Monday, August 18, 2008
A Young Gifted Actor In The Place He Loves Most - By Luke Davies
Utter Play: Heath Ledger, 1979-2008
A young, gifted actor in the place he loves most
By Luke Davies
Published on January 31, 2008
In the teen comedyTen Things I Hate About You, from 1999, Heath Ledger bribes the marching band, commandeers the PA system in the school sports stadium and appears, high in the stands, belting out "I Love You, Baby" to an initially shocked, then embarrassed, then touched Julia Stiles, in her soccer gear amid all the other girls at practice. Ledger hops, skips and glides as he makes his way down towards the playing field, using the raked stadium seats as a kind of expansive stage on which to play, deftly avoiding the security guards moving in to put an end to his tomfoolery.
He's not there: Ledger as one of Todd Haynes' multiple Bob Dylans in his penultimate completed film.Jonathan Wenk/TWC
The performance is hammy, self-knowing and exuberant: There is a sense that Ledger the actor is embracing the corniness just as much as his character quite clearly is. It's one part Singin' in the Rain, one part high school talent quest, and about eight parts Heath — this gangly, beautiful surfer-looking boy, tumbling through experience, always on the brink of calamity, risking grand failure in a public setting with nonchalant generosity.
It's Ledger's playfulness that many will remember the most. I have home-movie footage of director Neil Armfield and Ledger workshopping a critical entrance scene from Candy, a film I scripted with Armfield and which was adapted from my semiautobiographical first novel. In the scene, Dan (Ledger's character) returns home after pulling off a successful bank scam, his pockets filled with cash for the first and only time in the film, a bunch of flowers in his arms. He's filled with joy at his improbable success, ready to shower Candy (Abbie Cornish) with the flowers. Armfield suggests a kind of grand unloading of the flowers, and the home movie shows Ledger beginning to mime the action, grinning at Armfield, repeating the action more exuberantly each time, as if the flowers are more than he can carry.
What's remarkable is how similar the emotional texture of this behind-the-scenes moment is to that scene six years earlier, where a 19-year-old Ledger grins so delightedly, at Julia Stiles, at the security guards, the entire universe. It's Ledger in the place he loved most — utter play — wearing the grin of someone both excited by and at ease with the unlikeliness of good fortune.
The types of characters Ledger portrayed had become a little more complex over those years. But his ability to convey a kind of inner purity — a force strong enough to dispel either the adolescent self-consciousness of singing a love song in public or the guilt and remorse of not being the junkie breadwinner — seems in Ledger to have been both consistent and innate.
Some actors, Ledger included, are natural clowns, and this inner-clown quality helps to create character sympathy where it's needed most. In Candy,the character Ledger plays acts reprehensibly for much of the film, but somehow audiences felt more empathy for him than for Candy herself, the victim of his foibles. Guarded though he may have been in his private life, Ledger had a capacity to be truly vulnerable onscreen — as are the best clowns, such as Chaplin — that gives a genuine radiance to his performances.
Candybrought Ledger back to Australia in early 2005, straight from the grueling Brokebackshoot, with his new girlfriend, Michelle Williams. He seemed, at times, quite literally beside himself with love for her, unable to contain his excitement. I remember one night during preproduction, in an almost empty nightclub in Kings Cross, watching him sweep her to her feet and swirl her around an empty dance floor, much to the relief of a bored DJ. It was a completely private moment; he wasn't doing it for the benefit of others, for those of us settling into our seats or buying a round. He just wanted to dance with Michelle. One almost felt the need to avert one's eyes, and yet it was oddly compelling: that pure joy again.
That the paparazzi hounded him remorselessly genuinely distressed Ledger. He did not see why his privacy could not be his own, to do with as he pleased. I think he felt that the set was a haven, a refuge, from all the white noise outside, and from the constant sense of lurking ambush. No wonder he came across as skittish: In another context, that's called being on your guard. Away from that public world, where the media constructed a "bad boy" that was far from how Ledger acted in reality, he was warm, down-to-earth, bighearted.
I somehow wrangled a one-line cameo as a milkman in Candy. The scene came near the end of the shoot and I had six weeks in which to cultivate my growing panic. But when the moment finally came, what I remember most from the bustle of crew, equipment, camera rehearsals, bright lights and finding your mark, from my what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here paralysis, was Ledger putting a hand on my shoulder, leaning into that private space, and saying, "Breathe, Lukey, breathe."
My own sense is of deep gratitude, to have had the warmth of that connection during those few months. Someone was going to play, not just a character that I had created, but one that was a version of me. It was a surreal experience. Someone else was going to take ownership of that. Ledger did, and created something entirely new. He imbued the character of Dan with a kind of optimistic yet damaged nobility far beyond what Armfield and I had imagined in writing the script.
He's not there: Ledger as one of Todd Haynes' multiple Bob Dylans in his penultimate completed film.Watching the film being shot at close range, watching my own words come to life in front of the cameras was my first experience of just how amazing good actors are. "This is a good script," Ledger had said to Armfield and me during the rehearsal period, "but there's way too many words in it." He would march into a scene, and do with a twitch of his face, a glance, a shift in posture, a softening in his eyes, in two seconds, what we had tried to get across in a page of script. The most notable instance of this is in the film's final scene, where most of our two pages of finely honed dialogue is nowhere to be seen, and the bewildered pain of the two lovers is played out largely in silence. It's a beautiful and powerful performance; one that I believe will stand among the best of his tragically short career.
Producer Margaret Fink constantly referred to Ledger as "our boy." "What about our boy, eh?" she would say, wide-eyed, with a faint conspiratorial grin, after viewing another batch of exciting dailies. It was not even a rhetorical question, merely a statement of marvel.
He was, in fact, not just a boy anymore. He was becoming a man. It was exciting, the very notion of the films he would do in the upcoming years. He was gifted, he was A-list, he had the power to choose the best. The tragic loss, more than anything, is in what we might imagine was still to come. The actress Bojana Novakovic was a close friend of Ledger's for 12 years, since they both acted in Blackrockas teenagers. In recent months she had been staying at his places in Los Angeles and New York. A week ago she made a little gift for him, a sheet of silver contact that she painted black, and then scraped back, to reveal the words "Fail gloriously." Novakovic said he laughed, accepting the gift with the lightness with which it was intended.
"Now it seems so different," she said to me on the phone from New York, waiting, forlornly, to sort through her stuff.
Luke Davies is the author of the novelsCandyandIsabelle the Navigator, and numerous award-winning volumes of poetry. His new novel,God of Speed(Allen & Unwin), will be released in Australia in April.
Source: LA Weekly
Love In The Time Of Poetry
August 21, 2004
Luke Davies last night won The Age Book of the Year. Jason Steger reports on a writer's poetic inspiration.
Luke Davies remembers the first poem he wrote. He was 13. It was called Mack and the Boys and was inspired by reading John Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row, the book that turned him on to reading. The poem's subject was its characters.
"It is ominously weird to think that Mack and the boys were the bums and derros and the alcoholics who are the central characters of the book, who choose to stand outside the bounds of society. It might be a worrying thing that these were the first literary role models that I was influenced by."
Worrying because not many years later Davies embarked on what he refers to as a decade of darkness and heroin addiction. It was a period that has informed and shaped almost all his writing since: his two novels, Candy and Isabelle the Navigator, his collections of poetry, Absolute Event Horizon, Running with Light, Totem, and now the film script for Candy he is writing with its director, Neal Armfield.
One constant since Mack and the Boys, however, has been poetry. For years he wrote it obsessively. By the time he was 18 he had notebooks crammed with the stuff, much of it bad. But this was his apprenticeship. And out of that has come Totem, for which he last night won The Age Book of the Year.
It consists of two parts. First, Totem Poem, an intensely celebratory paean to love, a 525-line poem that burns with a passionate lyrical intensity, relishing sensations, language and feeling.
"In the yellow time of pollen when the fields were ablaze/we were very near bewildered by beauty./ The sky was a god-bee that hummed. All the air boomed/ with that thunder. It was both for the prick/ and the nectar we drank that we gave ourselves over."
So much happened that was so dreadful. So much of that darkness you wouldn't wish on a dog. And yet everything that happened led me to where I am.
This is followed by 40 Love Poems, short and sharp in comparison, reflecting the emotional intensity and language of the longer poem but which, according to Davies, are "immediate and erotic but also extremely formal and mannered".
One of the most remarkable things is that the book came to Davies almost in a flash, a vision when he saw what the work would become in its entirety. He was doing a spell as writer in residency at the Australia Centre in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand.
"In a two-day period I had written the first line of Totem Poem and understood immediately that it would be a very big juicy grand love poem, a kind of hymn to life. The very next day I had written the first of that sort of song cycle, the little kind of metaphysical love poems and there were lines echoing between the two things," he says. "It was a fantastic moment because it's never really happened to me before like that - the creation of a body of work and you know very clearly what it will be. And you spend the next four years trying to get there."
The other extraordinary thing was that in the writing he didn't deviate from his vision. He didn't spend four years in a sort of rhapsodic incantatory state but he did find that he had easy access every time he got to grips with the grand structure that became Totem.
He sees Totem as the most coherent, large-scale writing that he has done. "In a sense novels are more coherent by their transparency and accessibility and by their more narrative momentum. But I don't mean that. I mean at a deeper level in terms of the creative heart of the work that this was the biggest and best thing that I've done."
He pauses momentarily as if reconsidering a slightly rash statement. Perhaps he's not sure. "I'm really proud of Candy too, but now I would say Candy and Totem are two things that if I died tomorrow I would stand proud of."
He has tried in both Totem and the Love Poems to blur the divisions between the "intimate and the immense, between the intensely physical and the greatly metaphysical". Particularly in the shorter poems he recognises and embraces the influences of writers such as John Donne, Ben Jonson, George Herbert and Andrew Marvell in the creation of poems that are immediate and erotic and formal and mannered.
"Across your back
Those freckles strewn
Are every constellation
I have known -
All galaxy and godhead too -
An astronaut would weep
At such a view: as if,
After dreams, in the deep
Heart of dawn, he'd wake
To that expanse, and breathe it in.
Home! O Milky Way!
O milk-white skin!"
The shorter poems are addressed largely to a fictional lover called Sugar Lee, "my kind of white-trash muse figure" who emerged most probably from a state of yearning while he was working alone in the Spanish Pyrenees. But in Thailand when the whole sequence was dreamed up, he had a "brief and wonderful" liaison with Mille, a Danish woman he met on his travels.
"I wonder how relevant it is to talk about that but the fact of the matter is that it's a beautiful beginning to the story. That was a kind of really genuinely visceral starting point to the thing," he says. "This woman was the spark point from which it started. Now I'm deep in a relationship with my partner Victoria and most of the book is a reflection of growing with her and living with her."
The other woman who played a significant part in the outcome of Totem is Judith Beveridge whose Wolf Notes was also on the shortlist for The Age poetry award. Davies won a four-week fellowship at the Varuna Writers' Centre in the Blue Mountains that included $1000 to spend on an editor of his choice.
"Everyone's scared of poetry. Publishers aren't going to say, this is a problem, change this or change that. But the opportunity to invite a poet into your work was so fantastic," he says.
"It was that final home stretch that tightened the screws and got rid of the flab. I said please get specific and she was incredibly specific. It was like, 'this line stinks, this line is weak compared with the lines that surround it, or this is really unclear what you are trying to say here'. Judith is really great with eliminating tonal glitches and fluctuations that seem like repetition."
Davies says that from his point of view there is an unbroken continuum between all his different works. If Candy is some kind of analysis of the trauma of addiction and Isabelle the Navigator an examination of the experience of grief, of the loss of all that is both so dark and so good, "the celebratory nature that you're recognising in Totem comes out of the experience of immense gratitude of being alive and having survived".
