Games of the Strong, Part III: Island

The last sentence of Part II is “What a lark.” The first of Part III is “Now that I am out of the hospital, I have to sit and write again.” The change in mood is clear.

We don’t yet learn what exactly happened on that frivolous, ill-fated boat ride.

Neila is now the Minister of Information because Wils is dead, we assume in the unexplained boating accident. She has a high-profile, decadent office; it is a corner office with six windows and carpeting and a sofa. (Side note: my mother writes “sofa,” but I thought my use of “couch” was from her. Maybe this was an editor’s hand; I am reading the U.S. edition.) We know where Neila stands, still seeing herself as a resistor, though she plays along without actually supporting the Complex agenda.

In Part II, before the boat ride, Wils warned Neila about writing too much: “’You’re too involved with writing things down. Don’t do it. I’m trying to warn you.’” Was he threatening her or helping her? Was he a loyal Complexer? A resistor? Neila assumed he was threatening her – despite the fact that they had become lovers.

When Neila finally reveals what happened on the boat ride, we are told that neither the boat nor the bodies were found. Did the others all drown? Perhaps it is predictable that someone could have survived. The possibility that Neila will be revealed as a resistor is wide open.

Questions answered:

In this part of the novel, the reality of the Island, to where resistors are exiled, is revealed. What and where is the Island? Who is there? Is it a prison setting? The 10,000 resistors there are in exile with nothing to support them on the previously uninhabited and inhospitable Island where it rains for most of the year. But what Neila finds on her visit to the Island deepens the mystery of Lak, her beloved who disappeared after Part I. He is not there with his family. But his coded letters from Part II of the novel mention sea air. Did he escape capture? Where is he?

In addition, Neila meets an old man who knew her parents, who died in a car crash when she was a baby. She learns unexpected information about them. They were resistors, but they really did die in a car crash; they were not murdered as she suspected. And her mother had an affair with an unnamed Complex official.

Taking action:

Neila is ineffective and misunderstood throughout this part of the novel. Though she has authority in the totalitarian regime, she can’t change it and can’t do anything overt about the injustice of the Island. Her foster family even believes she turned them in as resistors. She defends herself, but no one trusts her, not the resistors, not the Complexers

Not words, not writing, but action is Neila’s turning point.

Neila decides to take 300 exiles, the most that will fit on the ferry, back with her and let them escape, swim through the shallows, before the ferry docks. She gives the ferry to a handful of resistors who remain aboard in order to help the remaining Islanders escape.

But her action is ineffective and awkward. They exiles don’t trust her, and we don’t know if they follow through on the full plan. Neila observes, “I was forcing this rescue on these miserable wretches and risking everything.” Barm, the resistor and writer Neila interviewed in Part II, is now on the Island. Neila appeals to him: “’They won’t let me rescue them.” He replies, “Why should they give you that glory?”

Everything changes for Neila after the Island trip, but not because she has helped the resistors. This action seems to go unnoticed, as least for now. It is not this boat ride to the Island that brings change, but the frivolous one from Part II.

More about writing:

I believe my mother includes her own writing process in the narrative. The chapter begins: “It is difficult to start again. I have forgotten the mood, the reasons I am doing this. But if I do it scene by scene, episode by episode, one step at a time, everything will come together.” It is as if she retained what she wrote to keep herself writing the novel as part of Neila’s story.

And, on the Island, Neila and Barm again discuss writing. Neila tells him, “Someone has to write it down,” meaning the truth of the Island. Barm replies, “Then you write it down. You go home and sit down and write it all down. As for me, I’ve grown beyond paper and pens.” In this exchange, there is ambivalence about writing, a questioning about writing.

And, like a writer, Neila admits the possibility of conflicting versions of stories: "I am always interested in versions of the truth," as my mother was. 

The New York Times and my mother

A few links to reviews I stumbled upon in The New York Times: 

The Life You Hide May Be Your Own, by Coral Lansbury, July 30, 1989. 

The review of the reprints of The Hottest Night of the Century and Games of the Strong gave me a new perspective on my mother's writing. But Lynne Sharon Schwartz takes the reviewer to task in her Letter to the Editor: Crushed by Australia?, August 27, 1989.

Unloved in Manly, by John Crowley, September 13, 1992. 

Not so glowing, but an interesting review of Longleg. 

And this is a fabulous exchange to read:  

1) The bad review of Dancing on Coral (the winner of the Miles Franklin Award): In Short - Fiction - Dancing on Coral, by Roger Freidman, May 24, 1987. 

2) The Letter to the Editor in reply: Dancing on Coral, Glenda Adams, June 28, 1987. My mother takes him down.

