Monday, Oct. 30, 2006
These days, and increasingly so, the playwright is indignant. Unlike a youth's reckless rage or an old man's sour huff, Michael Gurr's fury radiates white heat. "I've never been angrier," he says. "Our current national government has presided over a time of almost unbelievable moral corruption." Gurr is speaking about toughening up the idea of compassion, his words punching through the chill wind of a bloody-minded Melbourne spring. His conviction is kinetic: he's a man with a steady gaze and fresh legs, impatient to change the temper of the times. What's to be done? We're out in Gurr's Footscray neighborhood, in the city's western suburbs, where the factory whistles were silenced long ago. The place, now teeming with Vietnamese and African eateries, looks lively and exotic. But hard and desperate, too. A woman scuttles past, foraging in planter pots in the plaza. As soon as Gurr realizes she is collecting cigarette butts from which a few puffs might be salvaged, he hurries after her. She accepts all the smokes he has left.
For 25 years, Gurr has labored in the solitary trade of turning the lightning strike of a single image, perhaps inspired by an incident like the one above, into plays. But it's not all that he's been doing. He's freelanced as a political speechwriter, teacher, radio program host, bit-part actor and inveterate agitator. In his new memoir Days Like These (Melbourne University Press; 285 pages) Gurr reveals what's been going on in the rooms of his mind and casts his wisdom to the world beyond the writer's sanctuary. This form, he says, is radically different territory for him; less visceral, more conscious and considered. "For the first time I had to write in my own voice and learn to use the word I," he says. "Whenever you get an intimation of being comfortable, you should jump out and do the next thing—and this is it."
Born in 1961, Gurr learned his craft at Melbourne Theatre Company from Ray Lawler, creator of Australia's most celebrated drama, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. For those familiar with Gurr's plays—from the aids-era's DesireLines through to Crazy Brave, Sex Diary of an Infidel, Jerusalem and his recent Something to Declare, about refugees—his memoir is an opportunity to understand how those plays came about. His creative ideal: Never invent, only reveal. He brings a reader close enough to taste the rumble between what he describes as "the unconscious impulse and the internal editor." "Whenever I've tried to modify the first impulse of a play," he writes, "it has turned into carpentry, an exercise in detached invention. Fiddled with, plays can stop breathing."
Gurr has taken quick gulps from the rarefied, somewhat bloodless atmosphere of backroom politics. Here, he says, he tries to help carry forward the left's great struggle: "To translate what can often sound high falutin' into things that are concrete and connected to people's lives." His activism is driven by a faith in justice. Gurr records his encounters with the solid union men of the picket lines and with old-fashioned Christians who inspire him because of "their lack of embarrassment about wanting to do good in the world." He's scathing about those from the mall churches: "It's interesting how rarely you hear them speaking about the poor, the downtrodden, the foolish and the ugly: all the people their prophet worried about."
He moves about easily, and because he so clearly likes and is curious about people, Gurr is a reliable witness to a changing city. Writing about how property developers moved into bohemian St. Kilda and evicted him from his home of 15 years, Gurr pinpoints the decay: "The first sign, someone said, is an ice-cream parlour." On a train, after meeting two lonely souls, he has an epiphany about the fissure "between ordinary human need and the rhetoric of success." "Believing that your value as a human being is measured by your independence and separation from others is the great lie of the market-driven world," he writes. As a professional daydreamer, Gurr's writing drifts off in wicked thought: "On the early trains, slightly damp hair and recently applied make-up give you access to bodies so lately asleep or naked that it can induce a sensation like the swoon of a long kiss."
Then, without warning, came a thunderbolt. An old-fashioned stage direction might introduce it like this: Old enemy king-hits writer. Depression. Gurr thought he was winning the arm-wrestle of writing one of his plays when it struck. "The marrow turns tepid, the skin spongy, the eyes dry, the feet stepping ahead in a flat counting-to-ten kind of way," he writes. "You begin to identify with inert objects. A fence post, a wardrobe, a cut stump in the park. You see these things and see yourself in them: a dead thing with a faint memory of flowing sap." Gurr respects the stealthy enemy, in a way, but he also knows its vulnerability. "Each episode erases the most important memory of all: that it passes."
Gurr's abiding gift to readers lies in his largeness of spirit. It's born of decency and courage in laying his soul bare. The cumulative effect is a gritty grace: depth of character, tenderness and the masculinity that you find in the muscular work of novelists such as Philip Roth or Richard Ford. In form and heart, with its floating chronology and candor, Gurr's memoir springs from a sensibility close to that of the late Arthur Miller in his masterly Timebends. In it, he's telling two stories. There's the public history of shared experience, a critique of the times, inviting a connection. But the quiet story is more compelling; the struggle inside the mind house, with its interplay of faith and experience.
Home has been a moveable feast. Still, Gurr retains a strong sense of "honoring the domestic." "It's not just to do with the man I live with," he says of his home life. "Part of it is an antidote to the wildness of the imagination." Gurr says he was three-quarters of the way through writing the memoir before he realized its hidden purpose: "To put a bit of steel back into the language of ideas that have come to be seen as soft, nebulous, weak," he says, before pausing. "All the things that have been stripped out of the national conversation." Despite his fury, Gurr is free of rancor. He's hard-headed about federal Labor's chances next year, but remains positive about the cause. "I refuse to be cynical," he says, as the lunchtime queues lengthen outside a Footscray bank's suite of five ATMs. "Cynicism is a kind of laziness. To be cynical about politics is to give up on life. And I refuse to."
- Tom Dusevic
- By turns raw, reflective and graceful, an Australian playwright's memoir fuses personal candor and muscular political critique