He makes no bones about his addiction: he wouldn't be the person nor the writer he is today without it. There's the paradox. "So much happened that was so dreadful. So much of that darkness you wouldn't wish on a dog. And yet everything that happened led me to where I am. It's that sense that I regret nothing. But a poem like Totem is also an appropriate obeisance to the gods for me. Because it's still that sense that I wake up and pinch myself; still that sense of gratitude for being alive."
Davies grew up in West Pymble on Sydney's North Shore, a middle-class Catholic boy who went to a private school and on to Sydney University for an arts degree. Somehow he managed to stagger through it, publishing his first collection, Four Plots for Magnets, in his third year, in 1982. After that "things went wrong". His habit developed and it was not until 1990 that he got clean.
But he was always writing, the deciding activity of those dread years. He says it wasn't much good but there were sparks of good things and he squirrelled it all away. He was completely isolated and disconnected from the literary community and putting a stamp on an envelope to send out his writing was beyond him.
But here he is today, fresh from receiving the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal at this year's Mildura festival, about to spend 12 weeks in a German castle where he hopes to complete the "backwards and forwards" of the editorial work on a new novel about Howard Hughes that he describes as a sort of demented interior monologue in which Hughes goes back over all the events of the century he was involved in: glamour, Hollywood, women, speed, power, flight, war, corruption and capitalism. "The guy was this incredible emblem for everything that is weird, wacky and wrong with the modern era."
He is due to deliver the manuscript in a week or two and is "deep in the zone". It's an idea that he has lived with for 10 years. He started writing it in 1994, then wrote Candy instead and then Isabelle, deciding that because the Hughes book was so big and ambitious he should get one more novel out of the way.
He has done loads of research and when I say I remember Hughes taking over a floor of a London hotel in the mid-1970s he's there in a trice. Names the hotel immediately and in fact has set much of the last part of the book in London when Hughes flies there for the first time in many years. "Those four flights in the summer of '73 were the last thing that he did to try and reclaim his greatness or whatever. The book's a tragedy."
In January the adaptation of Candy is due to go into production starring Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish - "she's a great Candy" - and Geoffrey Rush. And there's still his poetry, the work in which he says he is most autonomous.
He talks of the past few years as something akin to a slow turning point in which he has been getting a public profile for his novels or film work. But he is always bemused that people don't know him as a poet "because this is the most important thing that defines me".
And it all started when he was in year eight. When he read Cannery Row, when "everything changed, the whole universe changed", when his response to Steinbeck prompted that first poem. Davies says he is such an anally retentive collector of his work that he has everything he has ever written. The one thing he is missing, however, is Mack and the Boys.
Source: The Age
Live - Luke Davies
I really loved this article and am excited to be sharing it with you. I thought the writer did a really terrific job and I loved reading it.
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Live - Luke Davies - Sydney Writers' Festival
Reviews, By Joal, 26th May, 2008
Apparently Luke Davies’ mother thinks he’s just like Britney Spears. And Luke agrees, except these days he wears underwear.
Davies is the author of three novels, the most well known being Candy, adapted into a film starring Heath Ledger. He also collaborated on the film’s screenplay. In addition to this, Davies has published five books of poetry, the latest of which is Totem. It’s a collection of 40 love poems and one extended aria and it won The Age Book of the Year in 2004.
Appearing at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival, Davies does resemble our beloved Britney. Although, as he sits on stage in what looks like a 60s style sailor-collar denim jacket with a cheeky grin, it’s definitely more of the innocent ‘hit me baby one more time’ pop diva he’s exuding these days.
But Davies admits that it’s the substance abusing, off-the-rails Britney that seems to make his writing so fascinating, and it’s this ‘old’ Luke that his mother complains about resurfacing every time an article is written about him and his work.
Candy is said to be a “thinly veiled” autobiographic account of Davies’ own experience with heroin addiction, “a horrible nightmare, life defining moment”, but an experience he appreciates, as it brought him to where he is now. A sold-out Writers’ Festival session on Saturday called Under The Influence, saw Davies delve once again into how his creativity is linked to and fascinated by the feeling of addiction.
“I can’t let [drug addiction] be the white elephant in the room,” says Davies. “I’m happy to talk about it. I hope in 10 years time I’m not still being asked about it… but if one person reads about me and finds their way out of a dark place, that’s what I associate myself with.” Even if that means his mum’s co-workers bring in an embarrassing article about Davies being a ‘junkie’ every now and again.
And the relevance and importance of writing about drug abuse and addiction seems to have ironically been validated. With the death of Heath Ledger, who played Davies – his autobiographic-self in Candy, passing-away from a suspected drug overdose earlier this year, Davies’ themes seem as pertinent as ever.
And although Davies promises his mother his next book won’t have any drugs or sex or bad stuff, his most recent release God Of Speed, details the life of Howard Hughes, the 1930s film producer, aviator and philanthropist. Davies said he was attracted to the neurotic character, his self-medication, and the contrasting power and fragility of a man who was admirable, but by the end of his life completely unlikable and fundamentally an ugly character.
The most poignant moment in Davies Writers’ Festival appearance was in reflecting on the difference between himself and his characters. “Love is listening, the ability to be there with someone, to connect. Addiction is an autistic lock-down…” where things can be taken in, but nothing given. “The tragedy of Howard Hughes was that he never escaped that blackhole, but I did.”
Reviews, By Joal, 26th May, 2008
Apparently Luke Davies’ mother thinks he’s just like Britney Spears. And Luke agrees, except these days he wears underwear.
Davies is the author of three novels, the most well known being Candy, adapted into a film starring Heath Ledger. He also collaborated on the film’s screenplay. In addition to this, Davies has published five books of poetry, the latest of which is Totem. It’s a collection of 40 love poems and one extended aria and it won The Age Book of the Year in 2004.
Appearing at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival, Davies does resemble our beloved Britney. Although, as he sits on stage in what looks like a 60s style sailor-collar denim jacket with a cheeky grin, it’s definitely more of the innocent ‘hit me baby one more time’ pop diva he’s exuding these days.
But Davies admits that it’s the substance abusing, off-the-rails Britney that seems to make his writing so fascinating, and it’s this ‘old’ Luke that his mother complains about resurfacing every time an article is written about him and his work.
Candy is said to be a “thinly veiled” autobiographic account of Davies’ own experience with heroin addiction, “a horrible nightmare, life defining moment”, but an experience he appreciates, as it brought him to where he is now. A sold-out Writers’ Festival session on Saturday called Under The Influence, saw Davies delve once again into how his creativity is linked to and fascinated by the feeling of addiction.
“I can’t let [drug addiction] be the white elephant in the room,” says Davies. “I’m happy to talk about it. I hope in 10 years time I’m not still being asked about it… but if one person reads about me and finds their way out of a dark place, that’s what I associate myself with.” Even if that means his mum’s co-workers bring in an embarrassing article about Davies being a ‘junkie’ every now and again.
And the relevance and importance of writing about drug abuse and addiction seems to have ironically been validated. With the death of Heath Ledger, who played Davies – his autobiographic-self in Candy, passing-away from a suspected drug overdose earlier this year, Davies’ themes seem as pertinent as ever.
And although Davies promises his mother his next book won’t have any drugs or sex or bad stuff, his most recent release God Of Speed, details the life of Howard Hughes, the 1930s film producer, aviator and philanthropist. Davies said he was attracted to the neurotic character, his self-medication, and the contrasting power and fragility of a man who was admirable, but by the end of his life completely unlikable and fundamentally an ugly character.
The most poignant moment in Davies Writers’ Festival appearance was in reflecting on the difference between himself and his characters. “Love is listening, the ability to be there with someone, to connect. Addiction is an autistic lock-down…” where things can be taken in, but nothing given. “The tragedy of Howard Hughes was that he never escaped that blackhole, but I did.”
Source: samesame.com.au
Inside Out Australia Reviews
God of Speed - Review By Annie Grossman
Luke Davies writes on Howard Hughes
January 23 , 2008
After a great break over the festive season, our Book Club is back on the go!
There are plenty exciting plans for the year ahead, plenty great books on the way and plenty fantastic authors we’ll be introducing you to over the next few months.
To kick off 2008, please welcome our guest reviewer - Annie Grossman of Written Dimension Book Shop, Noosa Junction - who has been fortunate enough to get her hands on a copy of The God of Speed by Australian author, Luke Davies.
The God of Speed
Luke Davies penned the award-winning modern day classic "Candy", which sold over 35,000 copies and was made into a brilliant and confronting film.
He also wrote the extremely underrated "Isabelle The Navigator" and the verse novel, "Totem".
I was very excited to receive an advance copy of Luke's new book "God of Speed" which is due for release in April this year."God of Speed" is again confronting, but beautifully written.
It is the story of Howard Hughes, and the final day or so of his life where he is laying in a bed, hopelessly addicted to drugs and protected from all visitors, but more importantly, the germs they carry.
As his power ebbs, he contemplates his life, a rollercoaster of drugs, oil, money, power, fame, women, aircraft, Hollywood and a lot more!
Luke has gathered information from Hughes' life, and I must say I wasn't aware that he had slept with so many of the most famous screen stars in cinematic history!
Luke doesn't spare the details of these encounters, so if you are easily unsettled by sexual detail, you may wish to avoid this one!
I personally found the details very much in context with the novel, not thrown in to titillate.Luke Davies is one of Australia's secret treasures.
His writing, despite his tough subject matter, is lyrical and compelling.
I think Howard Hughes himself would have been pretty happy with this one!
Source: The Daily - Sunshine Coast Daily - Between The Covers Blog
January 23 , 2008
After a great break over the festive season, our Book Club is back on the go!
There are plenty exciting plans for the year ahead, plenty great books on the way and plenty fantastic authors we’ll be introducing you to over the next few months.
To kick off 2008, please welcome our guest reviewer - Annie Grossman of Written Dimension Book Shop, Noosa Junction - who has been fortunate enough to get her hands on a copy of The God of Speed by Australian author, Luke Davies.
The God of Speed
Luke Davies penned the award-winning modern day classic "Candy", which sold over 35,000 copies and was made into a brilliant and confronting film.
He also wrote the extremely underrated "Isabelle The Navigator" and the verse novel, "Totem".
I was very excited to receive an advance copy of Luke's new book "God of Speed" which is due for release in April this year."God of Speed" is again confronting, but beautifully written.
It is the story of Howard Hughes, and the final day or so of his life where he is laying in a bed, hopelessly addicted to drugs and protected from all visitors, but more importantly, the germs they carry.
As his power ebbs, he contemplates his life, a rollercoaster of drugs, oil, money, power, fame, women, aircraft, Hollywood and a lot more!
Luke has gathered information from Hughes' life, and I must say I wasn't aware that he had slept with so many of the most famous screen stars in cinematic history!
Luke doesn't spare the details of these encounters, so if you are easily unsettled by sexual detail, you may wish to avoid this one!
I personally found the details very much in context with the novel, not thrown in to titillate.Luke Davies is one of Australia's secret treasures.
His writing, despite his tough subject matter, is lyrical and compelling.
I think Howard Hughes himself would have been pretty happy with this one!
Source: The Daily - Sunshine Coast Daily - Between The Covers Blog
Paul Landymore Reviews "God of Speed"
Luke Davies: God of Speed
Review by Paul Landymore, Manager Readings Malvern
The book opens in 1973 with Howard Hughes, enigma and twentieth-century icon, hidden from the world in a London hotel room, where he sits in bed waiting for the dawn and a meeting with an old friend. Now tended to by Mormon carers, this rare intrusion into Hughes’s secluded, strictly controlled and drug subdued life causes him to reflect on his past; from his childhood, struggling against the bonds imposed by his over-protective mother, his early inheritance of the family empire, through to the decades of his breakneck charge to notoriety.
