The Beautiful Afternoon

By Airini Beautrais

In The Beautiful Afternoon, award-winning poet and short-story writer Airini Beautrais plumbs history, literature, Star Wars, sea hags, beauty products, tarot, swimwear, environmentalism and pole dancing to deliver a virtuoso inquiry into how we become, and change, who we are.Beautrais surveys the many influences on her life, from Lord Byron and Dante to Dolly magazine and 90s R&B, with intense curiosity and a fierce intelligence. Whether saving the planet in her Quaker childhood and activist youth, surviving the lonely years of early motherhood, or confronting the fears and freedoms of midlife in which she writes about the body becoming a poem and human touch beginning to feel safe again Beautrais' lucid examination of experience reveals that the personal is inescapably political.Throughout these wide-ranging essays her vigilant critique of entrenched patriarchal control turns anger to resistance, as a woman finds a way out of its grip, back to herself and the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Release date: Mar 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9781776921997

Book preview

Life of Leisure

I would to heaven that I were so much clay

As I am blood, bone, marrow, passion, feeling –

Because at least the past were passed away –

And for the future – (but I write this reeling,

Having got drunk exceedingly today,

So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)

I say – the future is a serious matter –

And so – for God’s sake – hock and soda water!

So writes George Gordon, Lord Byron, as a headpiece to his verse narrative Don Juan.

Imagine being an aristocratic poet in the early nineteenth century, owning lands, travelling the Mediterranean, day-drinking, indiscriminately having sex, and generally having a good time. Being able to say ‘I say – the future is a serious matter –’ then call for a hangover cure. Beginning one’s writing day hungover. Having servants you could call out to, to bring you a drink. The future did, however, turn out to be a serious matter for Byron, who died of a fever in 1824, aged only thirty-six, after a botched blood-letting treatment.

We take modern medical care for granted. I am sitting in the corridor at Medlab in Whanganui, looking at the creamy linoleum, the cleaners walking past with sacks of used paper towels; the elderly, the diabetic, the pregnant, the worried, lining the walls, crammed into small plastic seats. I am waiting for some bloods. I have noticed lately that my hair is falling out, and I am checking for any autoimmune or hormonal disorders. I suspect it’s genetic. My namesake, my great aunt, was a thin-haired woman. My dad was losing his hair by my age. I am thirty-nine years old. I have outlived Byron by three years, so far.

I first read Don Juan when I was working on my PhD, investigating contemporary long poems. In reading the work of six recent Australian and New Zealand poets, I ended up meandering from Dante to Byron, from Milton to the modernist epics, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Audre Lorde. One of the books I wrote about, and still one of my favourite books of poetry, was Alan Wearne’s The Lovemakers, set in suburban Australia between the 1960s and 1990s. In a sequence about a 1980s house party, Wearne makes a foray into Byronic ottava rima.* I began a deep dive into Don Juan and its successors, finding that Kenneth Koch and Anthony Burgess had been similarly obsessed and had written novels in verse – a somewhat perverse undertaking in the latter half of the twentieth century, golden age of Free Verse – using the same stanza format. For a while, I considered giving it a go myself. ‘That sounds terrible,’ said my friend Helen, a poet and publisher. I haven’t entirely ruled it out.

At last, my name gets called and I go with the phlebotomist to the blood-letting room. She rests my arm on a plastic pillow, cleans the site, inserts a sterile needle. When I was nine, I fought off a phlebotomist and had to be held down by at least one nurse and a doctor. I am better with needles now. I just don’t watch. I look at the tubes of blood with their multi-coloured caps once they’re filled. My blood looks dark and thin. The tiny wound in my arm is covered. Nothing is spilled. Everything is aseptic; our knowledge of microbiology has come a long way since the 1820s.

Byron’s contemporaries had a mix of trajectories. William Wordsworth inherited money that enabled him to write a lot of poems and go for a lot of walks. Robert Southey, the ‘Bob’ of Don Juan’s sarcastic dedication, had a good run as Poet Laureate. Samuel Taylor Coleridge got by financially, though he struggled with mental illness and addiction. Percy Shelley – the argument unravels further with Shelley, who faced financial, health and personal troubles and died by drowning, aged twenty-nine. Then there is John Keats, who died of tuberculosis in 1821, aged only twenty-five. Byron, avid follower of happenings in the poetry world, surmised that a bad review had killed Keats, describing him in Don Juan as ‘snuffed out by an article’. Perhaps things are better the other side of 1900? The modernist poets had day jobs: Wallace Stevens was an insurance salesman, William Carlos Williams a doctor, T.S. Eliot worked in a bank, Ezra Pound – it’s probably best if we leave the can of worms that is Pound, for now.

