Dancing on Coral Read online

  GLENDA ADAMS was born in Sydney in 1939. She studied at the University of Sydney and later taught Indonesian there after travelling through Indonesia. In 1964 she moved to New York to study journalism at Columbia University, then worked as a journalist at the Associated Press and the United Nations.

  In the 1970s Adams produced the short-story collections Lies and Stories and The Hottest Night of the Century, and began teaching fiction-writing courses at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. Her first novel, Games of the Strong, appeared in 1982; but it was Dancing on Coral—which won the 1987 Miles Franklin Award, and was praised by Elizabeth Jolley, Marion Halligan and Kate Grenville—that cemented her reputation.

  Adams lived and taught mainly in the United States until 1990, when she returned to Sydney and began lecturing in creative writing at the University of Technology. That year Longleg, shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, was published.

  Her fourth and final novel was The Tempest of Clemenza (1996). She also wrote two screenplays, ‘Pride’ and ‘Wrath’, for the ABC TV series The Seven Deadly Sins (1993); and a play, The Monkey Trap (1998), performed in Sydney.

  Glenda Adams returned frequently to the United States to teach at Columbia, and to visit her daughter, Caitlin, and first grandson. Her second grandson was born shortly before her death in Sydney, in 2007.

  SUSAN WYNDHAM is the author of Life in His Hands: The True Story of a Neurosurgeon and a Pianist and the editor of My Mother, My Father: On Losing a Parent, which will be published in late 2013. She has been editor of Good Weekend, New York correspondent for the Australian and deputy editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. She is the Herald’s literary editor.

  ALSO BY GLENDA ADAMS

  Lies and Stories (stories)

  The Hottest Night of the Century (stories)

  Games of the Strong

  Longleg

  The Tempest of Clemenza

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © the estate of Glenda Adams 1987

  Introduction copyright © Susan Wyndham 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in Australia by Angus & Robertson 1987

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147110

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148186

  Author: Adams, Glenda, 1939–2007.

  Title: Dancing on coral / by Glenda Adams; introduced by Susan Wyndham.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  On the Run

  by Susan Wyndham

  Dancing on Coral

  LIKE Lark Watter in Dancing on Coral, Glenda Adams had always planned to run away. When she was three she would pack her bag and disappear next door to the suburban Sydney school where her elder brother was a pupil. She considered leaving the University of Sydney to be an air hostess but went on to graduate with first-class honours in Indonesian studies and live in Indonesia for eighteen months. Determined to be a political journalist despite being unable to get a job in Sydney’s male-dominated newspapers, in 1964 she won a scholarship to do a master’s in journalism at Columbia University in New York and travelled there by freighter on a borrowed one-way fare. She married, had a child, built a career as a writer and teacher, and made New York her home for most of the next thirty years.

  That urge to run away, shared by generations of young Australians, has inspired fiction from Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1945) to Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2012). For the characters in Dancing on Coral it is a fierce, irrational drive as strong as sex. First published in 1987, Adams’ novel transforms her experience into a ruthless and hilarious satire of the 1960s that echoes Stead’s story of the 1930s. It spoke truthfully to me when I read it soon after moving to New York, in 1988.

  Rereading Dancing on Coral now, I am even more admiring of its intelligence and art. When I pulled my yellowed American edition off the bookshelf I surprised myself by laughing aloud. I am no fan of satire that bangs readers over the head, but here Adams’ feminist politics are distilled into exquisite portraits of characters we have all met. (Oh, Donna Bird, floating relentlessly to the centre of every scene in your sun visor and scarves, with your aphorisms, agendas and earnest scribbling in green ink: I hate and adore you.) At twenty-six years old, the novel remains universal, fresh and ready to connect with new readers.

  When the story opens, Lark Watter is a timid university student, living with her parents in a Sydney beachside suburb and saving money to ‘wander around the world, until she found some kind of island to settle on, where it would be peaceful’. At home she feels trapped between her moody father, who is constructing a mysterious wooden box in the basement and memorising arcane facts in the hope of winning a ticket to London on a quiz show, and her deeply conventional mother, who wisely insists that Lark finish her education.

  A window onto the world opens when Lark meets ‘her first American’, Tom Brown, a Harvard and Oxford graduate with charisma, radical opinions and enough scorn for his country to make him attractive to Australians still in the thrall of Britain. She falls for him and becomes as much of a girlfriend as the noncommittal anthropologist will allow. But there is the problem of Donna Bird, daughter of Tom’s American mentor, who buzzes around him like a mosquito, and the band of male students who equate drunken vulgarity with cleverness. Adams cuts down phoney academics and narcissistic poseurs with a glinting blade.

  Lark stopped at the edge of the group. Tom patted the stone wall beside him. ‘Come, sit.’ The conservative leader known only by his initials was wearing a monocle, which he turned on Lark as she slid by him and the half dozen others ranged around Tom. Donna Bird was not there. ‘Don’t take any notice of F.X.,’ said Tom.

