By the Book Read online

  PRAISE FOR BY THE BOOK

  ‘By the Book takes us on intriguing journeys through books…The excitement with which Koval still approaches each new book, plunging in “head first, heart deep”, furnishes the last words of this urbane and enlightening work of her own.’ Weekend Australian

  ‘She’s a shining presence in the world of literature, here in Australia and right across the globe…The book reads smoothly, it flows along from mood to mood, full of wit and beauty and grace…Her voice is always recognisable, invigorating, familiar to us and greatly loved: the voice of [a] highly literate woman.’ Helen Garner

  ‘An irresistible study of the symbiotic relationship, for the bookish, between life and books…The voice is easily recognisable as the one we know from [Koval’s] decades in radio: generous, warm and fearless.’ Kerryn Goldsworthy, Australian Book Review

  ‘The last chapters of By the Book reveal the quality of mind that made [Ramona Koval] such a brilliant interviewer, as much at home with scientists and travel writers as with novelists and poets.’ Brenda Niall, Saturday Age

  Also by the author

  Speaking Volumes: Conversations with Remarkable Writers Samovar

  Jewish Cooking, Jewish Cooks

  The Best Australian Essays 2011 (editor)

  The Best Australian Essays 2012 (editor)

  Ramona Koval is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. She presented ABC Radio National’s The Book Show and Books and Writing, which were broadcast across Australia and throughout the world between 1995 and 2011. She blogs at ramonakoval.com and tweets @ramonakoval.

  For my five little readers—Maya, Eden, Bella,

  Amelia and Jesse—with love

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Ramona Koval 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Published in 2012 by The Text Publishing Company An earlier draft of sections of chapter 1 and chapter 4 was published in Overland; chapter 11, in the Age: chapter 14, in The Best Australian Essays 2004 and the Canadian literary journal Brick.

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Imogen Stubbs

  Typeset by J&M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Koval, Ramona, 1954-

  Title: By the book : a reader’s guide to life / by Ramona Koval.

  ISBN: 9781922079060 (hbk.)

  ISBN: 9781922147677 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9781921961311 (ebook.)

  Subjects: Koval, Ramona, 1954—Books and reading.

  Books and reading.

  Authors.

  Dewey Number: 028.9

  CONTENTS

  Cover Page

  Praise

  Author Bio

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Chapter 1 High above the city

  Chapter 2 Only as old as her feet

  Chapter 3 The ferocity of love

  Chapter 4 Between knowing and telling

  Chapter 5 What the guilty always say

  Chapter 6 Does Comrade Ivanov write English?

  Chapter 7 Becoming a woman

  Chapter 8 Beauty is truth, truth beauty

  Chapter 9 Mortal men

  Chapter 10 The aroma of faraway countries

  Chapter 11 A knife, a tobacco-pipe

  Chapter 12 The great white desert

  Chapter 13 This deep darkness of night

  Chapter 14 A fine ash like snow

  Chapter 15 Genius from the dust

  Chapter 16 A good disposition

  Acknowledgments

  Book List

  CHAPTER 1

  High above the city

  Reading a book, my mother would stretch out in our lounge room on one of the deep purple divans that would be made up later into beds, her soft body covered in a blanket, her attention absorbed by the pages in her hands. She was lost to us.

  I’m sure she must have read aloud to me, a soft Polish lilt to her voice, but I can’t remember Mama doing this. Reading was her self-education program, and English was the latest in a line of language lessons that had started with Yiddish in the Polish shtetl where she had been born, then Polish when she was big enough to go to school at seven, then German when she was living under a false identity as a teenager in Warsaw during the war (carefully hiding the Yiddish construction and accent, which had their roots in Middle German), then French when she lived in Paris for four years after the war. Now we were in Melbourne, and the pages she read on the couch with such concentration were usually in English.

  Her name was Sara. Before I was born she worked as a ‘finisher’ in a garment factory in Flinders Lane, in the heart of the city’s rag-trade, sewing on buttons by hand and embroidering collars. She had deep blue eyes and wavy brown hair, which she said had been blonde like mine but turned dark after having me. She was on the short side, with a full bosom, as they said then, and rounded hips. She wore a starched apron in our small one-bedroom, ground-floor flat, but would always take it off to go outside. She had little to spend on herself, but she favoured a particular brand of French perfume, Amour Amour by Jean Patou. I suspect she didn’t buy it for herself. And that my father certainly wouldn’t have thought of giving it to her.

  I can’t remember a proper bookshelf in our flat, so perhaps in those early years my mother borrowed her books from friends, although I don’t think of any of them as readers. I don’t remember going to a library till much later.

  By the time I was three, in 1957, I owned some Little Golden Books. Now the only one I recognise is The Little Red Hen, the story of an industrious hen that tries to enlist the other farmyard animals to help with planting, harvesting, and otherwise preparing the grain for flour to be made into bread. They are too busy having fun, and when her hard work is rewarded she doesn’t share her bounty with them.

