Raimond Gaita

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Transcript

Ramona Koval: Rai, welcome to The Book Show.

Raimond Gaita: Thank you Ramona, it's good to be here again.

Ramona Koval: Would I be right in saying that After Romulus is a book about how to read Romulus, My Father, what happened after the book and the film was written, continuing the conversation really?

Raimond Gaita: Continuing the conversation but not how to read it, I don't want people to think that...especially a chapter called 'Character and Its Limits' in which I comment on the way people responded to their sense of what was particularly good about my father. And sometimes I say I don't think it was like this, it was more like that. But I don't mean that to be a kind of authorial interjection. I wrote that essay in large part because I had been asked a number of times...actually after film showings, and philosophers are not used to having one of their number on screen, even if it's a lovely little boy like Kodi Smit-McPhee. So I might be at a philosophical lecture somewhere and then they would say would you mind speaking after the lecture at a screening of the film.

And so I did, and during the course of that I realised just how much I owe it to my father and to his friend Hora, not just in a sense of what one should do to live a good life, but about the very nature of morality itself, and indeed...again, through their example, not so much through what I've said, I learned from them things that are still very controversial amongst moral philosophers, one of them being that you can be morally severe in the sense of insisting, for example, that you be truthful about how to describe somebody's conduct in moral terms, and yet at the same time not point fingers or be judgemental.

So my father, for example, never for one minute was prepared to deny that my mother and, in a different way, Mitru had betrayed him. And if somebody said, 'Do you think betrayal is the right word?' he said 'Yes, let's call a spade a spade about this one.' But all his life he remained friendly...well, not all his life because Mitru died, but all Mitru's life he remained friendly to Mitru. And one of the things I try to celebrate more specifically in this book than in Romulus, My Father was the nature of his compassionate response to Mitru's need but more importantly my mother's desperate need.

Ramona Koval: Because he said 'this is the wrong thing to do but I understand that there are other factors which drove them'.

Raimond Gaita: Yes, but I don't know that he even thought too much about there being other factors, he wasn't a theoretician, so he wasn't weighing up the conditions of culpability.

Ramona Koval: But you don't have to be a theoretician to say 'my wife is suffering deeply and they are in this passionate embrace with each other and this is what they need at the moment'. I mean, you don't have to be a philosopher to say that.

Raimond Gaita: No. I think...I say this in Romulus at any rate, I think he also always thought that theirs was a doomed relationship, one in which they were doomed to terrible suffering. And I think his response simply was, well, what else was there to be done? This is the thing that I talk about a bit, this was an ethically necessitative response, this sense of impossibility, that there was nothing else he could do, was an ethical necessity but it was also compassionate the same time. And I contrast that with obligation.

I'm going on a little bit about this, but just to illustrate that what I'm trying to do in that particular essay, which is a kind of essay in moral philosophy, was to reveal how certain quite controversial thoughts in my own discipline are thoughts that I owe to my father, and I wanted in that essay to explore that, rather than to tell people, hey, you think character is the important thing, it is not. That I hope isn't the spirit in which the essay is read.

Ramona Koval: It was very important to you in Romulus, My Father to tell the truth, so much so that you are very careful about what you said, whether you remembered particular words that people spoke, whether you could say these people said that these words were spoken, and you didn't try to conflate anything or assume anything. You said perhaps this or perhaps that. Why was it so important for you to be careful with the truth?

Raimond Gaita: I think because instinctively...and I have to say 'instinctively' because I wrote that book very quickly...

Ramona Koval: You said three weeks?

Raimond Gaita: Three weeks, the first draft. But I think instinctively I knew it was a book that was a kind of witness to the values by which my father lived his life. People may disagree with this but I think it's the nature of witness that you can't mix fiction with it and you can't be careless about truth. You will remember a time when you and I were both embarrassed by the Wilkomirski episode where we were both enormously impressed by book, and the way we were moved by that book depended absolutely on it being fact, not mixed up with fiction.