  ‘You can call him Fux,’ cried Perce, ‘or if that’s too hard for you—get it, too hard?—Fix.’ Lark tried to look as if she was accustomed to this sort of thing, consorting with the student notables.

  ‘So,’ said Tom, ‘what’s new? Est-ce-que tu as trouvé “quelques iris de roche”?’

  Lark shook her head. ‘Nothing really.’

  In her quest for adventure and love, Lark cannot see with her creator’s clear eyes. She follows Tom to New York, even though this sentences her to weeks on a freighter with the abominable Donna. Where Adams herself had a short, uneventful journey as the sole passenger on her ship, she develops this central section of her novel into a tour de force of tension between the two women.

  The scene that gives the novel its title is so brilliant that it should not be paraphrased. Adams said she had no idea if a ship could stop in the middle of the ocean and deliver its passengers onto a coral reef, yet she imagines a scenario that is simultaneously surreal and believable, lyrical and suspenseful, like Yann Martel’s depiction of a man and a tiger in a lifeboat in Life of Pi but much funnier.

  I most recently reread Adams’ novel, by coincidence, while holida
ying on an island and snorkelling on its reef. I can attest to the dangerous beauty of coral, which tore my flesh as I brushed it, just as it shreds Lark’s espadrilles. You do not dance on coral for pleasure but because it is treacherous to stand still, and I had to admire plucky Donna, who while stranded with the weeping Lark on a reef in a rising tide declares: ‘This is an adventure. You must take whatever chance you can get to do something you would never do under normal circumstances.’

  Lark’s troubles do not end when she reaches New York. In the last third of the book she confronts a self-assured yet neurotic society where political protests, happenings, conspiracies—and Donna Bird—make fun of her plans.

  When I arrived in New York, I was fortunate that Glenda Adams was one of the first Australians to welcome me. Pale-skinned, soft-voiced, self-deprecating, she also had the mischievous eye and wry tongue you’d expect of the author of Dancing on Coral. Her survival stories gave me a sense of the insider-outsider life we expats could expect.

  After more than twenty years in the city, Adams was still dancing on coral and—to complicate the metaphor—straddling the Pacific. Long divorced from her American husband, she was raising their daughter and writing in the study of her Upper West Side apartment, which she had decorated with posters of Surrealist art.

  In Australia she had already published a collection of short stories (several of which developed into Dancing on Coral) called The Hottest Night of the Century, and the dystopian novel Games of the Strong; in America her stories had appeared in the Village Voice, Harper’s and Ms. But Dancing on Coral was her debut book published there, and was described in Publishers Weekly as ‘an exuberant first novel, wickedly funny and profoundly serious, whose characters are at home with themselves and whose heroine charmingly combines innocence and perceptive wisdom’.

  There was plenty of praise, but not all American critics understood Adams’ dry humour. Roger Friedman’s review in the New York Times said:

  Lark Watter is an unintentionally disagreeable heroine, and that’s not good news. A scheming, kvetching twit with an opinion about everything...Lark’s shrillness is unremitting and builds to a high pitch whenever the United States meets with her disapproval. When she has so little regard for the new life she has created, it is hard to expect readers to care.

  Adams must have known then that she would always be an Australian abroad. Her spirited letter to the editor of the Times was cheered by her friends but would only have convinced Friedman that he was right:

  Roger Friedman was so busy ‘kvetching’ in his ‘shrill’ review of my novel Dancing on Coral that he seems not to have had time to read the book. In the few lines he spared for the substance of the novel he made four errors in identifying and describing the characters. The real ‘twit’ here may well be the reviewer.

  At home the novel’s admirers included Elizabeth Jolley, Kate Grenville, Marion Halligan, Don Anderson and Barbara Jefferis, who wrote, ‘There is no other Australian novelist writing at present with such a finely judged mixture of zany wit and unforced wisdom, with such a control of character and material, such urbanity and exuberance.’

  Dancing on Coral won the 1987 Miles Franklin Award against competition from Murray Bail, Nicholas Hasluck, David Ireland and Nancy Phelan. Even so, Adams was punished for having run away. The novel was also chosen as the winner of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for fiction, but the Ministry for the Arts withheld the $10,000 prize money on the grounds that Adams lived overseas; instead she received a medal—an insult that did not pay any bills. Adams told the Sydney Morning Herald she was disappointed rather than furious, but many people were outraged and the conditions of the awards were changed the next year.

  In the end, the prospect of a secure job brought Adams back to Australia in 1990. Despite the success of her third novel, Longleg, living as a full-time writer was impossible, so she had also built a career as a creative writing teacher at Columbia and at Sarah Lawrence College. She jumped at the offer of a full-time role at the University of Technology, Sydney. Her daughter was independent at nineteen and her mother, still in the pink family house at Eastwood, was in decline. Over the next decade, while playing a prominent role in developing Australia’s creative writing courses at UTS and beyond, Adams helped her brother care for their mother until she died. (Their father had committed suicide when Adams was nineteen, an event that haunts her fiction.)