1978: last bit

The mother's helper is named here, A. (I'm sticking with initials except for my own name, which I retain since it is mine to share), and I am left with my mother's question at the end, with no personal memory of the story.  I have a question of my own: How did my mother, who did not have money to spare, hire a mother's helper? Maybe this was such a bad experience, she never hired one again.

Keep in mind this is more of a journal -- my mother trying to catch the moment for later use -- with some artistry but also with some things that one might omit from another draft, such as the continued use of "disgruntled."

1978 last bit

“T. and I were students together,“ I said lightly, to include [the mother’s helper], to make her feel like one of the family. “But we didn’t know each other then. It wasn’t till we started to teach that we got to know each other.”

The children had started to hit each other. T. and I got up. A. stayed with her cup of tea. It was her first day, I thought, she must have felt strange, in this exciting city.

T. cooked dinner. I set the table. R. came home. Now there was a head of beautiful curls. Brownish red Welsh curls. But cut wrong.

“He ought to see to it,” T. said, “Beautiful hair like that, massacred, because he won’t pay more than £1.50.”

We ate. T. and I cleared the table. I did the dishes. R. and A. sat drinking their coffee. Not talking to each other. R. probably didn’t know what to say to a young American [student turned] mother’s helper with a new BA in drama. And A. wasn’t interested in anyone. Just disgruntled.

The children were bickering again. I gave mine a bath, then she asked A. to read her a story.

“Sure,” I said.

“Sure,” A. said and read a bit of Charlotte’s Web followed by Paddington Plays Golf.

I went up to give my littley her goodnight hug and kiss. A. stood by. Disgruntled.

“Lovely room,” I said. “We’re lucky to get a place at all in London. A room each. I thought you and Cait would have to share.”

A.’s room was identical to Caity’s. Bed, desk, 6 X12 or so. Shower next door. Toilet. Sweet, really.

A. said nothing.

Uh, oh, I thought again. What the hell’s up with her?

1978: mother's helper

This next part of the story from the little notebook focuses more on the mother's helper, who is finally named  (though I am again using only the first initial). I feel for the mother's helper -- even though she may have been a royal pain in the butt and not well-suited to her job. 

1978 continued

My mother’s helper [descended into/came downstairs to] the kitchen. Feet first. [Bead] sandals (in my day they were called [Roma] sandals and wound up the leg and tied), grey socks, Diane Keaton trousers, [Laura Ashley/Liberty] blouse, a five-year-old [Giddon’s] of London riding jacket, long straight brown hair, disgruntled face. My eyes took in the disgruntlement, my heart sank, my inner voice said, uh oh, what’s up with her? We’d been in London only two hours, ten minutes in the flat in Hampstead. Here we were, 20 feet from the beautiful heath, with the top floor of Victorian house to ourselves, a view of St. Paul’s dome and the radio tower to one side, trees and heath on the other. And already disgruntlement.

“Ha, ha, well, well,” I said.

“Let’s have tea, “ said T.

The mother’s helper asked where the nearest shops were. Just two minutes to little South End Green with [Rumfold’s] home made bread, delicatessen, patisserie. Everything, and I mean everything, three miles from the center of London.

“And a florist?” My mother’s helper asked.

“And a florist,” T. said.

And the mother’s helper said she’d be back in a moment. And she was, while our tea was still hot, with a bunch of flowers. For me? For T.?

“For my room, “ she announced. “There’s no color in it and I need color.” No color.  [I understood] why she was grumpy. And T. hauled out a vase from the back of a cupboard for the flowers for A.’s room, which, alas, had no color.

“But there are flowers  in the garden," T. said and pointed through the window to where her two and my one were fighting over the swing after only ten minutes. 

Tricky to have a room, I thought.

And when she came down, T. made a fresh pot of tea.

We sat, T., A. and I and drank tea. I asking T. for news, gossip, anything; A. looking disgruntled still even though she now had color in her room.

1978: curly hair

I am typing up a small book of notes my mother kept from a summer in 1978 while traveling around Western Europe. The 17 small pages are full of her handwriting, which is pretty but often hard to read. Anything in brackets are dual phrasings she hadn't chosen between or bits she crossed out. I've used only the first initial for the one name included. This is only the first two pages of notes in Lion Brand notepad:


