LE TEMPS PERDU Halfway up the Mountain. By Dorothy Hewett, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001. Reviewed by Marilla North. In Dorothy Hewett's poetic quest for honesty and truth in this 'la recherche du temps perdu' she has distilled 'candid speech at last' in spite of, or perhaps because of the pain that fills her days. As she once prophesied, in her old age she has mastered her art and 'All this babble' turned 'to speech at last': 'Hard, fine and passionate, can language glow / Like ice and fire, both luminous and cool/ A benediction falling from the mouth.' ('Let Candid Speech At Last' in Rapunzel in Suburbia 1975.) When two or three months ago Halfway up the Mountain arrived on my doorstep on the Queensland Gold Coast early one morning I confess that I at once devoured it. It soothed my home- sickness for the Blue Mountains. Bibliophile Kathy Herbert (from Leura's village bookshop) sent me this lifeline back into the place that has been my home for the past ten years. Dorothy Hewett benefits too from Herbert's thoughtful book provisioning that brings to the writer's doorstep a steady stream of literature. Inside Hewett's convict-hewn, sandstone Cobb & Co fastness in Faulconbridge, halfway up to Mount Victoria, the poet is now most of the time, and probably for the rest of her life, essentially 'housebound under the mountains/ with my books and my writing to sustain me' ('Writing Poems in the Blue Mountains') Arthritis has crippled Dorothy Hewett, crumbling her bone-joints into powder. She cannot walk independently now. One arm has betrayed her but she writes with the other. She is in constant pain. Her mind and will transcend the suffering, and she is writing furiously with a diamond-sharp and merciless poignancy that doesn't let herself or the others who have shared her life off the hook. The poems rack me again as I re-read them. I am an old woman now love and sex are impossible for me nobody looks at me any more nobody dreams lustful dreams of me. I remember that moment when she told me that a mutual friend, a painter who's now quite rich and famous, doesn't call on her in passing any more because, she thinks, her physical state embarrasses him. And I see Dorothy lying on her tapestried chaise-longue in the back extension to the Faulconbridge house - that big, big, wooden-panelled, bookshelf-lined, stained-glass windowed cathedral-ceilinged room which is her outer world now, with its French doors and windows opening out on to the enclosed garden that her husband, balladist and writer Merv Lilley, planted. There the roses and daffodils and citrus-blossoms and the other exotics spill over in Spring-time in sweet-smelling disarray; the birds come for the native callistemon. Dorothy watches them with a poet's pleasure. That backwing of the house also opens onto a wooden verandah pathway which leads round to Merv's 'shed', his photographic developing outhouse, also added on to the ramshackle old colonial staging-post which, for over a decade since they moved there, they have been adding on to and fixing-up and moulding around their lives and collection of paintings and inherited bits and pieces of furniture and things. Or have they enfolded their pasts into this house? No matter, it is inseparable from them now. Place! Place! Place! Dorothy Hewett once said that it was in reading David Malouf's 12 Edmondstone Street that she realised how vital the 'first' house was to childhood memory and to self-re-construction, helping her know where to begin Wild Card: An Autobiography 1923-1958, the first half of her life-story: 'The first house sits in the hollow of the heart.' Every piece of Dorothy Hewett's writing is autobiographical, whether it is presented as a wish fulfilment fantasy or as recorded after-the-fact. And her particular voice, its timbre, the idiosyncratic resonances of her raspy tones, the pauses - all her singularity of being echoes though every poem in this new collection. I can 'see' from experience of them most of the places in the first of the three parts of this collection - 'From the Dark Cottage' - and also those from the third part - 'Salt Harbour'. The places in the second part, 'The Sunlit Plains', which are from Hewett's childhood and young adulthood in the 1920s, '30s and early '40s in Western Australia, all seem to come to me via memories of the stage sets and back-scrim projections in the performances of her plays and from the other windows into her soul and visual memory - her earlier poetry collections, especially Alice in Wormland, Rapunzel in Suburbia and Windmill Country. The experiences that form 'From the Dark Cottage' emanate from Hewett's home in Faulconbridge, whether they are in time present or time past, for it is the force of Hewett's inner life which resonates though her days and nights of poetry. The past is always still alive in her, ready to make contact with the outer world. In 'The Call' her father's 'cooee' to his daughters echoes over the seventy years since her childhood, 'calling us home'; but she hears it as if it is coming from the railway cutting at the bottom of the Faulconbridge back yard: an intimation of mortality. And this collection of poems is, above all, elegiac. As are Merv Lilley's photographs on the front cover and prefacing each of its three parts. His gallery-view of the front verandah of the 'Dark Cottage' on the highway at Faulconbridge is devoid of people, showing only empty cane chairs on a bare concrete floor; the empty spaces are shot through with long, low sun beams penetrating the ferns and wisteria vines and, beyond them, the branches of the ancient magnolia tree. It strikes me as I ponder Merv's photograph that this is probably Dorothy's 'last' house; the place of Self de-construction; the house she will not pack up and move from into another. You do make that decision, I think. And so she has given this Faulconbridge