What if we don’t want a day job? What if we just want to be a writer? In 1929 Virginia Woolf famously argued that to be able to write a woman needed a room of her own and £500 a year. The Bank of England’s inflation calculator estimates that £500 worth of goods and services in 1929 would be worth a bit over £24,000 in 2022. While this figure comes close to that of a Creative New Zealand grant or a residency stipend,* most contemporary writers of poetry, literary fiction and creative non-fiction are not making this amount of money every year by selling books.†

Perhaps we should consider a bohemian lifestyle in the early twentieth century, escaping the cultural cringe of colonial New Zealand for the hedonistic world of art and letters in London. Katherine Mansfield, once described as the ‘one peacock in our literary garden’ by Antipodean misogynist A.R.D. Fairburn, was childless and had money. This didn’t mean writing came easy to her. In an excerpt from her journal from 1918, not long after she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, Mansfield writes:

I pose myself, yet once more, my Eternal Question. What is it that makes the moment of delivery so difficult for me? If I were to sit down – now – and just to write out, plain, some of the stories – all written, all ready, in my mind, ’twould take me days. There are so many of them. I sit and think them out, and if I overcome my lassitude and do take the pen they ought (they are so word perfect) to write themselves. But it’s the activity. I haven’t a place to write in or on – this chair isn’t comfortable – yet even as I complain, this seems the place and this the chair.

Mansfield’s journal contains frequent illustrations of the ways in which her physical health affected her mental health, her creative wellbeing, and her literary output. She frequently writes about books she wants to begin working on, or stories she wants to finish but, as her illness progresses, she becomes less and less certain these will ever materialise. In 1922, the year before her death, she writes:

I manage to get up, to dress, to make a show of getting to the restaurant and back without being discovered. But that is literally all. The rest is rather like being a beetle shut in a book, so shackled that one can do nothing but lie down. And even to lie down becomes a kind of agony. The worst of it is I have again lost hope. I don’t, I can’t believe this will change. I have got off the ship again and am swept here and there by the sea.

In an endnote to the journal, her husband John Middleton Murry describes her death: ‘As she came up the stairs to her room at 10pm she was seized by a fit of coughing which culminated in a violent haemorrhage. At 10.30 she was dead.’ Murry published the Journal of Katherine Mansfield,* along with some of her unfinished stories, a few years later.

Woolf, Mansfield’s contemporary, is well known for her struggles with mental illness, culminating in suicide by drowning. There is a popular fallacy that being mentally unwell helps people produce better art. ‘We of the craft are all crazy,’ Byron claimed. ‘As an experience, madness is terrific, I can assure you,’ Woolf wrote to a friend. But it does seem like wishful thinking to assume that a person can be simultaneously unwell, functional and productive. Causal links between mental illness and creativity are more likely to go the other way: art therapy is a widely practised method with a lot of evidence behind it. For Virginia Woolf, creative work was both burden and balm. As Susan and Edwin Kenney argue, ‘Her writing, we know, appeared to be the effective cause of her later breakdowns, but we suggest here that far from being merely a cause, her writing provided the long-term therapy that kept her in control, barely, of her own mind.’ The interpretation of writing as both cause of, and balm to, psychological issues feels familiar to me.

Everything is against the likelihood that a ‘work of genius’ will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire, Woolf writes. ‘Generally, material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down.’ Furthermore, she adds, family responsibilities, which are gendered, erode creative potential. Comparing the Brontë sisters, George Eliot and Jane Austen, Woolf mentions ‘the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child’. Even if unencumbered by parenting responsibilities, women of this era were not immune to other limitations placed on them by their families. As Woolf explains, the middle-class woman’s home had a ‘common sitting room’. She posits this as a reason why these women wrote novels and not poetry or plays – as she sees it, ‘less concentration is required’.