1978
They’re all wearing their hair curly in London. At least they were that particular summer. Quite remarkable. A nation of curly headed women, overnight so to speak.
I had seen T. just [the summer / twelve months] before. Blonde, straight hair, absolutely perfectly cut, swinging around as she yelled at her children, no different from fifteen years before when we were TAs sharing an office, sharing Rothman’s King Size, and giggling at the fact that we were teaching Sanskrit and old Javanese to Sydney undergraduates, who were practically our own age. My hair at the time, as always, was brown and straight, no swing, not even when I yelled at my child.
[This] particular summer, T. had a head of gorgeous little curls. Her children were a year older and things were more peaceful. The little curls wiggled as she smoked and made pots of tea.
“T.,” I shrieked, or maybe I just said it [when I saw her], “Your hair. [Curly.]” I was very impressed.
T. moved her Benson & Hedges around and put on the tea kettle. The little curls wiggled. She told me everyone had switched to [curly hair/permanents]. Soft, not like in our mothers’ day.
I grabbed the arm of my mother’s helper. “Look at that.” I said. “My old friend T., from way back. We were young together. Now she has curly hair.”
The mother’s helper, who seemed to know about these things, inspected the curls. She told T. that she shouldn’t comb it so much. The curls would stay rounder, curlier. T was making them drag out by combing her hair.


(To be continued... The next bit is more about the mother's helper, of whom I have no memory, but I was only 7 years old.)

Games of the Strong, Part II: Peninsula

Part II of the novel, Games of the Strong,  focuses on language and writing. Neila has become official translator and news writer. And she eventually becomes Wils’ speech writer. And we learn the novel itself is Neila’s writing, her journal. She hides under her own bed so no one, especially the detestable Serena, will walk in and see what she is doing, no one will see her light: “I imagine the lights, written by Serena: ‘OFFICIAL COMPLEX SPEECHWRITER FOUND WRITING SUBJECTIVE LITERATURE UNDER HER BED … LITERATURE HAS BEEN BURNED … BED HAS BEEN FUMIGATED … SUBJECT JAILED’”

Neila is feeling unsure and less than capable, yet she receives promotions and additional responsibilities in the Complex that have to do with writing. Wils, her superior, the Minister of Information, former resistor or pretend resistor, current Complexer and “an enemy,” gives her increasing responsibility: “’You are liked here and it is particularly pleasing when a woman shows she can handle the responsibility of a man. It sets a good example. You are wanted to represent us at the conference.” Neila privately notes his avoidance of “active and personal” language as common in the Complex.  And, instead of the Serena in her imagination, Neila is promoted to write the lights: “I have been told I am to do the news lights from now on. What excellent luck for me. The Whole complex will see my writing on the news tower.” (The personal side: my mother wrote the Times Square “zipper” news ticker in the 1960s for a bit.) Then, after intelligence and personality tests and a strange meeting with a psychiatrist, she is promoted again: “I Write position papers and speeches for Wils, and I am on my way up. I have been given a new office and a higher rank…I have a new desk and three windows to myself. ”

She thinks the Complex authorities, including Wils, are fools to trust her because she is actually against the Complex, but she also thinks she is less capable. She also kind of likes her higher rank and her new office. Though Neila does not become indoctrinated by the increased power, she remains passive except for her writing: her answers on the psychological tests, veiled resistor references in a speech and the writing of her journal itself.

Yet she becomes comfortable in Complex life during her Peninsula tour and while speechwriting for Wils. She and the older Wils even become lovers. “It has been fun and I am no longer constantly afraid, which is why I can sit here under the trees and write this in front of our little group.”

Neila’s insecurity comes out even when, or especially when, interviewing to Barm, the ex-resistor (or current resistor) and famous writer, Neila worries, “I was so afraid Barm would think me stupid that I had a list of questions prepared.” But the questions themselves are stilted, stupid, “They were dull and obtuse.” She can see the flaws in her own writing – yet she would feel unprepared for the interview, for speaking, without writing.

Through Neila and her encounter with Barm, my mother offers some thoughts on writing: Neila observes, “His language is straightforward… It gives a strength to his writing that is unique here. Most writers, who have generally come from high Complex families, strive to imitate masters from elsewhere, which gives their already stilted Complex language a peculiar deadness.”

 Barm not a likable or easy fellow. He worries his wife: “I think it is Barm who makes her anxious.” And Neila thinks he is “a difficult person to be with.” But he is interesting, even inspiring: He says, “’There has always been a mysterious voice that keeps coming back and asking me, “What are you and what do you want?” That voice sets my soul in turmoil. And I am still trying to answer it.’” Neila answers, “I have that turbulence.” My mother had it. I have it. Is it a writer’s turmoil?

Neila’s interest in writing comes out in other ways: “I find I am collecting poems and stories written from the point of view of someone dead.” She remembers writing such a story herself when she was 10 years old. The first-person tale was about a boatload of shipwreck survivors whose dinghy sinks. A class “clever boy” dismisses her, “’How could they know it was quiet if they had drowned?’” And Neila is affected: “After that, I was so uncertain that I felt I had to borrow images.”  (I wish I could ask my mother if this is autobiographical – I have a vague memory of her telling me this childhood story.)

In light of Neila’s childhood story, it is probably not coincidental that Part II ends with a boat ride – and a boat sinking, though we don’t learn of the sinking until Part III.

