The Thorn in the Flesh. Paul Wenz
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Paul Wenz (1869-1939) arrived in Australia in 1892 and worked as a grazier at ‘Nanima’ in the Forbes district from 1898, where he wrote several popular novels and many short stories of Australian bush life published in Paris. His only work published in English was Diary of a New Chum (ETT Imprint 1990). Most of his books are available in French through the publishers La Petite Maison. His most recent book in English is Their Father’s Land: For King and Empire, translated by Marie Ramsland (ETT Imprint 2018).
Helen Garner (born Melbourne 1942) lived in Paris in the late 70s, and has published extensively around the world. Her Collected Stories were published in 1998, and The First Stone published in a French language edition.
Maurice Blackman (formerly Head of the Department of French, University of New South Wales) has translated this first English version of a classic French novel.
First published in 2018 by ETT Imprint, Exile Bay
Copyright © ALFA 2004, 2018
Translation © Maurice Blackman 2004, 2018
Introduction © Helen Garner 2004, 2018
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher:
ETT IMPRINT
PO Box R1906
Royal Exchange NSW 1225
Australia
ISBN 978-1-925706-51-2 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-925706-52-9 (ebook)
Design by Hanna Gotlieb
Cover: Nora Gurdon, Under the Window. Oil on Board.
The Philippa Gibbs Collection. Image Courtesy of Day Gallery.
INTRODUCTION
By Helen Garner
Paul Wenz was a Frenchman who loved Australia from the moment he set foot on this continent in 1892, and who set out to learn the country from the ground up – as a jackeroo and grazier. His wide practical experience of working bush life informs (as it does all his writings) the novel The Thorn in the Flesh, an old-fashioned, pacy melodrama, set perhaps 80 years ago, which first appeared in French in 1931.
Its theme is simple: a tale of Miss Susie Brady, a woman with ideas above her station, who is spurned, and whose jealousy corrodes her life and drives her to try to sabotage the happiness of John Iredale, the prosperous South Australian grazier who has broken her heart.
No writer now, at the end of the 20th century, would think to emulate The Thorn in the Flesh with its unsophisticated psychology, its classic sketches of bush types, and its women characters neatly categorised as either good or bad. But apply to it the useful rule of thumb which judges a work of art according to whether it bestows energy on us or deprives us of it, and Wenz’s novel passes the test with flying colours.
One may smile a little, perhaps, from the bruised and bossy eminence of the 1990s, at Wenz’s unadventurous structure; his plain, steady narrative, manly and good-humoured, innocent of fancy devices, interiority, or agonised self-consciousness; his awkwardly bright dialogue; his elementary approach to human (especially female) motivation.
One sits up and begins to take notice, however, when he tosses off authoritative observations drawn from a life spent far from cities. Iredale, the station owner, is described as “a good bloke, quite young, not married and afraid of women.” In a grazier’s house “the bedrooms were too small, as if these men could not forget the tent under which they had lived for so long”. “One of the first toys of the Australian child is a tomahawk.” “The dog died,” the story goes, “and the man went mad.”
One pays attention when he executes the odd relaxed flourish of eloquence. On the warm evening when the unfortunate Susie arouses Iredale’s dormant sexuality, “the silhouette of the orange trees closing off one whole side of the garden was like a sacred wood, a mass of mystery and dense shadow. You could make out the almost phosphorescent spots of their countless flowers; at their feet, the ground was white with their petals.”
And before long, one turns green with envy of Wenz’s ear and his eye. Wenz is a brilliant noticer – a talent one is born with, it seems, and without which no novelist can draw us into the world he is making. Off every page of this novel, in Maurice Blackman’s graceful and self-effacing translation, leaps a sharp fizz of life, sparked by a writer alert in every nerve to the physical world and its poetry.
A policeman’s face in fierce sunlight reflects the “crude green of his helmet’s lining”. Afghan camel drivers in “loose, balloon-like trousers” are wearing “heavy European shoes”. Shorn rams look like “badly peeled potatoes”. Calves locked up for the night “look through the railings at their mothers grazing on the outskirts of the yard”. A woman thrown from her horse far from home, seriously injured, and waiting for rescue as night falls, sees “the stars budding on the branches”. An Australian gambling rashly in Monte Carlo sees the “enormous, barbaric jewels” worn by the women who frequent the casino. A sugar cupid on a wedding cake hovers “trembling on a spiral spring which went into (its) belly”. Patent leather shoes have “the shine and suppleness of enamelled porcelain”. And (my favourite) a dog’s footsteps, approaching along a verandah, sound to a sick person in one of the rooms “like seeds dropping on to a wooden surface.”
Classy stuff, this – the fruit of delighted observation, of a sensuous and irrepressible joie de vivre. You cannot fake this quality, it is remarkable; and long after one has forgotten the cardboard goodness of Iredale’s chosen bride, the symbolism of the giant ring-barked eucalypt, and the last-minute change of heart of Miss Susie Brady (this Becky Sharp minus Thackeray’s hilarious psychological acuity), there lingers in one’s mind the rare and special pleasure of the sense-texture which Wenz has created – a poignant gift from a Frenchman to Australia, his adopted country.
Sydney, 1998
I
A coolie in Canton to begin with, later on a boatman and pirate on the Pearl River, a miner in Australia, and then a gardener: now Ah Sin was the cook for John Iredale, owner of Tilfara Station. As looks go, he was likeable, he was even clean; cleaner and more likeable than many of his Caucasian confreres. Without any pretensions to being a “chef”, he could serve up mutton, with inexhaustible variety, twenty-one times a week. Leg of mutton would appear on the table roasted, boiled, stuffed or smoked; the meat would be cut up into steaks or minced into rissoles; the chops would be done in breadcrumbs, grilled, served in an Irish stew, an Indian curry, or fried in batter.
Ah Sin had kept his pigtail, which he wore in a roll around his shaven skull; he had not abandoned the nimble chop-sticks with which he adroitly gripped the small morsels he had fished out of his rice bowl. He had maintained that love for his country, that attachment to the soil which brings a Chinaman back to China, from the four corners of the world, whether he is living or embalmed. He would dream of the solid coffins adorned with scarlet inscriptions which brought good fortune in the other world; he could see again the tombs scattered through the countryside, shaded by trees which, in spring, were smothered in a pink snow. He would yearn for the hills, topped with temples and pagodas, from which you could see the bat-winged junks gliding away, their big painted eyes fixed in the direction of the sea.
Ah Sin admitted to only sixty years; but his pupils seemed to be as old as the world, and his yellow face was crackled like Ming porcelain.
From his ten years working as a cook, he had saved up what a coolie from Canton would have considered a fortune: the