Letter to Pessoa. By Michelle Cahill. Giramondo. pp 247. $24.95
For most followers of Australian poetry there is probably a feeling of unease when a poet they've read with interest and/or approval moves to prose fiction. Sometimes, as in the case of the novelist Roger McDonald, they are lost to poetry forever. Others, such as Alan Gould or David Malouf, successfully develop parallel careers.
Michelle Cahill, author of four poetry collections so far, has now produced a sizeable short story collection which ranges extraordinarily in geography and considerably in manner. Although the title story is not the best one it is a clue to the book's protean use of narrators and protagonists. In an end-note Cahill lists eight of them and says that they "can be read as other selves, heteronyms in the Pessoan sense".
This, of course, refers to the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa (1883-1935), who famously wrote two thirds of his work under at least 44 "heteronyms" with three of them predominating. Michelle Cahill's life story so far has equipped her well for such an approach. Born in Kenya, of Goan/Anglo-Indian ancestry, she went to primary school in London before emigrating to Australia with her family in her teens. Later, she graduated in Medicine and Arts and, like many Australian writers, has also travelled widely.
All this has given Cahill the confidence to set her stories in widely different locations and cultural contexts. As one of her narrators says in the last lines of the last story: "If you are passing through me for the first time please enjoy my characters, disguises, sabotages and micro-prose. I offer you my candles and my bowl. It is here that I whittled away at my perspectives amid the mayhem and stupor of the world." ("A Miko Coda")
Several of the stories seem to square with what is publicly known of Cahill's life story. One story ("Letter to Tadeusz Rósewicz") even mentions her daughter, Tegan, and thus can perhaps be taken as memoir or travelogue rather than fiction. While these may occasionally be dangerous games to play, there is no doubt about the cumulative impact of Cahill's shape-shifting. We are in the hands of a clever and empathetic writer who can transport the reader at will from one milieu to another.
While titles such as "Letter to Virginia Woolf", "Letter to John Coetzee" and "Borges and I" may suggest a preference for literary game-playing over evocation or commentary, it's nearly always the case that Cahill has some tangential moral to make (downsides of Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance, in "The Sadhu" and "Finding the Buddha").
Other stories can be disconcerting in different ways. "Chasing Nabokov", for instance, re-locates Nabokov and his wife, Véra, in space and time to contemporary Sydney, and is narrated by a somewhat incautious and self-indulgent female narrator. "The Nabokovs lived in the art-deco block of flats next door to my mother's house in Willoughby". Half a page on our narrator is revealing that, "After the barbeque he called me on the pretext of the essay. I dropped a flirtatious clue and, with the prerequisite knowledge that Mum was at work, he was over in a flash". I'm not sure that the real-life Nabokov was ever "over in a flash" but our narrator is disturbingly convincing about the novelist's Antipodean namesake.
One of the most memorable of the stories is "Borges and I". Though it may be hubristic of Cahill to steal the title of one of Borges' best creations, the story is a light-hearted and vertiginously successful mélange of some of the Argentinian's most famous stories, all set in a quasi-metaphysical framework not unlike those employed by the master himself.
The possibility that Cahill might desert poetry for prose seems unlikely. These stories are probably best read as extended versions of ideas for poems that didn't quite fit that more compressed format. They may also offer an intriguing opportunity for obliquely "confessional" work that Cahill's four volumes of poetry have not so far permitted.
Sydney poets Michelle Cahill and Judith Beveridge at Poetry at the House in the Drawing Room of University House, December 14, at 8pm. Bookings: gpage40@bigpond.net.au.