  I have always thought the little red hen was a twisted martyr who should have made the tasks fun so the other animals might have wanted to help her. The Little Golden Books were targeted at exactly the child I was. Published in war-time America, in 1942, they were twenty-five cents each and were designed to appeal to children from all socioeconomic levels. They were sold broadly, in department stores as well as bookshops and specialist children’s outlets. In 1950s working-class Melbourne, we bought our books from the newsagent.

  Enid Blyton’s Noddy Goes to Toyland was another favourite. I remember the warm tangerine cover and the happily skewed multicoloured letters of the title. I couldn’t read yet. I liked Noddy and Big Ears because they had a red open-topped car. They used it to breeze about the countryside and get away from evil golliwogs. That’s what reading was for my mother, and became for me—a way to escape, a private time machine, a place that began with moral instruction but soon morphed into empathy and imagination.

  When I went to kindergarten at four, I discovered that there was more than one Noddy book—the bookshelf there had lots of them: Here Comes Noddy Again, Be Brave Little Noddy!, Do Look Out Noddy! and Noddy Gets into Trouble. I learned that books could be collected, that they were important enough to keep and that a story that seemed to be over could be part of a bigger one.

  I tackled the John and Betty books. They were full of mysterious symbols to be mastered but, when you did, their message
s were so much less interesting than Toytown and Mr Plod.

  John can jump. Betty can jump too. Fluff the cat and Scottie the dog likewise.

  I had chickenpox that year and was away from kindergarten for some weeks. When I came back it was my turn to read aloud. I loved my teacher, Miss Joseph, who was large and warm and towered over the little children. I wanted to make her happy. There was a new letter at the front of a group of sentences. It looked like the letter l for lamp and lady and lolly. So I spoke up loudly. L can see Scottie. L can see Fluff. There was a murmuring as I charged ahead. L can see John. L can see Betty.

  Miss Joseph asked me to stop. That’s not L, she said, it’s capital I. It means I as in ‘I am your teacher and you are Ramona’. And you can say ‘I am Ramona and you are my teacher’. It’s the way we all talk about ourselves.

  I looked at the letter with new respect, this letter that allowed you to show what it was like to look out of this face, with these eyes at the big world. This was the letter to describe the me-ness of things. At that moment the world deepened for me. And reading was the tool with which I would begin to make sense of it.

  I realised that reading was the key that opened the door to secret lands, strange places and the worlds behind other people’s eyes. Much later, when I discovered the hidden promises of a toy microscope, I became aware of similar possibilities—of fantastic worlds revealed only through the lens. I had the same thrill when I discovered the night sky through a telescope on a school excursion to the planetarium. There were millions of stars beyond the ones we could see with our eyes, and beyond those too, a carpet of twinkling blackness opened up forever.

  But, until I could master enough language to be able to read the kinds of things that interested me, I loved to be told stories.

  One of the first I remember was told to me by my father who, like my mother, was a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland. Aaron was born in 1918, and became a tailor’s apprentice at thirteen. His first job was to run between the blacksmith’s forge and the tailor’s shop, with hot coals for their irons. A few years later he was cutting out patterns and sewing men’s three-piece suits, and what he called ‘costumes’ for women. He was short like my mother. His eyes were brown and his straight hair, which he used brylcreem to brush back without a part, was black.

  So what did he think important to tell a child? A woodcutter was wandering about in a forest…

  I imagined it was in Poland. I always thought Poland was cold and possibly snowy but when I went there it was summer and the cornflowers were blooming in the fields. Or perhaps they were rye flowers. I’m sure there must be rye flowers in Poland, although I’m not certain they are blue. And the flowers in Poland were blue.

  Anyway, in this story, my father said, there is a man who then and there comes upon a bird that he wants to kill and carry home to feed his family. I remember my father saying that he grabs the bird, which I thought would be hard because they are such sensitive flighty things—none of those that I had chased in the St Kilda gardens would ever have been caught by grabbing. And maybe my father, the uneducated Polish tailor, didn’t know the right English word.

  But now the bird is in the man’s hands. And just before he kills the bird—and, did I tell you, I am five years old when this killing is about to happen—before he breaks its neck, it speaks to him. ‘Don’t kill me,’ says the bird. ‘Why not?’ says the man. ‘Because if you let me live I will reward you by telling you three secrets of life.’ ‘All right,’ says the man. ‘What are they?’ ‘One—don’t believe what you are told. Two—don’t climb higher than you can. And three—don’t reach for things beyond your grasp.’ So the man lets the bird go and it flies and flies, higher and higher, onto the top of a tall tree. I imagined a Christmas tree, not a straggly gum tree or one of the palms on Beaconsfield Parade, across the road from our flat. And now the bird begins to laugh, and, really, I hear it as a cruel laugh, a jeering laugh. And I hear the voice of the bird, no longer sweet. ‘Oh, you are such a stupid man! You let me go, but I have a heart that is pure and solid gold, and if you had killed me you would have had riches beyond your dreams. And now you have nothing! Not even a bird for your dinner!’ This makes the man angry. He realises that he has lost his fortune. And he begins to climb the big tree. And he climbs it to the very top where the branches get smaller and smaller and hard to hold and sway in the wind. And just when he gets to the topmost branch and the bird is within his grasp, it takes flight and hovers above his head. He holds out his hand to reach it, loses his balance and topples over, crashing to the ground. He is dead. And, my father said, the man thought he had lost his fortune but, actually, he had been given three secrets of life. He was told not to believe what he was told, and yet he believed the bird had a golden heart. And he was told not to climb higher than he could and he didn’t listen, and he climbed to the top of the tree. My father’s voice reached a crescendo. And he was told not to reach for things beyond his grasp and he did, and he fell to his death.

