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