawlers; if its effects persist, that cannot be helped, but the fact is dustily antique. So also with the Banksia Man; he did his damage and was abandoned.

But Alice has never been altogether away from me, only neglected a little, to return at last in force. She deserves closer attention.

Alice in Wonderland tapped an ecstasy of visions as real as the ‘real’ world. They existed in a different kind of reality but needed no explaining. What the mind perceived was. I talked with the White Rabbit in our garden. Often.

The invisible playmate is a psychiatric commonplace; it is his persistence into maturity that troubles common sense. It was this innocent confusion of perceptions that led at last to science fiction (which is never innocent), though by a tortuous and often obscure track.

In these days of pragmatism masquerading as political philosophy, the Carrollian method of seizing the world by the scruff of its illusions may make a better recipe for understanding it than mulling over its dreary record of blood and self-deception. Writing science fiction is that part of the seizing which records and puzzles over paradox and inconsistency in the hope of seeing a little—however little—more clearly. The connection with Alice may not be immediately obvious, but Carroll would have spotted it at once.

The acceptance of Alice as a timeless book for children confirms success on the obvious plane but obscures the subtextual nature of the creation, and it is there that the connection lies. The humour of Alice is expressed superficially in the pointing of paradox and absurdity, a mode that George Bernard Shaw ground to needle sharpness in plays that began to appear while Carroll still lived. Shaw’s ferocious wit would have horrified the gentle Charles Dodgson, yet it was a wit founded like his own on the recognition of incongruities as comments on life.

Dodgson/Carroll—the mathematician and the wit together make a man—did not write science fiction;* nor did he, in the strictest sense, write what is vaguely termed ‘fantasy’. Fantasy in its pure form depends on the denial of physical likelihood or even possibility. An early fantasist could have been the cave man who fancied his dinner dropping dead at his feet to save him the chore of hunting it. This is the denial expressed in dreams, those symbolic creations which bypass all limitations of reality to come at once to their psychological point.

Carroll’s flights of fancy were rarely dreamlike, and he was not the man to provide a fancy-creature with red eyes simply because red eyes may symbolize a blazing nastiness; he required more than dream and symbol. Nor were his flights narrative conveniences, as in the introduction of a magic wand simply to get characters out of a dilemma; for Carroll both the wand and the dilemma would have had to be representations of the desperately uncertain nature of the universe. Behind each of his ‘fantasies’ lurked the destructuring mind of an anarchic philosopher-mathematician. He did not fantasize; he extrapolated received knowledge and theory to points beyond the edge of reason.

Here, in Chapter 2 of Alice, is the Carrollian mind at work (Alice is speaking): ‘Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is—oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!’

Just a little nonsense to make the children giggle? Well, yes—but why will she never get to twenty?

Think of this: In 1865, when Alice was published, the arithmetic tables were commonly learned by chanting a litany in class: ‘two times two is four, three times two is six’ and so on, ending at ‘twelve times twelve’. (Sixty years later we were still at it; surely education has by now come up with something less deadening.) Alice’s progression—4 × 5 = 12, 4 × 6 = 13, 4 × 7 = 14—could never ‘get to twenty’ because 4 × 13 would be twenty, and everybody knows that the multiplication table stops at ‘times twelve’. Thirteen times anything is toil for pencil and paper and knotted brow.

Behind the nonsense was a mathematician’s joke about the mutability of number systems and an educationist’s passing tilt at the teaching method. No ‘fantasy’ here, only accepted reality transmuted into the nonsense he perceived inherent in it.

Such logical joking is the backbone of Carroll’s humour, not all of it mathematical. The Red King’s dream sequence in Through the Looking Glass, for instance, is an undisguised discussion of Berkeleian reality, with Tweedledum and Tweedlede. . .