As history now records, Hughes’s life was increasingly troubled by obsessive compulsive disorder, and it was this that drove him to extraordinary lengths to be master of all he saw. Hughes is a man who lives very much in the world: every sight, sound and smell is keenly felt and requires attention, his life a barely controlled maelstrom of experience. No aspect is without minute attention, whether it be perfecting his planes, designing a bra for a well-endowed film star or being a leader of men. And of course, there were the women –dozens of them – who Hughes relentlessly pursued, no less a part of his condition than any other of his habits. Davies’ novel is a fascinating and intimate insight into the mind of a great and deeply disturbed man, told with a thoroughly convincing voice.
Readings
Melborne AU
Review by Paul Landymore, Manager Readings Malvern
The book opens in 1973 with Howard Hughes, enigma and twentieth-century icon, hidden from the world in a London hotel room, where he sits in bed waiting for the dawn and a meeting with an old friend. Now tended to by Mormon carers, this rare intrusion into Hughes’s secluded, strictly controlled and drug subdued life causes him to reflect on his past; from his childhood, struggling against the bonds imposed by his over-protective mother, his early inheritance of the family empire, through to the decades of his breakneck charge to notoriety.
As history now records, Hughes’s life was increasingly troubled by obsessive compulsive disorder, and it was this that drove him to extraordinary lengths to be master of all he saw. Hughes is a man who lives very much in the world: every sight, sound and smell is keenly felt and requires attention, his life a barely controlled maelstrom of experience. No aspect is without minute attention, whether it be perfecting his planes, designing a bra for a well-endowed film star or being a leader of men. And of course, there were the women –dozens of them – who Hughes relentlessly pursued, no less a part of his condition than any other of his habits. Davies’ novel is a fascinating and intimate insight into the mind of a great and deeply disturbed man, told with a thoroughly convincing voice.
Readings
Melborne AU
Luke Davies Discusses His Books That Inspire Him At Sydney Writer's Festival (Transcript)
At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival a number of prominent Australian authors talked about what they read and the books that have inspired them.
Luke Davies is a novelist, poet and screenwriter currently trying his luck in LA. He's the author of the recently published God of Speed and his book Candy was made into a film. It focuses on young lovers who are in a spiral of heroin addiction.
Luke Davies was himself an addict 20 years ago and in this talk he guides us through the books that penetrated his drug induced haze and re-introduced him to the world of emotions and feeling.
Ramona Koval: On The Book Show we often talk to authors about what they've written, but what about what they like to read to nourish their own writing and for enjoyment? At the recent Sydney Writers' Festival a number of prominent Australian authors talked about what they read and the books that have inspired them in their work.
Luke Davies is a novelist, poet and screenwriter currently trying his luck in LA. He's the author of the recently published God of Speed and his book Candy was made into a film. It focuses on young lovers who are in a spiral of heroin addiction. Luke Davies was himself an addict 20 years ago, and in this talk he guides us through the books that penetrated his drug induced haze and re-introduced him to the world of emotions and feeling. John Steinbeck's Cannery Row opened the door to literature for him as a teenager.
Luke Davies: This is the opening paragraph of Cannery Row:
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and the scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.
There's something that I now recognise as being intrinsically corny and a bit twee about that. I was a precocious little kid; within a few months I had moved on to Faulkner, which kind of blew my mind, and I understood then and I understand now that Faulkner and Steinbeck...we're talking about completely different things, but my emotional contact with that moment of feeling like an adult and an autonomous person who discovered a new world, the same world that Christos talked about with the Bergman films, that feeling has never gone away. It was kind of like Steinbeck was the door and then three months later, down the corridor, Faulkner was when it opened out into the palace and I've been roaming around in that palace ever since.
So I jump forward many, many years, I'm a heroin addict and things have been very bad for very, very many years. I was a pathetic criminal in many ways. All of my criminal endeavours ended in disaster basically, but an area that I was comfortable with was books, and so back in the days before they had those electronic things on the fronts of bookshops I just used to steal a lot of books and sell them the next day, and I'd steal the best books possible, the brand new books that were in the most demand that second-hand bookshops in Carlton would love to buy off you and turn a blind eye.
So, books very rarely lasted more than 24 hours. The books I was reading were second-hand books that weren't really sellable. But this book Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez in the middle of that horrendous misery touched something inside me that was to be the thing that reconnected me with the idea of the capacity for becoming human again after I had become so dehumanised for so many years. I started reading this book, this passage that I'm about to read to you:
[reading from One summer evening I was camped... to ...she stared back resolute as iron.]
In that instant in reading that book I burst into tears for the first time in so many years, because as a heroin addict tears are a luxury and you become really cold and really hard, so something in this writing cut through, something in this remote region that I was living in, some kind of possibility of hope reconnected me with my life. And what I was reading in this literature, in this very brilliant book, was the sense of presence, of how to be present here and now in this body at this moment in these extraordinary circumstances of being rather than not being, the more likely alternative.
This is a real 'writer's writer' book. It's very popular amongst writers. It's a really great book, and I got it...and I wrote in the movie that I co-wrote, Candy, there's a scene where the Heath Ledger character is reading the book, and I convinced the director Neil Armfield to have a close-up shot of the book, so it gets in there, and you see that beside the alarm clock on the bedside table.
I'm going to totally bypass the stuff that I wanted to say, apart from the fact that I'm going to say it, about how great Roberto Calasso is. If you check him out you will be rewarded. The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony is a wonderful book that sort of reaches down into the fundamental mythic meanings of this question of what it means to be alive. And the book Ka by Calasso. The first one is retellings of the Greek myths and legends, the second one is retellings of the great Hindu and Sanskrit myths and legends. You go backwards through these books it's kind of like getting a really vivid glimpse of the history of our Western consciousness.
So we're running out of time and I'm going to move on to poetry, stuff that is about presence. This is Yeats:
My fiftieth year had come and gone,I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cup on the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazed my body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or less it seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.
It's just a poem that I love, I guess, because...the theme of this thing that I'm talking about is the journey from...the gap between the life you are leading and the life you ought to be leading being immense and on the journey towards death trying to narrow that gap by becoming a better person.
I was in Auckland last week at the writers' festival and I heard Junot Diaz talk about...he's just a great guy, the Pulitzer Prize-winner guy, and he talked about how talent is not enough. It doesn't make us write better books the next time around, you've got to strive to become a better person, and to me that means just always making an effort to become more present.
So I really love...I have investigated, I guess, in God of Speed the questions of people whose lives are really lost and who don't come out the other side of that thing. I guess John Berryman is one such person, and in recent years, the last five or so years, John Berryman has been my great discovery as someone who is exceedingly difficult and dense but the rewards are immense, and he has become bedside reading. Well, I dip in and out anyway. I've moving through the collected now, but The Dream Songs is a great book and this is a poem called 'Op. posth. no.13', and I assume that the Randall that is mentioned in this poem is Randall Jarrell, I'm not sure.
In the night-reaches dreamed he of better graces,of liberations, and beloved faces,such as now ere dawn he sings.It would not be easy, accustomed to these things,to give up the old world, but he could try;let it all rest, have a good cry.
Let Randall rest, whom your self-torturing cannot restore one instant's good to, rest:he's left us now.The panic died and in the panic's dying so did my old friend. I am headed west also, also, somehow.
In the chambers of the end we'll meet again I will say Randall, he'll say Pussycat and all will be as before when as we sought, among the beloved faces,eminence and were dissatisfied with that and needed more.
I wanted to rave on a bit about the Australian poet Vivian Smith because that journey was about...I was 13 years old and the door opened, in the middle of that the glimpse into the Barry Lopez thing was about finding the turning point that made things change, and then this is kind of like about presence again by a senior Australian poet who is one of my favourite poets, and this is a mature poem. I guess emotionally it's a place that I love, because it's certainly not a place that I live in emotionally but it's a one that I think would be nice, to be an old guy like Vivian Smith and experiencing a reality like this and writing a poem this beautiful, which I will finish on. It's called 'Happiness'.
They tell me that the novelist next door is working on a new book full of fight with all the characters named after colours:Rose and Pink and Black and Brown and White.He's the kind of guy who knows the ropes.He is so at home in his own skin.(Of course it could turn out a load of shite).
And I, today, have reached a small peak of cloudless unconcern,With no demands, and no calls on my time.
I'm standing at the window with a coffee,the first flush of spring on view.I know that in an hour you will return and I will have this greeting ready for you.
Thanks
Ramona Koval: Luke Davies at the recent Sydney Writers' Festival talking about writing that's influenced him. Thanks to Slow TV for making that audio available.
Source: ABC Radio National Australia
"God of Speed" Review From Malcolm Knox Sydney Morning Herald
God Of Speed
Malcolm Knox, reviewer
April 18, 2008
Luke Davies climbs up a notch by stepping into the shoes of one of the 20th-century's most intriguing characters.
AuthorLuke Davies
GenreFiction
Publisher Allen & Unwin
When I read this fever-dream of a book, I was laid up in a darkened room, my sweats and aches salved by codeine, my stubble growing into an unkempt beard, my fingernails long, my mind on germs - where I had caught this thing, how I could avoid it next time?
There, and precisely there, my assonance with Howard Hughes stops. I have greater concerns about Luke Davies, that is, if a successful Australian writer's attuning to the moods, memories, habits and intimacies of America's strangest and most corrosive 20th-century plutocrat is a matter for concern.
Davies, born in 1962, is the author of several volumes of poetry and two previous novels. Candy is one of the best novels of the past 15 years and Isabelle The Navigator one of the most underrated.
Why Davies would be so compelled by Hughes, the oil-money heir who built an empire in film, aviation, electronics, media and hotels, who set records on land and in air, is a question that will be raised and I mention it only in order to get it out of the way. Firstly, there are no passport controls on art. Secondly, Davies reinvents Hughes with a sure artistry that quickly puts such questions in the shade.
Davies's Hughes narrates from a hotel in London, one of his temporary tax shelters, in 1973. He is 68, three years from death, cared for by his retinue of Mormons, in the full grip of his addictions to drugs and obsessive behaviour. The time is momentous because he has decided to pilot an aeroplane again.
Hughes has summoned Jack Real, an old flyer and friend, to come from America and assist him. God Of Speed is narrated over a single night while Hughes waits for Real to wake up. A single bow of tension holds up the novel - will Hughes be able to take the controls? Between those two points it warps in short chapters back and forth over Hughes's life. These episodes, often disordered and rambling, are threaded together with the story of Hughes's record-setting round-the-world flight in 1938.
Davies is not attempting an act of perfect ventriloquism. As much is clear from Hughes's real memos, spliced through the text. The real Hughes, on the page, is a stranger and colder creature than Davies's Hughes. A faithful re-creation of the real Hughes would be, I suspect, wild and unreadable, if "Memo, 1959: On retrieving my hearing-aid cord from the cabinet" is any guide: "The door to the cabinet is to be opened using a minimum of fifteen Kleenexes" and so on.
Davies's Hughes, on the other hand, is warmer-blooded and poetic, and most importantly is talking to someone other than himself. By carrying Hughes's story out to Jack Real, Davies is engineering its carriage to us. His Hughes has some of the weirdness of his disorder, repeating himself, losing his way, obsessing over "setting the controls" as if every moment is like flying a plane, mistaking Jane Greer's "softness" for her "sadness" but then deciding that the mistake is as apt as the intended word. Yet he is self-aware: 'You see, Jack, there was a loop, and it was hard to get out of ..."
His rhythms are more fluent and accessible than those of the real Hughes, and they prise open this self-awareness about his inner life, and his regrets, in a way that the real Hughes probably never articulated, certainly not in his memos.