Ramona Koval: And then it turned out it wasn't.

Raimond Gaita: It turned out not to be true. And the publisher for a while had the cheek to at least entertain the thought that maybe it would release it as fiction. Well, I don't think that the sense of my being a witness to my father's goodness would survive anything that looks like carelessness about the facts, and certainly wouldn't survive the addition of a fictitious material. But I really want to add that I don't have a general view about the mixing of fact and fiction. I just think in this case it was out.

Ramona Koval: In your book A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice you quote Simone Weil saying that 'the need for truth is more sacred than any other need, this gives truth a more spiritual value, sacredness rather than simply something that is right or factual'.

Raimond Gaita: Yes. Primo Levi writes...I also quote this in A Common Humanity, that he was disgusted by the way the political life of Italy had been polluted by the lies of the fascists. 'Polluted' is a very interesting word. Only something that can be very precious can be polluted. If it is merely useful to you, you can bugger it up in all sorts of ways and reduce its effectiveness. But you don't describe it as having been polluted. And people can think about truthfulness in their own lives in those kinds of ways where it really matters that you be truthful about, for example, your past, even though your concern to be truthful in that way isn't because you think it will make things better for the future.

Ramona Koval: You write about depending on Bach to keep you truthful.

Raimond Gaita: Don't ask me to explain that!

Ramona Koval: Please explain that.

Raimond Gaita: I can't...

Ramona Koval: You're playing Bach while you are writing because you say...

Raimond Gaita: Not so much while but afterwards. But it was because I knew that in a dramatic story as this one was I had to resist any tendency...in fact I had a deep tendency to pathos in describing what had happened to my mother, what has happened to Mitru and so on.

Ramona Koval: Because it is sad story.

Raimond Gaita: It is a sad story, and I didn't want the sadness to disappear. But I take a vulnerability to pathos to be like a vulnerability to sentimentality, not so much an absence of feeling but as a distortion of feeling. And I listened to Bach to keep me truthful in that kind of way.

Ramona Koval: Because of the structure?

Raimond Gaita: Because of Bach's structure?

Ramona Koval: Yes.

Raimond Gaita: No, because I think in a lot of Bach's music there is such wonderful and powerful feeling but utterly disciplined in the sense of not yielding to any of those things; sentimentality, pathos and so on. I listened during the day to Maria Callas, who my mother loved, but I couldn't take too much of that without knowing that the book would be dripping with pathos.

Ramona Koval: Then the film arrives, the proposal for a film, and I remember your struggle with being courted by many offers of filmmaking at the time. And you were very, very selective, weren't you. Tell me about your attitude to somebody else telling your story.

Raimond Gaita: I didn't want a film at all, and the only reason that Richard Roxburgh got the rights is because originally he asked, having come all the way from Africa to London with two bottles of red wine, he got the rights because he asked only in the end for the rights to write a screenplay, my having refused him the rights to the film. And then one thing led to another and over six years the film was made. But many times during that I was prepared to say let's call it quits when we couldn't get a screenwriter and so on.

Ramona Koval: And what were the points at which you felt that you were struggling over that?

Raimond Gaita: There were two things, perhaps most especially I think it's very hard to make a film about madness without pathos or sentimentality, and in this case there are three mad characters; Vacek, my mother, and my father. So I thought the chances of this coming out well were very small. And also because I thought that one of the things that mattered most to me about the book was to characterise the way in which my father could behave to Vacek who was visibly insane. In the film he is not, in the film he is more or less, as Richard Roxburgh describes him, an amiable homeless man who cooks eggs in his room.

But he was visibly mad, and one of the things that I realised about my father and indeed Hora was that they responded to Vacek without a trace of condescension. And I try in one of these essays in the book to say why I think that is so wondrous. I know that almost everybody would say we should behave like that, and I am now 65 and I have now met about three or four or five people who could do it. And in this new book I try to explain why I think it's such a difficult thing and why it is so wondrous when it occurs. And I thought, well, if I've only seen a handful of people do this in life, why would I think actors could do it? So that was one resistance.