The idea of the great multitasker, the superwoman who is both attentive mother and industrious artist, is another fallacy that surfaces on a fairly regular basis. ‘The picture of the happy housewife doing creative work at home – painting, sculpting, writing – is one of the semi-delusions of the feminine mystique,’ Betty Friedan argued in 1963, when second-wave feminism was just building steam. ‘There are men and women who can do it; but when a man works at home, his wife keeps the children strictly out of the way, or else. It is not so easy for a woman; if she is serious about her work she often must find some place away from home to do it, or risk becoming an ogre to her children in her impatient demands for privacy. Her attention is divided and her concentration interrupted, on the job and as a mother.’

Karl Ove Knausgaard, father of five, famous for writing about writing struggles and struggles of various kinds, is quoted in an interview thus:

Once, when I was young, I thought I had to be completely isolated, so I went out to an island and wrote. I was in a lighthouse writing, and it was very unproductive somehow, and then when I had children, I was writing in the living room, I suddenly became very productive. They brought life into the writing process, and also a perspective: writing isn’t a sacred activity, it is an ordinary activity, it doesn’t have rules and it must constantly be improvised. And if you only write for an hour a day through a year, or through two years, you will have plenty of time for a novel, you know?

There are scenes in My Struggle where Knausgaard comes across as a decent dad. There are also scenes where he comes across as an entitled jerk, like the time he comes home to find his wife sitting with a sick child and berates her for not cleaning up the house. The idea of writing for an hour a day through a year, and coming up with anything comprehensible, seems like a strange and distant fantasy to me. In my first year of teaching, I went to a festival talk by Owen Marshall. Asked how he had combined paid work and writing, Marshall replied that, during his teaching years, he used to write at the start of the day, before the students arrived. On weekdays I was walking to work at 7am with an adrenaline-churned gut, marking homework, setting up labs, trying to deal with the smokers who accumulated behind my classroom before the bell rang. ‘That teacher’s a fucking bitch,’ a girl yelled one day, as I walked away after giving them a warning. There were too many of them to march to the principal. You could cane children in Marshall’s day, I reminded myself.

At another festival, years later, I waited in a long line to have some books signed by Knausgaard. They were the Four Seasons quartet: short personal essays, meditations on everyday things like urine and gumboots. During his talk, an audience member had blurted ‘I love you!’ at question time. An old friend of mine had had his microphone disabled after trying to make a comment rather than asking a question. In the long signing queue, we caught up on the years that had elapsed since our last meeting. Eventually, it was our turn. My friend got to make his comment, and Knausgaard politely agreed. He also agreed with me when I said the illustrations in the Four Seasons were beautiful. ‘Look at this one,’ he said, opening Summer. What a patient dude, still talking to the punters at the end of the line! He seemed tired, but not pissed off. He was tall and handsome, in an ageing Nordic kind of way.

I was at the festival to talk about my latest poetry book. Afterwards, I sat with one of my former writing teachers, a fellow New Zealand poet. Maybe half a dozen people bought our books and came to have them signed. There wasn’t a queue. I had written my book of poems mostly while my children were in daycare, paid for by a PhD scholarship and by government subsidies. Virginia Woolf doesn’t mention daycare in A Room of One’s Own, but it has clearly been an important factor over the intervening century. I tried at first to write with the children in the house, with another adult, usually their grandmother, supervising them, but I would often find the bigger one had hurt himself and just wanted Mama, or look down to see the smaller one attached to my nipple, looking up at me as I tried to type around his head. Had I been wasting my time, and worse, theirs? What had I made with that time, and that money, and that room?

‘Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for,’ Virginia Woolf writes, and my books have not made me money, not in any kind of ongoing bill-paying way. When it is tax time, and I reluctantly get out my royalty statements, I also get out one of my favourite self-flagellating sticks. It is double ended. At one end is the demon of guilt: I should be doing the housework. I should be working full time in a meaningful job. I should be spending time with my children. I should be saving the planet. I should be volunteering in the community. At the other end is the much more straightforward demon of free-market capitalism: I should be making money. If I am not, my activities are pointless.

American essayist Eula Biss describes attending a dinner where funding is being sought for an artists’ community:

At first, I don’t understand why we need to explain that artists must have time and space to make their art and that this costs money. As champagne is passed around, some conversation clarifies this. The people here believe that if artists are successful then their success should produce all the money they need. And if they aren’t successful then they don’t deserve money.