house the very Alice-like name of 'None-go-by' from a childhood autograph-book's whimsical inscription: 'Let none go by, while this house lives/ Who needs what this house has to give.' And it is a very welcome-inn kind of house. The poetry collection's epigraph she chose from the Spanish poet, Lorca: Once in a while I am seized by a strange happiness I have never felt before. The very sad happiness of being a poet and nothing matters to me not even death. But I think this choice was the theatrical Hewett's braggadocio mask for, on the contrary, she always invests her inner and outer spaces with a great deal of 'mattering', using wonderful, wild words to keep her past alive inside her present, holding up its fragments to refract infinite meaning, as – the turbulent spring outside equates with something within the earth is beginning to stir just as the mind begins to shuffle up out of the dark the seed from that darkness springs - resonating, fiercely shoring her up against that inevitable moment when the 'covenant' is lost in that split-second in which not-being begins. There's a price to be paid for Hewett's poetic ability to shore up the past shards of the emotional life - to keep old love eternally alive within the present - a price which comes with that old love's very ability to once (and still now) cause deep pain: and especially one particular old, deep love's ability to cause Hewett inconsolable pain: even decades later, in fact whenever she sees him again. In 'After the Festival' (presumably the last Adelaide Festival, when her opening address was reported nationally), Hewett returns to the Mountains having seen him again, over there. She sits upon her sofa, craving to be no longer an invalid - not to have to be carried - but to be fit again, free and able to 'run back to the city' and meet him in their old Bohemian haunts. Her poem pitilessly examines her frustration at her physical immobility which magnifies the pain at experienced her powerlessness in her inability to reclaim him, or even regain any of the intimacy of their lost love. She writes poetry about him as he drives back east with his wife. Her resolve on the page that night rings hollow: I wont let the past hurt me any more        soon you will be gone for another year out into a night full of trees and possums rattling on the roof. In her inner revisitings of her old places on 'The Sunlit Plains' of Western Australia in the second part of this collection, Hewett overlays key moments of primal memory - ones already written about years earlier, and which the reader recalls or recognises from former poems and plays - with future events which she now seeds back within them. In 'The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies O' the fortune-teller - who did once tell her she'd live a long life and have many children - becomes more menacing in her retrospective omissions: what she didn't tell Hewett also lay in store for her: that she would 'run away with a madman'; that her child would die; that she'd get breast cancer and that she'd break her heart. This catalogue of prophetic omissions leaves the reader in no doubt that, on the emotional Richter-scale of Hewett' s inner life, the lost love of 'him' who'd been at the Adelaide Festival was a significant matter of life-and-death. I'm not sure why 'The Death of Don McLeod' isn't set in its geographical place in this middle part amongst the other echoes of the 'sunlit plains'. After all it ricochets back to her famous ballad celebrating the 1946 Western Australian Aboriginal stockworkers' strike, 'Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod' (in Windmill Country 1968). But, by this stage in Hewett's orchestrating of her randomly composed late-night poetry into the structure of a book, I suspect that TIME had probably replaced the original organising principle. And the poems of the third part have a lot to do with time running out on the tide, 'engulfed by the sea'. In 'Salt Harbour', Hewett's poems (by and large) return to the matter of her life during the decades she lived in inner-city Sydney. Merv Lilley's photograph of three fishermen on a quayside wharf with the Harbour Bridge out of focus in the left of the frame counterpoints his words: 'Death gives life its meaningless shape', that Hewett chooses for the epigraph to this section. She revisits the old haunts: the Oxford Street bars that she used to frequent with her nimble younger poet-lover (yes, the one from the Festival); the streets of Darlinghurst and the Cross; and her and Merv's mad marvellous old terrace house in Bourke Street set amidst the brothels and the squats, where Merv's photography developing lab was in the dunny out the back. In Bourke Street, Dorothy was both Rapunzel and Alice. The now forever lost ex-lover poet is but one of the many bards she elegises/eulogises in' Salt Harbour' (the repository of tears?): the Scottish oral poets of 'Words in Winter' (unlike them she must write the words down which come to her in the middle of the night); John Keats and Sylvia Plath who collide in a poetic conceit; Frank O'Hara who 'plays poet to the painters' in gay bars in New York; and 'For Ezra' (Pound) in which she celebrates the moment of poetic composition, even if it is on 'a roll of toilet paper'. There are a lot of poems for Dead Poets in 'Salt Harbour', including the local boys. In 'The Ghost of John Forbes' there's Forbes himself, and Robert Harris and of course Martin Johnson; Hewett incorporates Johnson's legendary reply to the question posed on his final admission to Casualty: "What day is it?" "Bloomsday" he said & died of alcoholism. They all come together in 'Homage to Dead Poets', and the place of their mystical union - 'lively as crickets' - is the backyard in Faulconbridge, with the great western railway line from Sydney to Perth running past the bottom of the garden. Almost all