Those regrets circle around the women. From Carole Lombard to Ava Gardner, Hughes bedded a full quorum of Hollywood beauty from the 1920s to the 1950s. In God Of Speed, their intimacies are rendered with the juiced-up lushness of erotic art, Hughes projecting each memory onto his mental screen, a voyeur of his own past. His final epiphany, that he didn't take enough account of the separate existence of his sexual partners, escapes triteness because of the surreal sexual heights at which Hughes flew. If anyone was entitled to monstrous flaws, it was a man who bridged the gap between the metaphoric American dream and its realisation. It is in exploring the outer limits of this consummation that Davies reaches his own heights.
The sexual avidity and cruelty are far from the worst of it. When filming Hell's Angels, Hughes would search the sky for "f---able clouds". The shot he wanted was a zeppelin plunging into a fat cumulus breast. How Davies translates this - from yearning for a woman, to yearning for many women, to yearning for some spirit that captures all those female essences, to yearning itself, involuted and arid - is one of this novel's triumphs.
God Of Speed is one of those memorable novels that is more strange than perfect. It has its patchiness. A late chapter on Hughes's financial manipulation of Richard Nixon is, while amusing, more an assemblage of facts than the strangulated outburst that the rest of the narrative has become by that point. The short-chapter structure is mostly satisfying but in the early stages there were times when I wanted it to slow down, allow its weirdness to unravel at a slower pace. Like a beautiful yet over-modest person, it didn't seem to want the attention it merited. But to let his Hughes ramble too weirdly would be a risk, as would letting his Hughes wander off and enjoy the sexual favours of men, as the real Hughes did. These untaken paths don't detract from the novel but pose interesting speculations.
"I was everything, Jack, I was everywhere, for a while." And Hughes was. God Of Speed is a novel that left me dizzy and a little altitude-sick - more codeine, nurse! But Davies strains for, and I think captures, the subjective essence, the anxiety and megalomania, of being - and knowing he was - an avatar of a whole century. Others will decide whether God Of Speed cements Davies where he deserves to be, among the very top echelon of our novelists. For those readers who are tuned in to what he is doing, it certainly will.
Malcolm Knox, reviewer
April 18, 2008
Luke Davies climbs up a notch by stepping into the shoes of one of the 20th-century's most intriguing characters.
AuthorLuke Davies
GenreFiction
Publisher Allen & Unwin
When I read this fever-dream of a book, I was laid up in a darkened room, my sweats and aches salved by codeine, my stubble growing into an unkempt beard, my fingernails long, my mind on germs - where I had caught this thing, how I could avoid it next time?
There, and precisely there, my assonance with Howard Hughes stops. I have greater concerns about Luke Davies, that is, if a successful Australian writer's attuning to the moods, memories, habits and intimacies of America's strangest and most corrosive 20th-century plutocrat is a matter for concern.
Davies, born in 1962, is the author of several volumes of poetry and two previous novels. Candy is one of the best novels of the past 15 years and Isabelle The Navigator one of the most underrated.
Why Davies would be so compelled by Hughes, the oil-money heir who built an empire in film, aviation, electronics, media and hotels, who set records on land and in air, is a question that will be raised and I mention it only in order to get it out of the way. Firstly, there are no passport controls on art. Secondly, Davies reinvents Hughes with a sure artistry that quickly puts such questions in the shade.
Davies's Hughes narrates from a hotel in London, one of his temporary tax shelters, in 1973. He is 68, three years from death, cared for by his retinue of Mormons, in the full grip of his addictions to drugs and obsessive behaviour. The time is momentous because he has decided to pilot an aeroplane again.
Hughes has summoned Jack Real, an old flyer and friend, to come from America and assist him. God Of Speed is narrated over a single night while Hughes waits for Real to wake up. A single bow of tension holds up the novel - will Hughes be able to take the controls? Between those two points it warps in short chapters back and forth over Hughes's life. These episodes, often disordered and rambling, are threaded together with the story of Hughes's record-setting round-the-world flight in 1938.
Davies is not attempting an act of perfect ventriloquism. As much is clear from Hughes's real memos, spliced through the text. The real Hughes, on the page, is a stranger and colder creature than Davies's Hughes. A faithful re-creation of the real Hughes would be, I suspect, wild and unreadable, if "Memo, 1959: On retrieving my hearing-aid cord from the cabinet" is any guide: "The door to the cabinet is to be opened using a minimum of fifteen Kleenexes" and so on.
Davies's Hughes, on the other hand, is warmer-blooded and poetic, and most importantly is talking to someone other than himself. By carrying Hughes's story out to Jack Real, Davies is engineering its carriage to us. His Hughes has some of the weirdness of his disorder, repeating himself, losing his way, obsessing over "setting the controls" as if every moment is like flying a plane, mistaking Jane Greer's "softness" for her "sadness" but then deciding that the mistake is as apt as the intended word. Yet he is self-aware: 'You see, Jack, there was a loop, and it was hard to get out of ..."
His rhythms are more fluent and accessible than those of the real Hughes, and they prise open this self-awareness about his inner life, and his regrets, in a way that the real Hughes probably never articulated, certainly not in his memos.
Those regrets circle around the women. From Carole Lombard to Ava Gardner, Hughes bedded a full quorum of Hollywood beauty from the 1920s to the 1950s. In God Of Speed, their intimacies are rendered with the juiced-up lushness of erotic art, Hughes projecting each memory onto his mental screen, a voyeur of his own past. His final epiphany, that he didn't take enough account of the separate existence of his sexual partners, escapes triteness because of the surreal sexual heights at which Hughes flew. If anyone was entitled to monstrous flaws, it was a man who bridged the gap between the metaphoric American dream and its realisation. It is in exploring the outer limits of this consummation that Davies reaches his own heights.
The sexual avidity and cruelty are far from the worst of it. When filming Hell's Angels, Hughes would search the sky for "f---able clouds". The shot he wanted was a zeppelin plunging into a fat cumulus breast. How Davies translates this - from yearning for a woman, to yearning for many women, to yearning for some spirit that captures all those female essences, to yearning itself, involuted and arid - is one of this novel's triumphs.
God Of Speed is one of those memorable novels that is more strange than perfect. It has its patchiness. A late chapter on Hughes's financial manipulation of Richard Nixon is, while amusing, more an assemblage of facts than the strangulated outburst that the rest of the narrative has become by that point. The short-chapter structure is mostly satisfying but in the early stages there were times when I wanted it to slow down, allow its weirdness to unravel at a slower pace. Like a beautiful yet over-modest person, it didn't seem to want the attention it merited. But to let his Hughes ramble too weirdly would be a risk, as would letting his Hughes wander off and enjoy the sexual favours of men, as the real Hughes did. These untaken paths don't detract from the novel but pose interesting speculations.
"I was everything, Jack, I was everywhere, for a while." And Hughes was. God Of Speed is a novel that left me dizzy and a little altitude-sick - more codeine, nurse! But Davies strains for, and I think captures, the subjective essence, the anxiety and megalomania, of being - and knowing he was - an avatar of a whole century. Others will decide whether God Of Speed cements Davies where he deserves to be, among the very top echelon of our novelists. For those readers who are tuned in to what he is doing, it certainly will.
Australia Council For The Arts Bio
Luke Davies
Sydney-based Luke Davies is a poet and novelist, whose work has been widely published both in Australia and overseas.
Luke Davies is the author of two novels, including the cult bestseller Candy (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1997), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 1998 and has since been published in Britain, the United States and translated into German, Spanish, Hebrew and French. A film starring Heath Ledger was released in 2006 and won Davies the (AFI) Awards, Best Adapted Screenplay, 2006. Davies' other novel is Isabelle the Navigator (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2000).
Originally a poet though, Davies was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry in 2004. He has published five books of poetry, including Running With Light (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1999), winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2000, and Totem (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2004), the 2004 Age Book of the Year winner.
Davies has completed several residencies around the world, including at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts, Ireland 1998, the Australia Centre, Chiang Mai, Thailand, December 1998-March 1999, Centre d'Art I Natura, Farrera de Pallars, Spain, June 1999, and Schloss Wiepersdorf, Germany 2004.
Davies was awarded the Dorothy Hewett Memorial Fellowship (Writer-in-Residence) in 2003, Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry (2004) and in 2004 won the Age Poetry Book of the Year and Book of the Year.
His works have been translated into German, Spanish, Thai, French, and Hebrew.
Source: Australian Government - Australia Council For The Arts
Sydney-based Luke Davies is a poet and novelist, whose work has been widely published both in Australia and overseas.
Luke Davies is the author of two novels, including the cult bestseller Candy (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1997), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Awards in 1998 and has since been published in Britain, the United States and translated into German, Spanish, Hebrew and French. A film starring Heath Ledger was released in 2006 and won Davies the (AFI) Awards, Best Adapted Screenplay, 2006. Davies' other novel is Isabelle the Navigator (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2000).
Originally a poet though, Davies was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry in 2004. He has published five books of poetry, including Running With Light (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 1999), winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize 2000, and Totem (Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2004), the 2004 Age Book of the Year winner.
Davies has completed several residencies around the world, including at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts, Ireland 1998, the Australia Centre, Chiang Mai, Thailand, December 1998-March 1999, Centre d'Art I Natura, Farrera de Pallars, Spain, June 1999, and Schloss Wiepersdorf, Germany 2004.
Davies was awarded the Dorothy Hewett Memorial Fellowship (Writer-in-Residence) in 2003, Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry (2004) and in 2004 won the Age Poetry Book of the Year and Book of the Year.
His works have been translated into German, Spanish, Thai, French, and Hebrew.
Source: Australian Government - Australia Council For The Arts
2008 Auckland Writers & Readers Festival 2008 - Luke Davies Bio
Luke Davies is the Australian author of three novels, the cult bestseller Candy, Isabelle the Navigator and his recent novel, The God of Speed. He has also written numerous books of poetry. Of these, Running With Light won the 2000 Judith Wright ‘Calanthe’ Poetry Prize at the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, and Totem won the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the Age Poetry Book of the Year and overall Age Book of the Year in 2004. The same year Davies was awarded the Philip Hodgkins Memorial Medal for Poetry.
He adapted Candy for screen, with director Neil Armfield. The film version stars the late Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush, and was released to critical acclaim in 2006.
The God of Speed takes the reader on a fictional journey through the internal life of Howard Hughes and is due for release in April 2008.
He adapted Candy for screen, with director Neil Armfield. The film version stars the late Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush, and was released to critical acclaim in 2006.
The God of Speed takes the reader on a fictional journey through the internal life of Howard Hughes and is due for release in April 2008.
Luke Davies On Writing "God Of Speed"
Around 1987 I'd written a poem, "The Lucky Women of the Lady Shore", which came out of an anecdote in Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, about an all-female convict ship bound for Botany Bay on which the crew mutinied "in the name of France" and sailed instead to Montevideo, where the convict women eventually became serving-women for wealthy Uruguayan families.
I was interested in the notion of one's destiny being so fundamentally changed by a single act. That's something that happens all the time, of course, every instant of every day; but Hughes had touched on a particularly vivid instance.
At the beginning of the poem I placed an epigraph by the French philosopher Paul Virilio that I'd jotted down in a notebook some years earlier, and that seemed apt. It read: "An aesthetic of disappearance that is probably all of history."
Jump forward six years: in 1993 my book of poetry Absolute Event Horizon (1994) was soon to be published, and my publishers were asking for more Virilio details so that they could get copyright clearance. At this point I no longer had any idea where I had found the Virilio quote that I had noted down years earlier; thus began a trawl through all his works, looking for that single line, quite a needle-in-a-haystack task. Virilio had even written a book called The Aesthetics of Disappearance, in 1991, but since my quote came from the eighties, that couldn't have been it.
I never found the line, and in the end the publishers didn't include it in the published book. (Many years later, going through a box of old stuff, I found it, in a small piece by Virilio published in an obscure and long-defunct magazine that came out of Sydney University, circa 1983, called Frogger.)