And I think, whether he did it intentionally or not, it was wise of Richard to portray Vacek as merely a homeless eccentric man because I don't think he could have done what I would have wanted him to do and then I would have been disappointed in the film, and I'm not disappointed in the film. I say in the essay about the film, when people ask me what I think of it they are always disappointed because I say I like it.

Ramona Koval: Why do you think they're disappointed?

Raimond Gaita: Because they're so used to writers saying how they hate the films that have been made about their works.

Ramona Koval: When the film came out I remember you being worried, and there was a scene that was dropped from the film that was in the original screenplay.

Raimond Gaita: Yes, there was a scene that was dropped in which (I have to talk about them as characters) Rai and Christine in the shack Frogmore before Christine has Susan, and she hears voices, thereby making it clear that she is suffering from a form of mental illness. That scene was dropped, and so when people see the film and they see Christine's incapacity, so marvellously acted by Franka Potente, to look after season they think this is postnatal depression, which leaves them wondering why on earth she came in an out of Raimond's life and all the rest of it.

And when I saw this I told Richard Roxburgh that they would judge her badly, and he said they shouldn't. And I said, well, maybe they should or shouldn't, but the fact is they will. And I have read countless reviews of the film that sort of say things like, well, it was tough and it was a good film, and the poor boy, good thing that he got through it all right and came out reasonably okay at the end, especially having such a bitch of a mother. That's the sort of sentiment. And that upset me a lot, and it was no consolation for people to say to me, look, she is just a character in the film, because nobody says to me, look, Franka Potente acted this character who has no existence outside the film, they all say Franka Potente acted Christine your mother really well. So I was deeply hurt by that, and I thought I might want to respond to it in some way...

Ramona Koval: So the film had been made by then, or did you know that that scene was going to be dropped?

Raimond Gaita: No, I didn't know until I saw a rough cut of the film that it had been cut. I suspect that was all intentional because they would have known that I would have resisted like mad at that stage.

Ramona Koval: And was it too late to insist that it would be put back in?

Raimond Gaita: It was too late. They did this right at the beginning of the shoot. Sorry, on Richard's behalf I should explain, he thought that there was too much madness in the film and another mad scene would just alienate the audience and turn the film into melodrama. And given that he was making a feature film and not a documentary, that might have been a fair thought. So I'm not saying this to be critical of him. But still, it upset me a lot, and it was one of the many things that was driving me to write about my mother. It wasn't the most important thing. And in this book I do comment on the fact that the scene had been cut, but I leave it for an essay on the film rather than the long essay about my mother because I didn't want in that essay about my mother to have any polemical tone or defensive tone.

Ramona Koval: Let's talk about that last essay about your mother. The way you write, it seems to have generated...by a particular incident that you went through when you went back to Frogmore. Perhaps you could just tell us about that and read a little bit.

Raimond Gaita: Yes, my wife Yael and I have built a house not all that far from Frogmore, and indeed just over the hill from the camp to which my father was sent when he first came to Australia to build a reservoir and where I had lived for a while with him. There is no longer a camp there, it's just over the hill. And Hora, after he died his children came to visit us and they came with Hora's grandchildren, and that's a significant part of the story. So I'll read.

[reading from We spent the next day at Frogmore... to ...what I thought I was seeking.]

Ramona Koval: But weren't you doing exactly that, and don't we try and do that, we put ourselves in the place of others whose lives we can't live but we're trying to understand?

Raimond Gaita: Yes, we try to understand, but I think in this case I couldn't really feel as she did. But what going to that swamp made clear to me on recollection is that after writing Romulus, partly because I wrote it so quickly I was...it sounds strange to say, sort of enlivened by the drama of it. In fact I sort of oscillated between exhilaration and depression when I wrote it, but I do remember coming back to Melbourne utterly exhilarated.