Hewett's heroes are male dead poets: or so it's just struck me. Women poets are victims - like Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop and Dorothy Hewett. There are predatory females, but they are academics and critics and sit on platforms 'discussing/ manner and style'. Her sharp address 'To the Literary Ladies' formulates them as embodiments of middle class femininity with 'detachable Peter Pan collars' and fringes and malice in their 'sober mien': Jane Austens with poison in their pens. Hewett's has always been a literary world in which she has been the Heroine on centre-stage. Now that she can no longer command the Hero-lovers she wonders: 'What will happen..?' in a Kafka-esque poem which heartlessly pushes her crippled state to its extremity ... as a 'broken-backed insect' after a critical fall. And finally, when the only mobility she imagines remaining is 'the movement of the eye dancing', then, she asks: will she receive an apotheosis of love in death? and be lifted up 'in his arms rejoicing?' There are very few allusions to Hewett's twenty odd years as a member of the Australian Communist Party in this collection. Save for the regrets. 'The Silent Years' (a revision of 'The Period of Silence' first published in Overland 153, Summer 1998) recaps and elegises the eight years in which she didn't/couldn't write in the 1950s, when 'nothing could be put into words'. At least nothing that would please the Party. The all-powerful censorious authorities in the court of Marx House resound with an Alice-in-Wonderland style verdict: If the writing is skilled so much the worse the sentence is doubled. But Hewett now hints at other traces of her voice in this era: my diaries& my fragments lie in the drawer by my bed telling everything. I wonder whether the true cause of her silence in those years was the trauma of living with madness, with violence real and symbolic: with Les Flood. I have had such a period in my own life and I know the paralysis of that pressure of another's mental illness on one's own psyche. At least the overwhelming fear and dread now has a name. The only other really 'political' poem in the collection is 'To Russia With Love', which gives her readers another take on Hewett's June 1965 stay at Moscow's Hotel Moskva when on a writers' junket - a 'Red gravy train' visit to Russia - after an International Writers' Peace Conference in East Germany. (These events are also versified in 'The hidden journey: II', in Windmill Country 1968.) Frank Hardy and Meanjin's Clem Christesen were among the witnesses to those weeks in Russia during the celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the Victory over Fascism. An 'incident' in this recent poem (published first in Overland 153, Summer 1998) is of peculiar significance to me as biographer of Dymphna Cusack. Hewett remembers a distraught Cusack 'raging' down the marble staircase of the classy Moskva Hotel, complaining: 'They are packing us off to a Writers' retreat/ without running water.' It was to Peredelkino that Cusack was bound, to the writers' village half an hour by road west of Moscow, set amongst pine forests, fields of wildflowers and quiet lakes, where Pasternak's is amongst the many prestigious writers' dachas. Cusack had just begun a massive bout of her relapsing/remitting form of multiple sclerosis, and was certainly not her usual, sanguine self. But it remains as a pivotal moment in Dorothy Hewett's memory of post-Stalinist Russia. 'Make them pay,' she remembers Cusack hissing. 'We have given our lives for them.' We have spoken of these days in June 1965. There is shifting ground. What Hewett's poem does is elegise the losses of the proletariat under Stalin, the losses of the vast underclass of Russian peasants for whom the Revolution had been the only true hope. And she accuses both the (visiting and local) Writers and the 'apparatchiks' of accumulating bureaucratic power and wantonly indulgent lifestyles at the expense of the masses: 'you betrayed the Revolution' she insists. Her portrayal of the incident is perhaps a displacement of her own grief and anger at the decades of commitment which she had given to the Australian Communist Party. Yet Hewett's raging also reveals the essential romantic revolutionary in her soul. A poem from the first part of this collection, 'An Invitation from Rendra', confirms this. The invitation from the revolutionary Indonesian poet and playwright to join him arrives when she is too old to take part 'in another abortive revolution'. Wistfully she laments: 'Everything has happened too late.' The last poem in 'Salt Harbour' is titled 'Black Harbour' - it is Sydney Harbour as a port on the River Lethe bound for Hades and oblivion - and the poet stands at a place (the Opera House?) where she contemplates the tortured ends of the lives of 'great composers' in the arts: the musicians, blind Bach, deaf Beethoven, syphilis racked Schubert and Sibelius; the 'mad' poets, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop; and the ballet dancer Markova famed for her Dying Swan solo on points. Hewett can see the sea of time engulfing her own 'notes' and, as an intimation of mortality, the owl crops up on the last leaf of the collection 'in the ruins of Athena's temple/ hooting a warning'. But Dorothy Hewett has got a lot left to say, and will say it, for after all - as her doctor recently told her - she's going to live for a long and painful old age. "Don't let him in." "But I would rather live in hell"        she said "& forfeit heaven to have been with him." ('The Infernal Grove' from Alice In Wormland 1987) Marilla North is a Blue Mountains writer who is residing in the sun drenched state whilst completing her Dymphna Cusack biography and undertaking a PhD at the University of Queensland. Yarn Spinners: A Story in Letters has just been published by the University of Queensland Press.