Side note: In my mother’s next novel, Dancing on Coral, the protagonist is Lark Watter. The ominous phrase “What a lark” at the end of Part II as Neila’s Complex group gets on the boat for a leisurely ride reminds me of the next Lark.

Games of the Strong, Part I: Mountain

My mother’s first novel, Games of the Strong, was published in 1982. It is mine, literally, since the dedication is “For Caitlin.” It used to be my favorite of my mother’s books. It isn’t anymore, for a few reasons. It seems young, and I appreciated that when I was a teenager. Neila is a young, unsure, isolated, in-love protagonist; she has no living immediate family; and she lives in an imaginary place that demands she do something dramatic. At the time, I liked fantasy and science fiction, and Games of the Strong is almost science fiction. It has been compared it to George Orwell’s 1984. The novel begins in the Complex, which is a totalitarian regime, and Neila is part of a secret resistor group.

The novel is in the first person and reads like a journal: “Today we set out before the sun rose.” The narrator has a teenage/early 20s tone, and I assume she is 19 years old for some reason.  She is quick to love: “But my new family is good to me, and it is still astonishing to me that I have fallen in love with Lak, who is the eldest son.” The foster family is ostensibly loyal to the Complex. Neila thinks her parents were killed by the regime, though they were reportedly killed in a car accident. She manufactures drama, “I am fed up with resisting, with being lonely, with loving someone I cannot have.” (Have I just become a cynical and older reader with less patience for the angst of the young? )

A text quoted repeatedly within the story, “The Sacred Journey,” is inspired by my mother’s Indonesian studies and is adapted from Lampah-Lampaham R.M.A Poerwa Lelana. The novel’s world itself is inspired by her experience in Indonesia in the early 1960s (of which I know very little – and I didn’t ask my mother enough about it while she was alive). Neila works hard to learn about the Mountain people: “I have spent several years learning the language and manners of the Mountainers, and I have studied the sacred book. It is all extremely difficult for an outsider to comprehend.” Neila’s feelings of wanting to belong with the foreign Mountain people so badly that she tries too hard to fit in – and she never could  – echo my mother’s attempts to become as Indonesian as possible.

Neila wants something else; she wants to escape, and the grass-is-greener trope is woven into Part I of the novel: “I think that my cousins at first will accept me as a close friend and then, after they get to know me, as a member of the family.” Unlike with the Complex and her foster family, where she feels like an outsider. The name Neila is “alien” spelled backward. She is named for the first time when Lak asks, “Neila, why don’t you feel you belong with us?” But, of course, with the Mountainers, she is still an outsider. If she doesn’t understand a joke, “It ruins the illusion of belonging that I am trying to create.” And even after a few days there she laments, “Why is it that I seem to be getting more and more awkward and shy?”

The most powerful bit for me was the odd almost suicidal moment at the volcano toward the end of Part I. Neila visits the sacred site of the volcano in the mountains. She throws in one of her mother’s scarves as an offering (makes me think of my mother’s basket of scarves on top of her dresser). Neila then goes over the edge herself, just a little but “inside the cone,” and becomes mesmerized by shapes she sees in the red molten rock. Her lone companion has to pull her out as she creeps lower. She even fights him, “I didn’t want to lose the shapes. I didn’t want to go back.”

I find elements of autobiography in Games of the Strong: Neila writes publicity releases and becomes an official translator and news writer . My mother studied journalism and worked as a journalist for many years in the late 1960s.

I also recall my mother and things associated with her: “We stopped like tourists in a rickety little roadside shop that sold delicate porcelain, spun silver, and handwoven cloth.” The cloth reminds me of the folded yards of Indonesian textiles I have piled up in my closet that my mother collected in the 1960s. (She didn’t do anything with them, maybe I will.)

And I can hear selections from my mother’s life philosophies: “I find that I am suspicious of good-looking men who are also both talented and successful. And I have never liked men who have large followings of women.”

I can hear echoes of my mother’s stories of left-wing New York society in the 1960s: The men do most of the talking, but talk enlightenment, thinking they are being something new, not traditional and segregated.  And, with exceptions that seem strident rather than enlightened (ah, the curse of outgoing women), the women remain stuck because they think they have to be something specific: “Anny and I, since we did not have anything startling to contribute in the way of high policy or thinking or a glorious past to offer, leaned forward and nodded to show we were involved and meant well.”

The two reviews Amazon.com includes pan the novel (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0207158452/ref=dp_proddesc_0?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books). I do think her later novels, which do not involve the invented world, are stronger. But Games of the Strong is still so well written.  My mother sure knew how to craft her sentences. These reviews do miss the connection to Indonesia – but why would they know about that?