Don Walker's Shots, to its credit, is a musical memoir like no other, writes our book reviewer Des Cowley.
Shots
By Don Walker pb $27.95
While you’ll brook no argument from me concerning Don Walker’s prowess as a songwriter – he wrote most of the first two Cold Chisel albums after all, including classics like ‘Khe Sanh’, ‘Breakfast at Sweethearts’ and ‘Cheap Wine’ – nothing could have prepared me for the sheer bravura of the man’s prose writing.
Shots, to its credit, is a musical memoir like no other. Eschewing the standard conventions of the genre – the book barely engages with music, let alone Cold Chisel – Walker gives us instead a sequence of isolated and random snapshots, piled one upon another, from his youthful days on a farm in northern NSW, to his early work at a Weapons Research Establishment in SA, to his itinerant moves to Melbourne, Kings Cross, then later to Paris, Russia, and back home again.
There’s little room for reflection here, he’s calling the shots as he sees them, recording it all like a camera.
While clearly influenced by Kerouac and the Beats – the book reads like a tranced-out global road novel – there’s equally a rich Australian-ness to Walker’s language. He relishes the place names – Kunnanurra, Tabulum, Jackadgery – and the disappearing Australia of Jim Sharman’s boxing troupe, the fleapits and rundown hotels and truck stops, the Elvis impersonators appearing in clubs and pubs in tiny towns, their life going down the toilet. Wherever he goes, the camera shutter is whirring, taking it all in, retaining it all like a frozen moment.
Rather than recalling the past, like a memory, Walker instead recreates it in the present tense, it’s as if no time has elapsed since the incidents he’s recounting occurred. He’s said in interviews that he began scribbling down short sequences, with no other intent, until finally he realized he was writing a book.
The end result retains something of that random quality, full of a dark desperation, its pages peopled by lonely figures trying to connect, like characters out of a Springsteen song.
As Walker says: “We’re each of us a witness, a lens... we are unique in this capability to contemplate the whole other”. Walker, first as a songwriter, and now as an author, has already proved that he’s maybe just a fraction more unique than most of us could ever hope to be.
The Favourite Game
By Leonard Cohen pb $24.95
Books by recording artists usually come in one of two flavors: the rock n’ roll memoir, or the book of collected lyrics. Less common is the imaginative work that stands apart from the recordings or musical life, such as John Lennon’s In His Own Write or Nick Cave’s And the Ass Saw the Angel. Perhaps only Bob Dylan can be said to have triumphed in all of these arenas. His Chronicles set a new benchmark for musical memoir. His Lyrics: 1962-2001 has been compared by some with the greatest poetry of the past century. And his strange impenetrable novel Tarantula remains a genuine oddball of 1960s Beat literature.
But in almost all cases, the publication of imaginative work – whether poetry or prose – by a recording artist is made possible solely by fact of their prior fame in the musical sphere. In other words, from a publisher’s point of view, they are already bankable. But if there is an exception that proves the rule, then it is perhaps Leonard Cohen, who was already a well-regarded literary writer long before he picked up a microphone. When Cohen came to record his 1967 masterpiece Songs of Leonard Cohen, he did so on the back of a serious literary career that included four books of poetry and two novels. Since then, he’s continued to publish volumes of poetry – the latest being The Book of Longing – but increasingly the poems have become intertwined, almost interchangeable, with the songs.
To coincide with Cohen’s recent tour to these shores, local publisher Text has seen fit to release the first-ever Australian editions of his two novels: Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). While the latter has always been held in high regard by Cohen fans, and been readily available via US editions, its lesser cousin – Favourite Game – will most likely be new to many readers. It has been billed by Toronto’s Globe and Mail as “one of the best ten Canadian novels of the twentieth century”, and glowingly compared to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Such hyperbole can’t help but prepare the reader for a fall.
Favourite Game recounts the salad days of Lawrence Breavman, the only son of a Jewish well-to-do family from Montreal. There’s little doubt that Breavman stands in for Cohen’s youthful alter-ego. The novel traces Breavman’s life from early adolescence through to his early twenties, a time of confusion and revelation. Cohen introduces the novel with a brief poem: “As the mist leaves no scar/ On the dark green hill,/ So my body leaves no scar/ On you, nor ever will”. It touches upon the primary theme of the novel, the way in which Breavman moves through his life, isolated from it, observing it as though untouched. Of course, like Cohen’s greatest songs, the novel finds its centre through the women who cross its pages. It begins with an image of Shell – “whose ears were pierced so she could wear filigree earrings” – and ends with a litany of names – Heather, Bertha, Lisa, Tamara, Norma, Patricia, Shell – of women who predate the Suzannes and Mariannes we’ve come to know so well through Cohen’s songs. As Cohen says: “They were the only beauty, the last magic... everything else was fiction”.
While Favourite Game is far from an easy read, it is less formidable than Beautiful Losers. Cohen has said in a recent interview that his two novels feel remote to him now, the work of a younger man. Unlike the lyrics, which he is able to re-interpret and re-arrange nightly in performance, they have become stratified, fixed in time. But equally they shed some light on the development of Cohen as a poet, a lyricist, a thinker, a philosopher. And if we no longer consider them the pinnacle of post-war literary fiction, when set against the towering achievements of a Roth, a Pynchon, or a DeLillo, that does not mean they are undeserving of our attention. They are the experiments of a young poet, who couldn’t possibly have known at that time that he would one day move us, not just with words, but through song.
All books available at the Greville Street Bookstore Phone: 03 9510 3531 (grevbook@bigpond.net.au)