But over the years, and this was before the film, it wasn't the film that triggered this, I became more aware of the quiet desperation of her life rather than the more dramatic episodes like an attempted suicide. And her lying there in that swamp that night became for me sort of emblematic of that more quiet desperation. And later on in the book I talk about how utterly terrible her last two years must have been after Mitru had killed himself and she was going from place to place in Melbourne suffering from mental illness herself, going from Melbourne to Ballarat where she had previously been in a psychiatric hospital to go and seek psychiatric care, and there she killed herself. So it was that deepened sense of the desperate quality of her very brief life in Australia. It's still hard for me actually to get the time span right because I still see it to some degree as a kid and I think, God, it was a long time. But it wasn't, in her case it was eight years.

Ramona Koval: You talk about Emmylou Harris as a musical accompaniment to this part of the story. Tell me about that.

Raimond Gaita: Well, one of my daughters, Katie, had given me for my 50th birthday a tape of music that she liked and some of it she knew I liked and so on. I'd never heard Emmylou Harris before and some of her songs were on that, and one of them, a song called 'I Can't Remember If We Said Goodbye' I played again and again and again. I had intended to write about my father but I thought I might write on weekends and nothing came of it, and I played this for about a week, I just played it again and again. And I said then to my wife Yael 'I'm going to write', but I said I had to be by myself, and I rented a cottage near where I grew up. And though I went to write this book about my father, Romulus, My Father, I started writing about my mother. So I should have realised a long time ago that this need to write about her was there strongly and wasn't really satisfied in the writing of Romulus.

Ramona Koval: Do you think it was the views of other people, those reviews of the film that made you finally put pen to paper about her, because you say that it doesn't happen...you say it can never be a kindness to a child to undermine the love it has for its parents by suggesting that they are not deserving of its love.

Raimond Gaita: I thought the reviewers were all full of sincere compassion for the boy, for the film me, but as I say in trying to suggest in those reviews that this was a woman undeserving of my love and indeed of her husband's love, I thought this was no kindness. In fact I think it's an insidious thing in general. One of the things I say in the book...and again, I wanted to...and this is in the case of my father, being a witness to this, is that the nature of his compassionate love for my mother and his compassionate response to her need, while at the same time never denying that she had betrayed him, that enabled me to see her in a light where I could love her without shame. And that's a very, very important thing, because I knew how disdainful everybody was of her.

Ramona Koval: 'Love her without shame'?

Raimond Gaita: Yes, without being embarrassed by the fact that everybody thought she was utterly irresponsible and so on. I became really aware of this, again, not in my own case, but through a series of accidents I became a kind of ambassador or what's called an ambassador for an organisation called Mirabel which is a wonderful organisation that gives support to kids who have been orphaned or abandoned when their parents were drug addicts.

And one of the talks I gave at a fund-raising thing, I emphasised this, I've seen Mirabel doing this, and a wonderful woman, Jane Rowe, who is the CEO of it, I said one of the things that is so wonderful about Mirabel is it recognises not only that these kids need to be loved, which everybody knows is important, but they had to be enabled to love. And sometimes what gets in the way of being able to love...of course it is psychological factors, traumas of one sort or another, but a certain kind of moralism can get in the way too because if you are encouraged to disapprove of your parents and join in the disdain for them that is felt in the community, and I felt that constantly in the case of my mother...

Ramona Koval: When you were a child?

Raimond Gaita: When I was a kid. I felt that I was being invited to do this by people who were expressing their compassionate sense of me, the poor boy abandoned, et cetera.

Ramona Koval: You went to a Catholic boarding school, didn't you, for those later years of being a child. What was the attitude there?