  What a strange story! But I liked it and I would ask my father to tell it again and again. I was intrigued by the paradox of being advised not to listen to advice. It was the opposite of romantic stories about heroic adventures and magic powers and brave quests. It grew out of a reality where no one expected too much and it was best not to disturb the order of things.

  This was the world my father was born into. His mother was widowed with four children after his father came back from fighting World War One only to succumb to the flu in 1919. She rented an apple orchard and, each year, sold part of the crop, stored some fruit in the cellar for the winter, and paid the rest of the crop as rent to the owner, just as if it was the Middle Ages. When I began to work in broadcasting, my father said: If you have to speak up, speak nicely and, above all, don’t be controversial. He never listened to my programs for fear he’d hear me say something that would worry him.

  On the other side of our building in St Kilda, in the exact mirror-image flat to ours, lived Lillian and Tommy. I thought of them as an old couple but they were probably younger than I am now. My parents said Lillian was the daughter of a Jewish-English family, and she had come to Australia to marry Tom, an Aussie soldier returned from World War One.

  Now a travelling salesman selling superphosphate to farmers, Tom would go off on trips for weeks at a time. If he was days later than his promised return he would tell his wife that he had spent time on the Murray River fishing, but my father said that Tommy stopped at a fish and chip shop on the way home and bought the fish from there, in order to fool his wife.

  As a matter of fact, almost everything I knew about them was from overhearing my parents talking, though I did wander over to Lillian and Tommy’s flat some mornings. I would get into bed with Tommy who would be reading the Sun. He had his first beer of the day by his bedside and he’d teach me to read the ‘funnies’ as he called them—the comic strip with Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead. He called me Blondie too.

  At primary school they played us a recording of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince. Another story about a bird and a man, but this time the man was a statue of a prince, and the bird was a swallow that had come to rest at his feet after a day of travelling. The swallow was on his way to Egypt to join his friends, after having waited behind to resolve an impossible love affair with an unsuitable object—a reed, in fact.

  It was narrated with sonorous authority by Orson Welles, his serious precision chiming with the lighter, boyish sound of the young Bing Crosby as the prince.

  I found the same recording while I was writing this book, and heard again, fifty years later, Orson and Bing and the orchestral music that underscored the story, telling you what to feel. It took me back to St Kilda Park State School where we sat on the mat at story time.

  ‘High above the city,’ Orson begins, ‘on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt.’<
br />
  The story tells of the prince’s awareness, after a life of carefree happiness, that there are people in his city who are poor and need help. His tears soak the little swallow as he shelters at the prince’s feet.

  ‘When I was alive and had a human heart,’ he says, ‘I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the palace of Sans-Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter…So I lived, and so I died. And now that I am dead they have set me up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot choose but weep.’

  Can you imagine how sad this sounded to my five-year-old self?

  The prince asks the swallow to help him, and slowly the sapphires and the ruby and the leaves of gold are plucked by the bird and given to the poor people of the city (including a writer in a garret who is trying to finish a play). But winter comes and the prince has given everything away and the swallow has missed his opportunity to fly to Egypt and he falls dead from the cold at the statue’s feet. And somehow the statue is dead again, too, and he’s melted down by the burghers of the city because he is no longer beautiful and the only thing left is his heart of lead.

  And the story ends like this: ‘ “What a strange thing!” said the overseer of the workmen at the foundry. “This broken lead heart will not melt in the furnace. We must throw it away.” So they threw it on a dust-heap where the dead swallow was also lying.’

  Then Orson says, ‘ “Bring me the two most precious things in the city,” said God to one of his angels; and the angel brought him the leaden heart and the dead bird.’

  I adore this tale of sacrifice and love. After all this time, it still has the power to move me. How different is the sweet swallow from the nasty trickster in the Polish forest! But, again, there is a paradox—the prince enlists the swallow to bring happiness to people in the city, and in the process causes the death of the good little bird. So strongly had I been moved by the goodness of the creature, that I identified it closely to myself. It was only on rehearing the original recording that I realised the bird was male and not female, as I had first remembered.