Autumn Laing by Alex Miller

on us, giving us a start—reminding us that we are helpless in the face of our fate. We will either meet a certain person or we will miss them by half an hour, or by minutes. Wasn’t that the fate of Burke and Wills, to miss their rescue party by half an hour after months of struggling towards a rendezvous with them? This is all I mean by fate: the critical moment. The kind of seemingly random event that determines life and death and which remains in the collective mind of the nation forever after. The plane one was late for which crashed, all passengers and crew killed. That kind of thing. The fate of Burke and Wills. We all know what that is. Their tragedy. Which would have been a triumph if they’d arrived at the rendezvous half an hour earlier.
    I should tell you, or you will never know it, this is all being handwritten by me at the kitchen table. The sun comes in here during the afternoons in autumn. It’s a lovely room. Homely. It’s where we all gathered and is much nicer than the dining room, which is gloomy and damp and smells of mice even more strongly than it smells of cabbages in here. Nothing good ever happened in the dining room. In the library, yes; lots of good things and lots of difficult things happened in the library. The library at Old Farm is a room of the sublime and the tragic. The library was for winter evenings and was the place where a few of us, three or four, sat and squatted around the open fire. I loved and feared library evenings. I seldom go in there these days. The library witnessed my hysterical outbursts more often even than our bedroom. The library, unlike the dining room, was a room in which we found our reality. There was no escape in the library.
    I’m writing in school exercise books that Stony brings me when he brings the wood for the Rayburn. They are secondhand, kids’ names and form numbers on them, most of the pages unused. He gets them from a school bin for recyclables. I write with a pen. A fine felt-tip. And no rewriting. You’re getting this just as it comes out, like toothpaste from the tube. I’m with Christina Stead on this. Rewriting is erasure. Like repainting. The thing gets muddy. Pat never repainted. He never refined a line. All Pat’s works are first drafts. Paintings, drawings (as you already know) and poems. Painting is simple, he said. The painter is simple. There was never any reconsideration with him. If it wasn’t right the first time it was never going to be right. He wasn’t striving like the rest of them to get to something fine and finished. He wasn’t striving at all. Strivingwas not what Pat did. It was what everyone else did, including Edith. Pat was heeding his imagination without questioning the direction it offered him, following the prompts. That was his god. His line untutored. He loved that. And when I say he dashed things off I am not disparaging what he was doing. That is how he worked: dashing things off, to catch the fierce and true while it shone for him. To hold it on the page or on the piece of cardboard, or the square of masonite (his preferred backing after Sofia Station). Pat Donlon wasn’t Alberto Giacometti, throttled by the need for the perfectly realised image. Constipated to the point of being unable to cross the road unless he could step on the same cracks he stepped on last time he crossed the road (or was it to avoid stepping on them?).
    I introduced Pat to the work of Christina Stead by telling him she too never reworked her stuff. He loved that. He read her three books. Reread them avidly (re reading was permitted) until he was familiar with them, like someone who listens to Bach’s Preludes and Fugues time and again because they hear in the music’s deceptive simplicities everything they need to hear. For a while Pat neglected his beloved Rimbaud for Stead. He was even thinking at one time of doing a series from The Man Who Loved Children , but he never did. That’s how Pat lived his life. If it shone for him he