But through all the 1993 trawling for the quote I came across Virilio's writing about Howard Hughes. Virilio was interested in the speed of light, global communications, power, speed, and what he saw as Hughes' "polar inertia". All of this somehow struck a chord with me. I knew the basics about Hughes, the broad brush-stroke stuff about the eccentric billionaire. But until I read Virilio in my search for a missing quote for another book, I hadn't realized Hughes was a drug addict. It was something of a light-bulb moment. My own experience of addiction made me understand, at some profound level, that Hughes' obsessive and compulsive neuroses were not after all so strange when viewed through the prism of his addiction.
Thus began a decade of obsessive research. I immediately knew I had a novel. I wrote a couple of chapters in '94: Hughes breaking (or rather, creating) the round-the-world record in 1938; his spectacular plane crash in the streets of Beverly Hills in 1946, and an imagined piece of what went through Hughes' mind another time, as he switched off the engines and masturbated in the cockpit, hurtling towards the ocean. (Fourteen years later these embryonic pieces found their way, in different forms, into the finished novel.)
I also knew immediately that this was a "big" book. Coming out of poetry, I had a very vivid sense of being on my "L" plates as a novelist. And Candy was the L-plates book that was looming by 1994, that was demanding it be written. I consciously put Howard Hughes on hold. I told myself I'd write it after Candy. Then Isabelle the Navigator pushed into the queue; it seemed the proper book to write as the "P" plates novel.
These delays, operating largely at subconscious levels, were the best thing I could have done. God of Speed was always going to need the "full" rather than the Learner's or Provisional license, novelistically speaking; as well as, ultimately, the permit to operate heavy machinery.
I needed to write Candy and Isabelle before I could make sense of Howard. I wrote more books of poetry, and the whole Candy film process took up a few years, and all the while I learnt more and more about Hughes.
Around 2003 I experienced a clear sense of "now is the time", and I plunged deeper than ever before. I had a messy draft by 2004; then Candy shot in 2005 and I had time to get some selective feedback on just how messy "messy" was. Hughes' mind was chaotic; I had to somehow convey that, without the narrative itself being genuinely chaotic. ("Controlled chaos" became my motto.) 2006 and 2007 were fairly obsessively about reworking and redrafting, trusting my instincts about what was and wasn't working, and trusting also the relentlessly perfectionist feedback and criticism of the wonderful editor I was working with, Alice Truax in New York.
During this couple of years I learnt not to listen to that inner voice that says, "Close enough. That will do." This voice comes from exhaustion, and expresses the sincere desire to rest, or move on. But it is the voice of sabotage, creatively speaking. It's important to tune in to a voice happening at a deeper level that says, however wearily, "Miles to go before I sleep."
I always knew what the book would feel like, in an overall sense. But you have to write it to know what it should look like and be like. I don't expect that any other book I ever write will have a fourteen-year history from gestation to completion. But when I look back at the whole process now, every step taken seems one of absolute necessity: not an event out of place. "Impatience is the only sin," the Buddha said, or so I've heard.
God of Speed
Luke Davies
I will fly at last. I will unfold my wings. I will unpack my head. I will step back outside. One day I may even make love again. But one thing at a time. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.The new novel from one of Australia's most exciting literary talents is a vividly imagined and riveting portrait of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary characters - aviator, film-maker, and billionaire, Howard Hughes.
Source: Allen & Unwin
I was interested in the notion of one's destiny being so fundamentally changed by a single act. That's something that happens all the time, of course, every instant of every day; but Hughes had touched on a particularly vivid instance.
At the beginning of the poem I placed an epigraph by the French philosopher Paul Virilio that I'd jotted down in a notebook some years earlier, and that seemed apt. It read: "An aesthetic of disappearance that is probably all of history."
Jump forward six years: in 1993 my book of poetry Absolute Event Horizon (1994) was soon to be published, and my publishers were asking for more Virilio details so that they could get copyright clearance. At this point I no longer had any idea where I had found the Virilio quote that I had noted down years earlier; thus began a trawl through all his works, looking for that single line, quite a needle-in-a-haystack task. Virilio had even written a book called The Aesthetics of Disappearance, in 1991, but since my quote came from the eighties, that couldn't have been it.
I never found the line, and in the end the publishers didn't include it in the published book. (Many years later, going through a box of old stuff, I found it, in a small piece by Virilio published in an obscure and long-defunct magazine that came out of Sydney University, circa 1983, called Frogger.)
But through all the 1993 trawling for the quote I came across Virilio's writing about Howard Hughes. Virilio was interested in the speed of light, global communications, power, speed, and what he saw as Hughes' "polar inertia". All of this somehow struck a chord with me. I knew the basics about Hughes, the broad brush-stroke stuff about the eccentric billionaire. But until I read Virilio in my search for a missing quote for another book, I hadn't realized Hughes was a drug addict. It was something of a light-bulb moment. My own experience of addiction made me understand, at some profound level, that Hughes' obsessive and compulsive neuroses were not after all so strange when viewed through the prism of his addiction.
Thus began a decade of obsessive research. I immediately knew I had a novel. I wrote a couple of chapters in '94: Hughes breaking (or rather, creating) the round-the-world record in 1938; his spectacular plane crash in the streets of Beverly Hills in 1946, and an imagined piece of what went through Hughes' mind another time, as he switched off the engines and masturbated in the cockpit, hurtling towards the ocean. (Fourteen years later these embryonic pieces found their way, in different forms, into the finished novel.)
I also knew immediately that this was a "big" book. Coming out of poetry, I had a very vivid sense of being on my "L" plates as a novelist. And Candy was the L-plates book that was looming by 1994, that was demanding it be written. I consciously put Howard Hughes on hold. I told myself I'd write it after Candy. Then Isabelle the Navigator pushed into the queue; it seemed the proper book to write as the "P" plates novel.
These delays, operating largely at subconscious levels, were the best thing I could have done. God of Speed was always going to need the "full" rather than the Learner's or Provisional license, novelistically speaking; as well as, ultimately, the permit to operate heavy machinery.
I needed to write Candy and Isabelle before I could make sense of Howard. I wrote more books of poetry, and the whole Candy film process took up a few years, and all the while I learnt more and more about Hughes.
Around 2003 I experienced a clear sense of "now is the time", and I plunged deeper than ever before. I had a messy draft by 2004; then Candy shot in 2005 and I had time to get some selective feedback on just how messy "messy" was. Hughes' mind was chaotic; I had to somehow convey that, without the narrative itself being genuinely chaotic. ("Controlled chaos" became my motto.) 2006 and 2007 were fairly obsessively about reworking and redrafting, trusting my instincts about what was and wasn't working, and trusting also the relentlessly perfectionist feedback and criticism of the wonderful editor I was working with, Alice Truax in New York.
During this couple of years I learnt not to listen to that inner voice that says, "Close enough. That will do." This voice comes from exhaustion, and expresses the sincere desire to rest, or move on. But it is the voice of sabotage, creatively speaking. It's important to tune in to a voice happening at a deeper level that says, however wearily, "Miles to go before I sleep."
I always knew what the book would feel like, in an overall sense. But you have to write it to know what it should look like and be like. I don't expect that any other book I ever write will have a fourteen-year history from gestation to completion. But when I look back at the whole process now, every step taken seems one of absolute necessity: not an event out of place. "Impatience is the only sin," the Buddha said, or so I've heard.
God of Speed
Luke Davies
I will fly at last. I will unfold my wings. I will unpack my head. I will step back outside. One day I may even make love again. But one thing at a time. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.The new novel from one of Australia's most exciting literary talents is a vividly imagined and riveting portrait of one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary characters - aviator, film-maker, and billionaire, Howard Hughes.
Source: Allen & Unwin
Candyman: An Author's Journey From Page To Screen
Luke Davies tells Garry Maddox about life on the set of his first film.
TWO young lovers, played by Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, whirl on a Luna Park ride. In the early days of a relationship, they are giddy with passion and possibility. But when she shares his taste for heroin, the lovers take a darker and more confronting ride.
For the poet, novelist and now screenwriter Luke Davies, watching the new Australian film Candy has inspired extraordinary emotions.
"I love watching it," he says.
"I have moments of being distressed, in tears, traumatised but nonetheless totally gripped. And almost side by side are these moments of exquisite joy at the actual sense of achievement - 'Oh my God, I wrote this novel and it got published and it got adapted and the film got made'."
Davies has a unique relationship to the film. It is based on his brilliantly evocative and tender novel that fictionalises his experiences on heroin over the best part of a decade. The worst years were from age 22 to 28.
"But to get to things being bad by 22, you're starting to wind up at 19, 20, 21 into messy territory," he says.
Davies collaborated with the famed theatre director Neil Armfield on the screenplay, has a cameo on screen as a cheerful milkman and was on set filming a "making of" documentary that has been boiled down from 45 hours of footage to five so far. It centres on the writer's anxiety at letting go and the odd-couple relationship between writer and director.
After first showing at the Berlin Film Festival, Candy premiered in Sydney this week before its release later this month. It also stars Geoffrey Rush as a gay junkie chemist and Noni Hazlehurst and Tony Martin as the distressed parents of Cornish's character, Candy.
Speaking in a Newtown cafe - all lounge chairs, groovy decor and thumping music - Davies says he is "bemused, bewildered and thrilled that this thing has grown out of a couple of fragments of prose that I wrote 10 years ago".
The collaboration on the screenplay started in 1999. Davies often typed while Armfield talked and acted through his vision for the film.
"He was like the Queen of Sheba," says Davies. "He was so often horizontal. He's got this little place at Patonga, this little holiday shack, and he'd lie there and I was like the amanuensis."
The big challenge was expanding a first-person novel, a passionate and confronting romance that centres on the daily struggle to make a dollar, shoot up and intermittently kick the habit, into a film.
"The book is essentially a completely claustrophobic interior monologue in which, in a sense, even the title is ironic and the character Candy is a two-dimensional approximation of the narrator's desires, obsessions and his inability to see the truth at any deep level," says Davies. "The focus had to shift around from inside his eyes to the two of them."
That meant including Candy's parents, expanding a minor character when Rush joined the cast and allowing one scene to represent each stage - drying out, for example - rather than repeating events from the novel.
Davies says he learnt how amazing actors are during filming.
"We spent years fretting about really important lines of dialogue that carried information that got you from one place to another. It was, 'We've got to find a way of expressing this, there's no way we can lose that', and we lost that because Heath Ledger would do something with a twist of his face or a glance of his eye.
"That's why actors are so great and why they earn so much money. They take away the anxious necessity to find the right words."
While working on the screenplay, Davies anxiously watched every new film dealing with addiction.
"Every one that came along was like, 'Oh my God, we're never going to get our film made because no one will finance it'. Leaving Las Vegas shits me - it's just a really bad cliched prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold film. Requiem for a Dream shits me even more - it's all fireworks and no substance.
"Trainspotting I loved, but it doesn't impinge on our territory. But Jesus' Son is the film that I really like. As an ex-user, it came the closest to any film I've seen, perhaps with the exception of Panic in Needle Park, the early '70s Al Pacino one, that actually gets the relationship [between the couple] right to some extent."
Davies is convinced viewers will be knocked out by the film despite its dark and troubling content.
"I'm the kind of cinema-goer who doesn't mind distressing cinema. What I care about is good cinema. I don't care if it's light comedy, dark or whatever. The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like Breaking the Waves, or as light as it gets, like Jerry Maguire, Election or Toy Story."
Having had a taste of film-making, Davies wants to resume his teenage ambition to write and direct.
"At about 15 years old, I got my dad to give me an AFI [Australian Film Institute] membership for my birthday. I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw Aguirre: The Wrath of God at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing."
He is making a short film as a precursor to a low-budget thriller.
"Being the writer is merely control freak level two. You've got to get to control freak level one."