George Gordon, Lord Byron, did make money from his work. In 1814, The Corsair, a narrative poem written over a period of two weeks, sold 10,000 copies in one day. Given the literate population of the English-speaking world at the time, and the tools available for marketing and publicity, this was a lot of sales. Narrative poetry was, to the Regency reader, what the TV series is to viewers of today. It was how people got their stories. It was what people talked about at social events. It made economic sense, in the way that bonnets or inkwells or other now niche and nostalgic items made sense. It makes a different kind of sense, now. Biss, a graduate of the University of Iowa’s MFA programme, describes her experience with poetry as living an alternative to capitalism, within capitalism itself:

The poets gave away their own books, handbound sometimes, and letterpress broadsides made on antiquated machinery, they gave their time to editing each other’s work in their bedroom offices, they paid to have it printed, they carried each other’s books in suitcases to give to other poets, they used their day jobs at copy shops to print chapbooks and zines, they performed their work for nothing but applause, and they gave each other places to stay, couches to sleep on. Not for profit, but for literature.

This is, no doubt, a familiar scenario for many contemporary poets. In my early twenties, when I made hand-lettered, hand-bound, photocopied zines, and traded them with punks and hipsters for other zines and screen-printed patches, literature seemed like a worthy thing to aspire to. Literature lined the walls of the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) in Wellington, New Zealand, where I was studying. Fellows from the famous Iowa Writer’s Workshop flew in and told us their dos and don’ts. In the local anarchist squat, punk poets derided the idea of getting a Master’s degree in poetry. Was I a sell-out to the man, a bum-suck to an imagined literati elite? It was my dream to write a book of prose poems, and I did it. But what then? I didn’t put my name down for Iowa. I wanted a roof over my head. I trained as a teacher. I did teach for a while, but then I had children, and drifted back to the IIML.

‘What are you going to do once you have finished studying?’ the Work and Income case manager asked me, when I applied for the childcare subsidy to write my PhD. ‘Oh, I’ll probably just get another teaching job,’ I told her. It was only later that I realised she was asking how my qualification would lead to greater employment opportunities. It probably wouldn’t, was the honest answer. Waiting in line to see her, I had watched other clients losing their shit at the front desk. One woman was told she’d have to wait out a two-week stand-down period to get a food grant. ‘But what am I going to eat?’ she asked, her face strained. She was as thin as a stick, her clothes shabby. I walked out of Work and Income feeling like an entitled arsehole.

‘For women,’ writes Audre Lorde, ‘poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.’ In Lorde’s terms, poetry is not a low-stakes activity, but a means of survival. She continues: ‘If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core – the fountain – of our power, our womaness; we give up the future of our worlds.’ This is certainly the case when voices like your own have been missing from the dominant discourse for centuries; when, as Lorde describes, ‘The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.’

As a middle-class white woman writing in Aotearoa, my demographic is not under-represented.* I don’t believe I am making a vital creative contribution, correcting an imbalance, or leaving an important legacy. But after twenty years of not making a regular living from writing, I still want to be a writer. I still cleave to this economically unviable activity. ‘It’s like if I said, I want to cut down to part time and play golf,’ a careers counsellor tells me, when I tell her my dream of working a John Maynard Keynes-style fifteen-hour week, and getting paid a generous hourly rate, to support my creative practice.

Foreseeing a future of great economic abundance, Keynes predicted that people would work simply to have something to do. ‘It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.’ For the ‘old Adam’ in us who has been conditioned to strive, ‘three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while’. The problem, of course, did not eventuate: working weeks remain as long as ever, if not longer. But even in the 1970s, when my parents were at high school, kids were being told to prepare for a lot of leisure time in the future. ‘They taught us to play golf, and took us sailing,’ my dad told me once. Perhaps that was where the counsellor’s thinking had gone, too. I, with my career dilemmas, was lost in some kind of anachronistic utopian fantasy. What doesn’t generate income is leisure. I should probably be applying for jobs in management.

I currently work with students who are studying to be nurses. Their contributions to the world will be concrete, and inarguably meaningful. They will be cleaning up blood, piss, shit and vomit, administering medications, changing bed linen, folding in the sheets to avoid shaking skin squames into the air. They will be saving lives: stopping people dying of microbial infections, supervising people with mental illnesses.