Raimond Gaita: To her? Well, no one spoke of her there, although one of the things that I do write about in this book is that when my mother came to visit me at the school after not having come...I hadn't seen her for two and a half years, not since Mitru's funeral. And my father at that stage had been committed to bringing another woman from Yugoslavia and to marrying her, and my mother came and she said that she wanted to go back to my father, that she probably only had a year to live if the doctors were right, and she asked me to convey this to him. And I did, but only three weeks later when I went home for the school holidays...

Ramona Koval: And how old are you now?

Raimond Gaita: I was going on to 12. So I said to the headmaster, 'Would you mind telling my mother if she were to come again that I don't want to see her', but I did say 'for the time being'. I insisted when the screenplay was written, you mustn't leave that qualification out, 'for the time being'. But, you know, I realised only recently, probably a year ago, that maybe he didn't tell her 'for the time being', and it had been so important for me all my life, that at least I had said 'for the time being'. And so I don't know whether he told her, and if he told her whether she believed it...

Ramona Koval: Or whether she heard it.

Raimond Gaita: Whether she even heard it. So it's all those things that were prompting me to write, because if that's true...let's say for the sake of argument he didn't tell her or she didn't hear it or didn't believe it, then she killed herself a few weeks later, she would have killed herself thinking that she had been abandoned by the man she thought she could always rely upon, my father, and even by her son. So again, it was a matter of coming to see how terrible her life had been and wanting to write about it. Why exactly I wanted to write about it as opposed to just coming to see, and having written, why I should publish, I don't know.

Ramona Koval: And that Emmylou Harris song?

Raimond Gaita: I still play it.

Ramona Koval: But isn't it about 'I don't know if we said goodbye'?

Raimond Gaita: Yes, I know. I shouldn't have been so obtuse. There was a conference in my honour just recently in Adelaide and a number of papers were on Romulus and so on, and I realise a lot of people realised long before I did that I should be writing about my mother.

Ramona Koval: And now that you have written this, does it help? A lot of people would think that that episode with you going to the log and spending the night was a kind of breakdown.

Raimond Gaita: I don't know if you call it a breakdown, but I don't know if it helps. I've never had any time for the expression 'closure' but it's not as though I think this is over. It mattered for me to try to get it as clear as possible. In part it mattered to me to write I hope not too defensively about it but that's in the essay about the film, because I wanted to say this is just not true.

Ramona Koval: There is another part of the film which wasn't exactly true too, it was about your half sister. You've got two half-sisters, and the film, because of the way it was told, and I don't quite understand why, but it only has your mother giving birth to one child. And your other half-sister felt left out.

Raimond Gaita: Yes, the reason is that they had decided to have only one child actor, and they knew they couldn't age him plausibly more than three years. And so they could fit only one pregnancy in without undermining the whole dramatic structure of the film. And I resisted that for a long time but I saw that it was inevitable, and again I had to yield. This was not a documentary. And Barbara, when she saw the film...there's a scene in the film when Christine is killing herself and she looks at photographs, and there's one of Susan and one of me, and Barbara told me that when she saw that scene she felt as though she'd been written out of history.

Ramona Koval: As you would, of course.

Raimond Gaita: As she would, of course.

Ramona Koval: So, it's very interesting about art and about life, and I'm sure your story has moved a lot of people to think about these things by seeing the film, by seeing the artistic depiction, probably asking themselves all the same questions that you raise in your philosophical works and in your memoir as well. But as you say, it's very complex for the writer, for the liver.

Raimond Gaita: Yes, it's complex for me because now sometimes the voice of Eric Bana intrudes when I am thinking about my father, and Franca Potente when I'm thinking about my mother, and so it can be...well, everybody knows about the business of photographs getting in the way of your memories of a holiday, and now I've got a book, a film, and shit, now it is another book! That's a realisation!

Ramona Koval: This new book of essays by Raimond Gaita is called After Romulus, and it is published by Text. And Rai, always a pleasure to speak with you.

Raimond Gaita: Thank you Ramona.

Publications

Title: After Romulus

Author: Raimond Gaita

Publisher: Text Publishing