Alex Miller on the inspiration behind Lovesong
My daughter was visiting us in the country and she and I were sitting by the fire reading. I had finished writing Landscape of Farewell a month or so earlier and was without a writing project. I was reading Edward Said's Musical Elaborations, an exquisite series of three lectures on a musical theme that Said had given at the University of California in 1989. I was close to the end of the third and last lecture, 'Melody, Solitude, and Affirmation,' when I read the following: "And that memory led me back to Louis Malle's film Les Amants, constructed around the relatively innocuous tale of a nameless unknown man happening on a lonely wife (Jeanne Moreau) in the country, and then becoming her lover for a time before he moves on." When I read this I laid the book aside and said to my daughter; 'I think I'll write a simple love story.' My daughter, who was eighteen at the time, answered at once; 'Love's not simple, Dad. You should know that.' The young are wise. I did know it. Love, or at least sensual love, is the most complicated and hazardous of our states of mind.
What I imagined, when I laid Said's little book aside and looked into the flames of the fire, was a man driving along the old gravel road to Lower Araluen, where I once had a farm. The man, who was in a sense the nameless unknown man of Said's memory of the Louis Malle film, was returning to the farm which had once been my own. He was returning after an absence of many years. He was coming back out of curiosity, just to see the old place again. When he came to the farm, the old house below the road and just above the creek flat, he pulled up and sat looking down at the place that had once been his home. A woman was working in a well-tended vegetable garden at the back of the house. He sat watching her for a while, then decided he would go down and make himself known to her.
Before sending the nameless unknown stranger down to the nameless unknown woman in the garden, I asked myself where the man was returning from. As the author of this love story, I believed I should know. Who was this man? He could not be me. I could not bear that. But perhaps he could continue to have something of my background. During the seventies I had lived for a year in Paris. So why couldn't he be an Australian who had gone overseas and, instead of living in London, had lived in Paris? What, I asked myself, might have kept this man in Paris? Was it love? Was he returning to his old home after the breakup of an earlier marriage?
I sold my own farm in the Araluen Valley when I went to live in Paris, invited to go by a woman friend who, when she visited me at Araluen, had seen how jaded I was by my lonely life on the farm. After I'd been living in Paris for a year, I decided I liked it so much I would come home to Australia, sell my house in Melbourne and move back to Paris permanently. When I got home, however, I met a young woman and we fell in love, and instead of selling my house I lived in it with the young woman, who soon became my wife, and eventually the mother of our children. In a sense I gave John Patterner the reverse of my own story. His story is why he stayed, and the life he lived there with his wife, when, like me, he had not intended to stay.
I used to visit a café in Paris called Chez Max. I visited it regularly. It was my place for coffee and to eat my evening meal. It was run by a North African, a Pied Noir, and many of his clients were North Africans, but it was not exclusively North African and always had a good mixture of people. I liked the easy going atmosphere and the padron made me welcome. Also the other clients were not French and spoke French little better than I did. We got along. We were outsiders in Paris. Chez Max, of course, became, with a little twist here and there, the model for Chez Dom in this story. The book that became my complicated love story, as my daughter had predicted.
I had visited Tunisia some years before while researching my novel Conditions of Faith and had made Tunisian friends. The country and its people have stayed with me and have become part of the vocabulary of my imagination. Tunisia and its people fit easily for me into the Paris I know. When I think of my Paris days I think also of my days in El Djem and Sidi bou Said and the people I knew there. Perhaps one day I shall return to the farm at Lower Araluen and let the unknown and unnamed strangers meet at last. But that's another story!
On living at Araluen
In 1967 I was deeply demoralised by working in the public service in Canberra for two years and needed to get out of the place. I managed to get hold of $12,000 and bought a run down, 1500 acre farm in Lower Araluen. My reason for buying the farm was to have a place where I could write without the distraction of a nine to five job. Araluen saved my life. Another year in the public service would have killed me.
At Lower Araluen I got the contract for the mail run. This gave me a modest monthly cash payment. I grew my own vegies and began buying a few head of breeding cattle at the Braidwood market. I knew how to deal with cattle in the bush. There were already horses I inherited with the property. I had once made my living as a horsebreaker and a stockman and I wasn't worried about dealing with all that stuff. Over the next few years I built up a modest herd of Hereford cows and I grew tomatoes and pumpkins for the Canberra market. Together with the money from the mail run I had enough to live on.
At Araluen I wrote three pre-novels. In other words, I did my apprenticeship there. The first pieces of mine that were published in mainstream journals, like Meanjin and Quadrant were written there.
I made great friends with my neighbours, who were all old timers and were glad to have a young man around the place who could shoe their horses for them and help them muster their wilder country. I look back at Araluen as a beautiful warm, homely place which I found very nurturing. I made wonderful friends there. They are all dead now.
For me John Patterner is a good Aussie bloke of the kind I knew in Araluen. A modest Australian with enough intelligence and curiosity to go to the university and make the journey to England. Like me, John Patterner also went to Melbourne University. He’s got a lot of my biography in him. I know and love the places he knew and loved. I know the smell of his country and the feel of it. Like him, I loved Araluen and the time I spent there.
Lower Araluen is beautiful, wild forest, very steep, hilly, with nice little creek flats. The Araluen creek ran all the way through my property and the southern border was the Deua River. A beautiful old river. It's marginal country. It's not country for people to make a lot of money on. I always only barely made a living. And so did my neighbours. I'm always glad if I can get some reference to it into my work.