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.

Admin

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.”

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

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

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.