"The book is essentially a completely claustrophobic interior monologue in which, in a sense, even the title is ironic and the character Candy is a two-dimensional approximation of the narrator's desires, obsessions and his inability to see the truth at any deep level," says Davies. "The focus had to shift around from inside his eyes to the two of them."
That meant including Candy's parents, expanding a minor character when Rush joined the cast and allowing one scene to represent each stage - drying out, for example - rather than repeating events from the novel.
Davies says he learnt how amazing actors are during filming.
"We spent years fretting about really important lines of dialogue that carried information that got you from one place to another. It was, 'We've got to find a way of expressing this, there's no way we can lose that', and we lost that because Heath Ledger would do something with a twist of his face or a glance of his eye.
"That's why actors are so great and why they earn so much money. They take away the anxious necessity to find the right words."
While working on the screenplay, Davies anxiously watched every new film dealing with addiction.
"Every one that came along was like, 'Oh my God, we're never going to get our film made because no one will finance it'. Leaving Las Vegas shits me - it's just a really bad cliched prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold film. Requiem for a Dream shits me even more - it's all fireworks and no substance.
"Trainspotting I loved, but it doesn't impinge on our territory. But Jesus' Son is the film that I really like. As an ex-user, it came the closest to any film I've seen, perhaps with the exception of Panic in Needle Park, the early '70s Al Pacino one, that actually gets the relationship [between the couple] right to some extent."
Davies is convinced viewers will be knocked out by the film despite its dark and troubling content.
"I'm the kind of cinema-goer who doesn't mind distressing cinema. What I care about is good cinema. I don't care if it's light comedy, dark or whatever. The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like Breaking the Waves, or as light as it gets, like Jerry Maguire, Election or Toy Story."
Having had a taste of film-making, Davies wants to resume his teenage ambition to write and direct.
"At about 15 years old, I got my dad to give me an AFI [Australian Film Institute] membership for my birthday. I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw Aguirre: The Wrath of God at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing."
He is making a short film as a precursor to a low-budget thriller.
"Being the writer is merely control freak level two. You've got to get to control freak level one."
TWO young lovers, played by Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish, whirl on a Luna Park ride. In the early days of a relationship, they are giddy with passion and possibility. But when she shares his taste for heroin, the lovers take a darker and more confronting ride.
For the poet, novelist and now screenwriter Luke Davies, watching the new Australian film Candy has inspired extraordinary emotions.
"I love watching it," he says.
"I have moments of being distressed, in tears, traumatised but nonetheless totally gripped. And almost side by side are these moments of exquisite joy at the actual sense of achievement - 'Oh my God, I wrote this novel and it got published and it got adapted and the film got made'."
Davies has a unique relationship to the film. It is based on his brilliantly evocative and tender novel that fictionalises his experiences on heroin over the best part of a decade. The worst years were from age 22 to 28.
"But to get to things being bad by 22, you're starting to wind up at 19, 20, 21 into messy territory," he says.
Davies collaborated with the famed theatre director Neil Armfield on the screenplay, has a cameo on screen as a cheerful milkman and was on set filming a "making of" documentary that has been boiled down from 45 hours of footage to five so far. It centres on the writer's anxiety at letting go and the odd-couple relationship between writer and director.
After first showing at the Berlin Film Festival, Candy premiered in Sydney this week before its release later this month. It also stars Geoffrey Rush as a gay junkie chemist and Noni Hazlehurst and Tony Martin as the distressed parents of Cornish's character, Candy.
Speaking in a Newtown cafe - all lounge chairs, groovy decor and thumping music - Davies says he is "bemused, bewildered and thrilled that this thing has grown out of a couple of fragments of prose that I wrote 10 years ago".
The collaboration on the screenplay started in 1999. Davies often typed while Armfield talked and acted through his vision for the film.
"He was like the Queen of Sheba," says Davies. "He was so often horizontal. He's got this little place at Patonga, this little holiday shack, and he'd lie there and I was like the amanuensis."
The big challenge was expanding a first-person novel, a passionate and confronting romance that centres on the daily struggle to make a dollar, shoot up and intermittently kick the habit, into a film.
"The book is essentially a completely claustrophobic interior monologue in which, in a sense, even the title is ironic and the character Candy is a two-dimensional approximation of the narrator's desires, obsessions and his inability to see the truth at any deep level," says Davies. "The focus had to shift around from inside his eyes to the two of them."
That meant including Candy's parents, expanding a minor character when Rush joined the cast and allowing one scene to represent each stage - drying out, for example - rather than repeating events from the novel.
Davies says he learnt how amazing actors are during filming.
"We spent years fretting about really important lines of dialogue that carried information that got you from one place to another. It was, 'We've got to find a way of expressing this, there's no way we can lose that', and we lost that because Heath Ledger would do something with a twist of his face or a glance of his eye.
"That's why actors are so great and why they earn so much money. They take away the anxious necessity to find the right words."
While working on the screenplay, Davies anxiously watched every new film dealing with addiction.
"Every one that came along was like, 'Oh my God, we're never going to get our film made because no one will finance it'. Leaving Las Vegas shits me - it's just a really bad cliched prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold film. Requiem for a Dream shits me even more - it's all fireworks and no substance.
"Trainspotting I loved, but it doesn't impinge on our territory. But Jesus' Son is the film that I really like. As an ex-user, it came the closest to any film I've seen, perhaps with the exception of Panic in Needle Park, the early '70s Al Pacino one, that actually gets the relationship [between the couple] right to some extent."
Davies is convinced viewers will be knocked out by the film despite its dark and troubling content.
"I'm the kind of cinema-goer who doesn't mind distressing cinema. What I care about is good cinema. I don't care if it's light comedy, dark or whatever. The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like Breaking the Waves, or as light as it gets, like Jerry Maguire, Election or Toy Story."
Having had a taste of film-making, Davies wants to resume his teenage ambition to write and direct.
"At about 15 years old, I got my dad to give me an AFI [Australian Film Institute] membership for my birthday. I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw Aguirre: The Wrath of God at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing."
He is making a short film as a precursor to a low-budget thriller.
"Being the writer is merely control freak level two. You've got to get to control freak level one."
"The book is essentially a completely claustrophobic interior monologue in which, in a sense, even the title is ironic and the character Candy is a two-dimensional approximation of the narrator's desires, obsessions and his inability to see the truth at any deep level," says Davies. "The focus had to shift around from inside his eyes to the two of them."
That meant including Candy's parents, expanding a minor character when Rush joined the cast and allowing one scene to represent each stage - drying out, for example - rather than repeating events from the novel.
Davies says he learnt how amazing actors are during filming.
"We spent years fretting about really important lines of dialogue that carried information that got you from one place to another. It was, 'We've got to find a way of expressing this, there's no way we can lose that', and we lost that because Heath Ledger would do something with a twist of his face or a glance of his eye.
"That's why actors are so great and why they earn so much money. They take away the anxious necessity to find the right words."
While working on the screenplay, Davies anxiously watched every new film dealing with addiction.
"Every one that came along was like, 'Oh my God, we're never going to get our film made because no one will finance it'. Leaving Las Vegas shits me - it's just a really bad cliched prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold film. Requiem for a Dream shits me even more - it's all fireworks and no substance.
"Trainspotting I loved, but it doesn't impinge on our territory. But Jesus' Son is the film that I really like. As an ex-user, it came the closest to any film I've seen, perhaps with the exception of Panic in Needle Park, the early '70s Al Pacino one, that actually gets the relationship [between the couple] right to some extent."
Davies is convinced viewers will be knocked out by the film despite its dark and troubling content.
"I'm the kind of cinema-goer who doesn't mind distressing cinema. What I care about is good cinema. I don't care if it's light comedy, dark or whatever. The experience of watching great cinema - great art - is life enriching and spiritually uplifting no matter whether it's about as difficult as it gets, like Breaking the Waves, or as light as it gets, like Jerry Maguire, Election or Toy Story."
Having had a taste of film-making, Davies wants to resume his teenage ambition to write and direct.
"At about 15 years old, I got my dad to give me an AFI [Australian Film Institute] membership for my birthday. I was a weird kid. It wasn't until I saw Aguirre: The Wrath of God at 16 that my whole world changed. The obsession with that was equal to the obsession with writing."
He is making a short film as a precursor to a low-budget thriller.
"Being the writer is merely control freak level two. You've got to get to control freak level one."
Source: smh.com.au
Sydney Morning Herald
Random Luke Info Tidbit
Luke Davies was born in Sydney in 1962. He has worked variously as a teacher, journalist and script editor. Luke Davies' collection of poetry Absolute Event Horizon was shortlisted for the 1995 Turnbull Fox Phillips poetry prize
Magdalena Ball's Review Of "God of Speed", Luke's New Novel
God of Speed
By Luke Davies
Allen & Unwin
April 2008, Paperback, 286pp
Though Davies’ Hughes isn’t exactly a likable character, the intimacy is so striking and the intensity of the portrait so great that Hughes becomes someone entirely familiar. Not so much the grand aviator with all the superlatives of his status: richest, fastest, most inventive, but instead, a man like any other, pursued by demons and running hard to find a way to live through them.
Luke Davies is the sort of writer that skips past the surface of his subjects, moving deeper into that underlying subconscious place of pain and fear. His latest novel takes on the over-wrought subject of Howard Hughes. In his heyday, Hughes was America’s biggest 20th century icon, still believed by many to be one of the greatest geniuses that America ever had.
His impact on the world was huge and varied, touching on the movie industry and Hollywood, aviation, engineering, biomedical research, and even espionage and warfare. His life has been the subject of numerous films, books, and studies, not only for his accomplishments, but also because of the extraordinary split between his early life when he is visible everywhere, and his later life, when his is almost entirely invisible.
Taking on Hughes’ life is no small task for a novelist, especially for a writer so used to working in the micro sphere of poetry. Davies is up to it. His portrait remains something entirely new – a fiction that takes on the contours of Hughes’ life, but which goes deeper into the heart of this invented man to find everyman.
The book opens just prior to the “final decline.” It’s June 1973, where a 68-year-old Hughes prepares to fly again after 13 years of reclusive dormancy. The book stays at that point, tracking Hughes’ sleepless, drug-ridden thoughts through the night as he lies, waiting for his friend, confidante and ultimately biographer, Jack Real, to wake and accompany him on his flights.
After those flights, Hughes fractured his hip and remained bedridden from that point until his death three years later. In his thoughts — feverish and strange — he flies through his life reflecting, refracting, and moving through those moments in such an intimate, personal way that the reader almost comes to understand him.
It’s not all warm. Davies' Hughes is self-centred, moving through sex and drugs with a hunger that is as ugly as it is damaging. The name dropping is almost irritating from the intensity of his relationship with Katherine Hepburn, through Ava Gardner, Billie Dove, Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Faith Domergue, and Susan Hayward - all treated with a hungry misogyny that ended up being a kind of laundry list of famous legs, vaginas, and skin, devoid of the person within the body parts.
Hughes' hunger can’t be satisfied by these women, who he catalogues by the type of sex he could have with them, anymore than it could by the drugs he later used in the same way. Instead of Ginger, Bette, and Lana, there was Emperin, Valium, and Ritalin replacing that hot, fast hit of success, of a blockbuster completed, the roar of an engine beneath the legs, of making huge amounts of money:
You get the thing you want, but hardly. Hardly have you breathed your way into the next thought than the last thought fills you with yearning and is gone. To say nothing of all this constriction. (87)
Placed in the uncomfortable role of Hughes’ confidante, the reader is made to understand this fictional Hughes, from his earliest memories of his mother’s germ fears, to his latest ones of infirmary and addiction. There is an honesty here that is painful, horrible at times, but also, and mainly because of Davies’ poetic skill, beautiful:
Now, so many decades later, I like the flooding again, that sense of being liquid inside all this dryness, which is only apparent dryness, of course. The way Emperin glides, and flows. The way at times, after an injection, I could swear not that I am in but that I have in face become a stream, rippling over the pebbles as I flow. Or the way Valium dulls the roaring of the sky, and makes the vultures pigeons.(26)
The grand scale of Hughes’ life is all on the outside. On the inside, where the reader sits at a nightmare ridden bedside, Hughes is still that little boy, afraid of germs, and unable to breathe in, but we can still hear the outside world. Despite the small-scale scene, Davies manages to provide the big picture of Hughes’ world. We have his real neurotic memos that give us a sense of how he might be presenting to those around him.
