In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (2014)

I'll admit that I had what is possibly a peculiar fantasy concerning this one. It was slated for publication in 1971 and then withdrawn, after which its author remained silent, so it has long been one of those 'lost' novels which may never have seen the light of day. Harrower had arguably been Australia's premier female writer of the 50s and 60s, alongside Patrick White as the main male. So it has been anticipated at a somewhat higher pitch. My odd fantasy concerns the likening I can feel between Harrower's style and that of many mid-century proponents from other Anglo cultures - writers like Elizabeth Taylor and Hortense Calisher. They have a spare poetic density which is a superb vehicle for insight and guarded emotional effect. And of course I feel the debt that style owes to vanguard authors like Virginia Woolf; my fantasy involved the fact that Woolf was not successful in her 1941 suicide attempt, that she continued to work alongside her husband Leonard at the Hogarth Press, that she mentored younger English writers like Taylor. And then, a year after Leonard's death in 1969, when she was 88, she took up the fifth novel of a fine Australian as her first commission after the grief had laid her off for a few months, and the rest was history, both in terms of that author's reputation being expanded, and of Woolf's becoming a pioneering sole female proprietor of a publishing house. Silly really, but fun to think about. The main characters here don't go through a huge plot-arc, though the story is more eventful than might first be anticipated. Mid-century, a well-off brother and sister, he back from the war and tender, she wide-eyed and just setting out in the world, take up a less fortunate pair and find that the friendship lasts. Their circles are very well-heeled, and all sorts of possibilities come to them with ease, but Harrower is at pains to point out the fact that this is not dehumanising, it simply creates its own topography in terms of the emotions and tensions that resonate through their lives - such challenges as we all have in common, but differently expressed. Agonies and triumphs, marriages, collapses, punctuate the picture as it progresses, magnified by Harrower's intense insight. By the time we reach the late 60s and early 70s, at the end of the book, the four are all more or less dissatisfied, and wrangling each other, along with partners and children, in tangled streams of stultified intent and misunderstanding. A slightly unbelievable accidental mistake by one of them blows apart these problems; the sediments really kick up in their pool. The end shows those murks redescending in a new arrangement - not a sense of immature release, but rather a wiseing-up, an understanding breaking through some, but not all, blockages. It is not the plot though that marks this book out - like those aforementioned contemporaries, it is the writing of these humanities that proves Harrower a great exponent of the modern mind.

Commonplace Book

'"...It's only that, when you're close to death, everything wears a look of eternity. Ephemeral expressions of bad feeling felt to me" - she clapped a hand to her chest - "like a last message from the human race. The terrible urgency, and the way no one could hear. You're like a wireless receiver turned to finer and finer degrees of receptivity, so that you receive messages other people aren't really aware of sending."'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part Three)

Commonplace Book

'"...I've always been convinced that if you're of sound mind you have no real right to - lower the confidence of the world. Something like that. By deserting it. Letting it be known that you reject what makes everyone else cling to life..."'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part Three)

Commonplace Book

'There were times when she felt like someone who had chosen to pander to the whims of a despotic interior decorator. The propriety of taking part in the performance struck her as dubious. Minds operate on so many levels at once: there was a limit beyond which he might not go without destroying her feelings for him. Since she had somehow placed her life in him, the danger was great indeed. He approached her at night, but the essential grievance, he himself, remained under lock and key. She might have been a handsome woman whose geography he had grown used to in a brothel.

Across the table she glanced at him. Where had he gone, that lover, that loved one? She sat with Stephen's effigy. He was the tomb of them both. Like a wraith, she visited the stone images. Eating, they continued to skirmish, silently sustaining thorny scratches, haemorrhages, and blows of extreme subtlety and variety. Last night - reconciliation, now these calculating looks, and in each chest Zoe saw the grinding stones turn again, and the sharpening-up proceed. The stakes were so high, although occasionally they both forgot what they were, as generals in the midst of battle must have trouble recalling the philosophy on which the carnage rests.'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part Three)

Commonplace Book

'"...I know you think Lily's no judge of character. But it isn't the only capacity worth anything in life."

But Zoe looked down dully. "She's not alone in that. But it is the only capacity worth anything." Almost desperately, she looked up. "It is. It is. It's sanity. It's being sane. There may be better things than seeing dead straight, but not many from where I stand. Because if you don't, you're dangerous."

"Or in danger, or both."'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part Three)

Commonplace Book

'...It was not only what they said and did that threatened her: in their presence, she saw with their eyes, felt with their disordered feelings, suffered their anger and panic. If she could have seen no more than their skin, she might have sustained her own life in their company. But she experienced the deadly movements of impulses that were not even conscious in them. It was as though some barrier other people possessed for their own protection was lacking in her.'

from In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower (Part One)