Uplifting Quotes for the Uninspired Historian #13: Geraldine Brooks

From her Boyer lecture (available for download here)

Writing may aspire to art, but it begins as craft.  Words are stones, and the book is a wall. You choose each stone with consideration, you place it with effort.  Sometimes, you find just the right stone- the right shape and heft- for that difficult niche, and the effect is beautiful and satisfying. Your wall has gone up straight and true.

Other days, you pick up one stone and then another, and none of them is right. You try it, it will not fit.  Frustrated, you jam it in anyhow.  The effect is unsightly, the balance precarious.  You come back the next day and you cannot bear to look at it.  You bring in the backhoe and knock it over.  The important thing is the effort.  There can be no day without lifting stones.

And after enough days, if you have sweated enough, scraped enough skin off your hands, been patient and diligent with your craft, unsparing in use of the backhoe, you will, in the end, have a wall. And it may even be a beautiful wall that will last for a hundred years.

(Reported in The Age, 10 December 2011)

I have a ‘Mrs Harris’ too

What a wag Edward Gibbon Wakefield was! Well, not really, but I did smile at this. In November 1848 he wrote to J. R. Godley:

For once you will be glad to hear of an approaching death.  My Mrs Harris is in a bad way; and I feel pretty confident of seeing the last of her some time next month.

To Robert Rintoul he wrote in December 1848

For fear of accidents I write to say that the coffin containing Mrs Harris’ remains was put on board the Albion steamer, belonging to the Steam Navigation Company last night.

So who was this unfortunate Mrs Harris?  Mrs. Harris is a character in Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit- a very ‘colonial’ novel for Wakefield to reference. In the novel, Mrs Gamp had much to say about her but the narrator of the novel could only explain:

a fearful mystery surrounded this lady of the name of Harris, whom no one in the circle of Mrs Gamp’s acquaintance had ever seen; neither did any human being know her place of residence…the prevalent opinion was that she was a phantom of Mrs Gamp’s brain… created for the express purpose of holding visionary dialogues with her on all manner of subjects and invariably winding up with a compliment to the excellence of her nature.

For Edward Gibbon Wakefield, “Mrs Harris” was his book The Art of Colonization.  I’m increasingly convinced that my own thesis is taking on the qualities of Mrs Harris too- a phantom of my brain, very familiar to me but rarely seen by others.  Mrs Harris- I embrace you.