These are disturbing instructions on how many Kleenexes should be used to open the door of his cabinet, or how to “prevent the backflow of germs” in sending flowers on the death of Bob Gross, who ran Lockheed. The way in which Davies handles the relationship between inner world and outer; between Hughes’ schemes and his obsessive-compulsive implosion without ever leaving his setting of a single night, and single bed, is masterful.
Though Davies’ Hughes isn’t exactly a likable character, the intimacy is so striking and the intensity of the portrait so great that Hughes becomes someone entirely familiar. Not so much the grand aviator with all the superlatives of his status: richest, fastest, most inventive, but instead, a man like any other, pursued by demons and running hard to find a way to live through them. He succeeds and he fails, as indeed, we all do on one level or another. This is a remarkable fusion of prose and poetry, well worth reading, regardless of whether or not the subject matter is of interest to you.
About the reviewer: Magdalena Ball is the author of Sleep Before Evening, The Art of Assessment, and Quark Soup.
Luke Davies is the sort of writer that skips past the surface of his subjects, moving deeper into that underlying subconscious place of pain and fear. His latest novel takes on the over-wrought subject of Howard Hughes. In his heyday, Hughes was America’s biggest 20th century icon, still believed by many to be one of the greatest geniuses that America ever had.
His impact on the world was huge and varied, touching on the movie industry and Hollywood, aviation, engineering, biomedical research, and even espionage and warfare. His life has been the subject of numerous films, books, and studies, not only for his accomplishments, but also because of the extraordinary split between his early life when he is visible everywhere, and his later life, when his is almost entirely invisible.
Taking on Hughes’ life is no small task for a novelist, especially for a writer so used to working in the micro sphere of poetry. Davies is up to it. His portrait remains something entirely new – a fiction that takes on the contours of Hughes’ life, but which goes deeper into the heart of this invented man to find everyman.
The book opens just prior to the “final decline.” It’s June 1973, where a 68-year-old Hughes prepares to fly again after 13 years of reclusive dormancy. The book stays at that point, tracking Hughes’ sleepless, drug-ridden thoughts through the night as he lies, waiting for his friend, confidante and ultimately biographer, Jack Real, to wake and accompany him on his flights.
After those flights, Hughes fractured his hip and remained bedridden from that point until his death three years later. In his thoughts — feverish and strange — he flies through his life reflecting, refracting, and moving through those moments in such an intimate, personal way that the reader almost comes to understand him.
It’s not all warm. Davies' Hughes is self-centred, moving through sex and drugs with a hunger that is as ugly as it is damaging. The name dropping is almost irritating from the intensity of his relationship with Katherine Hepburn, through Ava Gardner, Billie Dove, Ginger Rogers, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Faith Domergue, and Susan Hayward - all treated with a hungry misogyny that ended up being a kind of laundry list of famous legs, vaginas, and skin, devoid of the person within the body parts.
Hughes' hunger can’t be satisfied by these women, who he catalogues by the type of sex he could have with them, anymore than it could by the drugs he later used in the same way. Instead of Ginger, Bette, and Lana, there was Emperin, Valium, and Ritalin replacing that hot, fast hit of success, of a blockbuster completed, the roar of an engine beneath the legs, of making huge amounts of money:
You get the thing you want, but hardly. Hardly have you breathed your way into the next thought than the last thought fills you with yearning and is gone. To say nothing of all this constriction. (87)
Placed in the uncomfortable role of Hughes’ confidante, the reader is made to understand this fictional Hughes, from his earliest memories of his mother’s germ fears, to his latest ones of infirmary and addiction. There is an honesty here that is painful, horrible at times, but also, and mainly because of Davies’ poetic skill, beautiful:
Now, so many decades later, I like the flooding again, that sense of being liquid inside all this dryness, which is only apparent dryness, of course. The way Emperin glides, and flows. The way at times, after an injection, I could swear not that I am in but that I have in face become a stream, rippling over the pebbles as I flow. Or the way Valium dulls the roaring of the sky, and makes the vultures pigeons.(26)
The grand scale of Hughes’ life is all on the outside. On the inside, where the reader sits at a nightmare ridden bedside, Hughes is still that little boy, afraid of germs, and unable to breathe in, but we can still hear the outside world. Despite the small-scale scene, Davies manages to provide the big picture of Hughes’ world. We have his real neurotic memos that give us a sense of how he might be presenting to those around him.
These are disturbing instructions on how many Kleenexes should be used to open the door of his cabinet, or how to “prevent the backflow of germs” in sending flowers on the death of Bob Gross, who ran Lockheed. The way in which Davies handles the relationship between inner world and outer; between Hughes’ schemes and his obsessive-compulsive implosion without ever leaving his setting of a single night, and single bed, is masterful.
Though Davies’ Hughes isn’t exactly a likable character, the intimacy is so striking and the intensity of the portrait so great that Hughes becomes someone entirely familiar. Not so much the grand aviator with all the superlatives of his status: richest, fastest, most inventive, but instead, a man like any other, pursued by demons and running hard to find a way to live through them. He succeeds and he fails, as indeed, we all do on one level or another. This is a remarkable fusion of prose and poetry, well worth reading, regardless of whether or not the subject matter is of interest to you.
About the reviewer: Magdalena Ball is the author of Sleep Before Evening, The Art of Assessment, and Quark Soup.
Luke Davies
Luke Davies
(Australia, 1962)
Luke Davies is a critically acclaimed poet, novelist, and screenplay writer, with something of a popular groundswell of readers and fans uncommon in Australian poetry. His second volume, Absolute Event Horizon, was shortlisted for the National Book Council Poetry Prize, while Running With Light won the 2000 Judith Wright Poetry Prize at the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. Davies’ most recent poetry collection, Totem, won the 2005 South Australian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Grace Leven Poetry Prize 2004, the Age’s Poetry Book of the Year Award and the overall Age Book of the Year Award, firmly establishing him as one contemporary Australian poetry’s most acclaimed new voices. In 2004 Davies was also awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry. Along with his poetry, Davies has published two novels, the bestselling novel Candy and Isabelle the Navigator, while a third novel titled The Book of Howard H is forthcoming through Allen & Unwin in 2007. Davies’ play Stag was performed as part of the 2006 Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2 Loud Program, and along with co-writing the screenplay for Candy with Neil Armfield, Davies has written two other screenplays, Division 7 and Merlo, as well as making his first forays in front of and behind the camera with a one line role as a milkman in Armfield’s film version of Candy and as director of a documentary titled The Diary of a Milkman.
Davies is an unusual phenomenon in Australian poetry: a popular and commercially successful writer whose work has moved far beyond the small but passionate readership of Australian poetry. Some part of this success is no doubt due to his work as a novelist. Published in 1997, his first novel Candy was shortlisted for the 1998 NSW Premier’s Awards and was a commercial success. It has since been translated into various languages and published in France, Spain, Germany, Israel, Greece, the UK and US. More recently, Davies adapted Candy into a screenplay with the acclaimed director Neil Armfield, winning the 2006 AWGIE for Best Adapted Screenplay. Premiering at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2006, and starring Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush, this latest departure for Davies will no doubt bring new readers to his novels and poetry alike.
Since his first little chapbook of poetry, Four Plots for Magnets, was published in 1982, Davies has maintained and developed an engaging poetic voice consistent for its clarity, humour and ability to put into play popular culture, an abiding interest in cosmology, quantum mechanics and chaos theory, and personal experiences of addiction, love and the recognition of the world’s infinite playfulness and variation. By recognition I mean to suggest that Davies’ poetry is most often a conscious return to the moment, a re-cognition or re-visioning of the subject’s experience through the prism and near infinite trajectories and vectors the convergence of language, memory, being and experience afford.
Some part postmodern Troubadour with a penchant for entropy and the odd neutrino, Davies might yet be seen as a religious poet. There are resonances in his work with Christian mystics such as Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius, as well as Blake and Hopkins. For that though, drawing a line of dependence and influence, or making a claim for the religious, would be reductive of a poet whose sensibilities and concerns hinge upon a visceral — at times lugubrious, at times concupiscent — evocation of the physicality of experience. Every line is a curve, every reference point a string, and more often than not for Davies, the religious light is a refraction of the more immediate and profane light of this world set to its infinite confines:
There is more blue up here. This is good. There is
more light careening in the air. The haloes are in form.
Light floods the cerebral cortex all day long; the
toughest wildest physicists acknowledge this, agree with this.
And certainly the angels know and watch the light flood into
certain minds. This is something they do when they tire
of aetherial tag and aerial dogfights and general angel
larrikinism. They take their cortex watching seriously.
Davies also takes his cortex watching seriously. He shares the same larrikin spirit of the angels, a generosity of spirit that is in some strange way ruthless for its generosity, for its ability not to shy away from a lust for life (pace Richard Dawkins as much as Iggy Pop). There is an irrepresible sense of mischief, a playfulness engendered by a very conscious realization of the contingencies of knowing experience or gainsaying its truths. A knowledge that experience is multiple, if not infinite, subject as it is to interpretation and re-interpretation, the faults of memory and the difficulties of expression, all of which finally resting somewhere near the absences of godhead or a privileged referent, meaning or truth. Davies’ poetry embraces this unknowing or kenosis, the dark matter of experience or being, without losing touch with the contemporary, the popular or the readable. As in ‘Poetry and Flowers’ the most complex idea, such as the moment of knowing and naming, can be simply stated, the humour, allusion and ambiguities left open and clear to the reader’s own resources:
Lark and rose go mad, even with winter
coming on, the garden beneath the verandah blooms,
the park is dense with sun and soccer balls.
By lark I mean generic bird, God knows
the names for all these things with wings. Ditto
the rose: the garden drooling colour and bloom.
For this, mixing as it does with Davies’ dominating themes of love and the cosmos, his poetry offers an endlessly engaging depth of thought enlightened by an agile spirit. His work tends to draw quantum physics and chaos theory through peripatetic imaginings and love-struck songs towards a mysticism not far removed from the sort of a/theology Mark C. Taylor describes in Erring, so that he is first and foremost a poet of the here and now, of the infinite moment.
The title poem of his most recent collection Totem, shows Davies at his most profuse in all of this, and in one of the most successful long Australian poems of the last thirty years, Davies can be seen to have moved his work centre stage of the contemporary Australian poetry. In Totem, Davies has opened up a path for Australian poetry in much the way that Beaver’s Letters to Live Poets, Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, or Kinsella’s Syzygy showed poets there were other ways to plunder a muse. It is also, more simply, one of the most triumphant imaginings of the ever-so physical metaphysics of love and desire, approaching the sort of translucent and masterful evocation of love’s transcendence found in Malouf’s The Crab Feast.
There is a street-smart guilelessness to Davies’ work that is fascinating, an openness that for its acute playfulness is not simple-minded belly-fluff sniffing lyricism, but a penetrative engagement with the foibles of self and language, deception, self-deception and the chimera of truths, that presses beyond simple constructs of self or its experience. Davies’ playfulness, ranges through any number of possible referents from the ‘Song of Songs’ to James Gleick, from Rumi to Patti Smith, or Stevens back to Lucretius and off again through popular culture to popular science, from literary theory to a long and passionate reading in poetry. Davies’ poetry does not seek the illusory protection of irony’s detachment of self from subject, but rather does seek to express personal closely felt experience. His irony is most finely wrought through his capriciousness, in his ability to mix and shift registers, some part whimsy, some part wisdom, and play the profound off the profane to immediate effect, to riddle rhetoric with the force of the living, experiencing human voice. Take for example the swift discourse of Totem’s opening lines:
In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs,
in the green that would balance on the wide green world,
air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly
in the blue lilac weather, she had written a letter:
You came into my life really fast and I liked it.