  Life was unexpectedly full in Sydney. Adams found love with a new partner and published a gothic novel, The Tempest of Clemenza, which displayed her mastery of yet another form. She wrote for theatre and television, and had another novel underway when she died of cancer in 2007, far too young at sixty-seven. Later that year she was awarded the Australian Society of Authors Medal for her significant contribution as a writer and teacher.

  But the following year the critic Katharine England lamented in the Australian how hard it was to find copies of Adams’ books. ‘I am sad on her behalf and on behalf of all those readers who will never get the chance to read her,’ England wrote. At last, here’s another chance.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Literature Board of the Australia Council, and of the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Yaddo Corporation, where parts of this novel were written.

  Thanks to A. M. Barrett, who remembered the stops on the air route from Sydney to London, and to Barbie MacKenzie, who called her sheep Wooliam, Woolfred and Woolbur.

  In memory of my father

  I

  The rooster was crowing, at two in the afternoon, and the cicadas had started up again after their lunchtime quiet.

  “It’s a case of too much noise,” said Henry Watter, the father of Lark. “Far too much noise.” He was in the basement working on his project. He seized the hammer and rushed into the backyard. He thrust the rooster into the small wooden crate that rested under the gum tree within the circle of chicken wire that formed its coop and hammered it shut, the sun glinting on the hammerhead and on the lenses of his metal-rimmed glasses. The Bakers’ dog next door started barking. The rooster continued crowing. From farther off came the buzz of a lawnmower.

  Lark watched the hammering, then went back to looking through the old seventy-eights and the sheet music stacked near the pianola—Caruso singing “Vesti la giubba,” a silly song called “I Lift Up My Finger and I Say Tweet, Tweet,” and polonaises and rhapsodies played by Ignaz Friedman. She had already saved a hundred pounds, almost enough for a one-way passage to somewhere, Singapore or Ceylon perhaps, and she had arranged for an interview with Qantas to be an air hostess, after her exams. That was one way to get away.

  Lark’s father rushed into the house, then returned to the backyard with several army blankets and a tattered French flag, which he draped over the crate, layer on layer, creating night for the confused bird.

  “Sits there like a stunned mullet,” said Henry Watter.

  “Do you think that’s wise, Henry?” asked Lark’s mother from under her pink cloth sunhat. Her hands, in white gloves, were pegging clothes on the line with such alacrity that she could have been playing a scherzo on the pianola. The gloves protected her hands from the sun. The sunhat, in addition to performing its intended function, protected her head from the kookaburras and magpies, which liked to swoop down to take strands of hair for their nests.

  “Like bombers,” said Henry Watter. “It’s a case of World War Two in our own backyard. This country’s a joke. One big joke.”

  The crowing continued, muted, while he lobbed stones at the yelping dog next door. Every now and then he threw a stone into the trees to silence the cicadas. And he stood in the ankle-high grass waiting for the next noise, in his undershirt and khaki shorts, which were held up by a piece of rope tied around his waist in a reef knot. With the grass obscuring his feet in their black nylon ankle socks and lace-up shoes, he looked as if he had been planted and had s
prouted from those white legs now trembling with rage.

  “I do wish he would mow the grass,” said Mrs. Watter, whipping a row of pillow cases onto the clothesline. “The paspalum gets on everything.” She flicked at her skirt.

  The lorikeets, fifty or sixty of them, started lining up on the veranda rail, jostling and squawking, peering in the window, arranged a multicolored tableau vivant, waiting for the daily bread that Lark’s mother put out for them. Preserving Australia’s natural heritage, Mrs. Watter called it, and when she collected colored river pebbles and sat turning the handle of the little barrel to polish them, she also felt she was preserving something Australian and natural.

  Lark’s father took a mop and waved it at the birds on the veranda rail. “Heritage be damned,” he said. “In this flaming country it’s a case of too much nature. Far too much nature.”

  “Henry, please, no language.” Lark’s mother tended to whisper whenever possible, even outdoors, among the noisy insects.

  “Where’s that cat when it’s needed?” Henry Watter muttered. He swung at the birds. “William the First,” he said and swung again. “William the Second,” and he swung again. “Henry the First, Stephen.”

  “Watch my windows,” called Lark’s mother from under her hat. “They’ll cost the earth to replace.”

  “Henry the Second, Richard Lionheart, John.” Lark’s father threw the mop down beside the back steps and stamped inside.

  “Mind my parsley and my mint,” Lark’s mother called after him.

  “William and Mary,” said Lark’s father. He threw himself onto the lounge and placed his hands over his face. “Far, far too much nature.”

  Lark had always planned to run away. When she was four, she had packed her cardboard sewing case with her supplies for the journey—a swimsuit, a cardigan, her money box, an aspirin bottle filled with water in case there was no water to drink, and another aspirin bottle of methylated spirits, and matches, in case she needed to make a fire. She kept it all under the bed, next to a large black umbrella that could also be used as a walking stick or a club. She planned to wander around the world, until she found some kind of island to settle on, where it would be peaceful.