Beguiling for its unabashed rush of rhetorical lushness as much as the last line’s flat, almost rock-lyric, directness. Nor, though aware of the various contesting language theories and poetics of contemporary literature, and at times drawing from or parodying them, does Davies ever lose sight, or allow language to obscure, the central conundrum of experience and expression, of the physical impact and wonder of being in the world on the thinking and sometimes purely instinctual self. Davies’ poetry is unabashed without a blithering gush. It is well-considered without being sterilized or over-cooked. Finely balanced, there is an apparent care for the reader, for the need of poetry to communicate beyond the self, along with a provocative assertion of the speaking self not limited or embarrassed by the reader’s presence, by the reader’s approach to the most intimate and most wholly felt.
One of Davies’ central strengths is that he is not afraid to allow his poetry to be sentimental, to express emotion richly and cogently and unguardedly. While there is a burden of sorrow to much of Davies’ early work, this sorrow rises into a robust and rhapsodic exhortation of the abundance and vertiginous beauty of being not simply in the world but in relation to it and to others. It is perhaps for this that Davies is remarkable among his contemporaries, with his irrepressible, near irrevocable burgeoning of desire, lust and love that leaves a large part of the rest of the Australian poetic landscape gray and doleful in the least. Davies’ poetry offers a coherent evocation of the evolution of primal fears — of death, loss and loneliness, of the meaninglessness of matter and existence, of the recurrent needs that can save or destroy us — into something as simple and infinitely complex as each moment shared and given, each moment recounted and experienced in its quantum of possibilities. Never abandoning ‘the awkwardness/ of being alive, the unshakeable awareness/ of self as intrusion, and the ridiculousness/ of consciousness’ (Nature poem), Davies’ genius is to find through this doubt and uncertainty a transforming spirit, a passion, that senses and celebrates its part in a greater knowing and unknowing. His poetry dances in a haphazard and joyful place in the convergence of the worlds and bodies, forms and ideas, places and displacements that the human embodies and inhabits. It is a poetry that remains attentive to a greater symmetry, a cosmology, ineffable but for the saving and failing graces of the body, the spirit and of love:
A shining isomorphousness rings out —
the deep peal of bells and how the heart would hold the day.
We have tumbled through the years to meet it. You say laughing
Taste it Taste it. Static crackles in your hair, lightning
in your breast. Stop we will hold each other here.
I am listening, I am listening.
Michael Brennan
Australia – Poetry International Web
(Australia, 1962)
Luke Davies is a critically acclaimed poet, novelist, and screenplay writer, with something of a popular groundswell of readers and fans uncommon in Australian poetry. His second volume, Absolute Event Horizon, was shortlisted for the National Book Council Poetry Prize, while Running With Light won the 2000 Judith Wright Poetry Prize at the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. Davies’ most recent poetry collection, Totem, won the 2005 South Australian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Grace Leven Poetry Prize 2004, the Age’s Poetry Book of the Year Award and the overall Age Book of the Year Award, firmly establishing him as one contemporary Australian poetry’s most acclaimed new voices. In 2004 Davies was also awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry. Along with his poetry, Davies has published two novels, the bestselling novel Candy and Isabelle the Navigator, while a third novel titled The Book of Howard H is forthcoming through Allen & Unwin in 2007. Davies’ play Stag was performed as part of the 2006 Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 2 Loud Program, and along with co-writing the screenplay for Candy with Neil Armfield, Davies has written two other screenplays, Division 7 and Merlo, as well as making his first forays in front of and behind the camera with a one line role as a milkman in Armfield’s film version of Candy and as director of a documentary titled The Diary of a Milkman.
Davies is an unusual phenomenon in Australian poetry: a popular and commercially successful writer whose work has moved far beyond the small but passionate readership of Australian poetry. Some part of this success is no doubt due to his work as a novelist. Published in 1997, his first novel Candy was shortlisted for the 1998 NSW Premier’s Awards and was a commercial success. It has since been translated into various languages and published in France, Spain, Germany, Israel, Greece, the UK and US. More recently, Davies adapted Candy into a screenplay with the acclaimed director Neil Armfield, winning the 2006 AWGIE for Best Adapted Screenplay. Premiering at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2006, and starring Heath Ledger, Abbie Cornish and Geoffrey Rush, this latest departure for Davies will no doubt bring new readers to his novels and poetry alike.
Since his first little chapbook of poetry, Four Plots for Magnets, was published in 1982, Davies has maintained and developed an engaging poetic voice consistent for its clarity, humour and ability to put into play popular culture, an abiding interest in cosmology, quantum mechanics and chaos theory, and personal experiences of addiction, love and the recognition of the world’s infinite playfulness and variation. By recognition I mean to suggest that Davies’ poetry is most often a conscious return to the moment, a re-cognition or re-visioning of the subject’s experience through the prism and near infinite trajectories and vectors the convergence of language, memory, being and experience afford.
Some part postmodern Troubadour with a penchant for entropy and the odd neutrino, Davies might yet be seen as a religious poet. There are resonances in his work with Christian mystics such as Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius, as well as Blake and Hopkins. For that though, drawing a line of dependence and influence, or making a claim for the religious, would be reductive of a poet whose sensibilities and concerns hinge upon a visceral — at times lugubrious, at times concupiscent — evocation of the physicality of experience. Every line is a curve, every reference point a string, and more often than not for Davies, the religious light is a refraction of the more immediate and profane light of this world set to its infinite confines:
There is more blue up here. This is good. There is
more light careening in the air. The haloes are in form.
Light floods the cerebral cortex all day long; the
toughest wildest physicists acknowledge this, agree with this.
And certainly the angels know and watch the light flood into
certain minds. This is something they do when they tire
of aetherial tag and aerial dogfights and general angel
larrikinism. They take their cortex watching seriously.
Davies also takes his cortex watching seriously. He shares the same larrikin spirit of the angels, a generosity of spirit that is in some strange way ruthless for its generosity, for its ability not to shy away from a lust for life (pace Richard Dawkins as much as Iggy Pop). There is an irrepresible sense of mischief, a playfulness engendered by a very conscious realization of the contingencies of knowing experience or gainsaying its truths. A knowledge that experience is multiple, if not infinite, subject as it is to interpretation and re-interpretation, the faults of memory and the difficulties of expression, all of which finally resting somewhere near the absences of godhead or a privileged referent, meaning or truth. Davies’ poetry embraces this unknowing or kenosis, the dark matter of experience or being, without losing touch with the contemporary, the popular or the readable. As in ‘Poetry and Flowers’ the most complex idea, such as the moment of knowing and naming, can be simply stated, the humour, allusion and ambiguities left open and clear to the reader’s own resources:
Lark and rose go mad, even with winter
coming on, the garden beneath the verandah blooms,
the park is dense with sun and soccer balls.
By lark I mean generic bird, God knows
the names for all these things with wings. Ditto
the rose: the garden drooling colour and bloom.
For this, mixing as it does with Davies’ dominating themes of love and the cosmos, his poetry offers an endlessly engaging depth of thought enlightened by an agile spirit. His work tends to draw quantum physics and chaos theory through peripatetic imaginings and love-struck songs towards a mysticism not far removed from the sort of a/theology Mark C. Taylor describes in Erring, so that he is first and foremost a poet of the here and now, of the infinite moment.
The title poem of his most recent collection Totem, shows Davies at his most profuse in all of this, and in one of the most successful long Australian poems of the last thirty years, Davies can be seen to have moved his work centre stage of the contemporary Australian poetry. In Totem, Davies has opened up a path for Australian poetry in much the way that Beaver’s Letters to Live Poets, Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, or Kinsella’s Syzygy showed poets there were other ways to plunder a muse. It is also, more simply, one of the most triumphant imaginings of the ever-so physical metaphysics of love and desire, approaching the sort of translucent and masterful evocation of love’s transcendence found in Malouf’s The Crab Feast.
There is a street-smart guilelessness to Davies’ work that is fascinating, an openness that for its acute playfulness is not simple-minded belly-fluff sniffing lyricism, but a penetrative engagement with the foibles of self and language, deception, self-deception and the chimera of truths, that presses beyond simple constructs of self or its experience. Davies’ playfulness, ranges through any number of possible referents from the ‘Song of Songs’ to James Gleick, from Rumi to Patti Smith, or Stevens back to Lucretius and off again through popular culture to popular science, from literary theory to a long and passionate reading in poetry. Davies’ poetry does not seek the illusory protection of irony’s detachment of self from subject, but rather does seek to express personal closely felt experience. His irony is most finely wrought through his capriciousness, in his ability to mix and shift registers, some part whimsy, some part wisdom, and play the profound off the profane to immediate effect, to riddle rhetoric with the force of the living, experiencing human voice. Take for example the swift discourse of Totem’s opening lines:
In the yellow time of pollen, in the blue time of lilacs,
in the green that would balance on the wide green world,
air filled with flux, world-in-a-belly
in the blue lilac weather, she had written a letter:
You came into my life really fast and I liked it.
Beguiling for its unabashed rush of rhetorical lushness as much as the last line’s flat, almost rock-lyric, directness. Nor, though aware of the various contesting language theories and poetics of contemporary literature, and at times drawing from or parodying them, does Davies ever lose sight, or allow language to obscure, the central conundrum of experience and expression, of the physical impact and wonder of being in the world on the thinking and sometimes purely instinctual self. Davies’ poetry is unabashed without a blithering gush. It is well-considered without being sterilized or over-cooked. Finely balanced, there is an apparent care for the reader, for the need of poetry to communicate beyond the self, along with a provocative assertion of the speaking self not limited or embarrassed by the reader’s presence, by the reader’s approach to the most intimate and most wholly felt.
One of Davies’ central strengths is that he is not afraid to allow his poetry to be sentimental, to express emotion richly and cogently and unguardedly. While there is a burden of sorrow to much of Davies’ early work, this sorrow rises into a robust and rhapsodic exhortation of the abundance and vertiginous beauty of being not simply in the world but in relation to it and to others. It is perhaps for this that Davies is remarkable among his contemporaries, with his irrepressible, near irrevocable burgeoning of desire, lust and love that leaves a large part of the rest of the Australian poetic landscape gray and doleful in the least. Davies’ poetry offers a coherent evocation of the evolution of primal fears — of death, loss and loneliness, of the meaninglessness of matter and existence, of the recurrent needs that can save or destroy us — into something as simple and infinitely complex as each moment shared and given, each moment recounted and experienced in its quantum of possibilities. Never abandoning ‘the awkwardness/ of being alive, the unshakeable awareness/ of self as intrusion, and the ridiculousness/ of consciousness’ (Nature poem), Davies’ genius is to find through this doubt and uncertainty a transforming spirit, a passion, that senses and celebrates its part in a greater knowing and unknowing. His poetry dances in a haphazard and joyful place in the convergence of the worlds and bodies, forms and ideas, places and displacements that the human embodies and inhabits. It is a poetry that remains attentive to a greater symmetry, a cosmology, ineffable but for the saving and failing graces of the body, the spirit and of love:
A shining isomorphousness rings out —
the deep peal of bells and how the heart would hold the day.
We have tumbled through the years to meet it. You say laughing
Taste it Taste it. Static crackles in your hair, lightning
in your breast. Stop we will hold each other here.
I am listening, I am listening.
Michael Brennan
Australia – Poetry International Web
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