On Lust and Longing by Blanche d'Alpuget

Author:Blanche d'Alpuget
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

. . . from the dark outside the hut came distinct words, and Alex became conscious once more of her servant’s morning prayer. It ended with an exhalation, the submission of mind and will. ‘Submission,’ people said. ‘Islam means Submission.’

Submission was the last thing on Alex’s mind, however. The novel ends with her broken-hearted.

Incredibly, in retrospect, I had no idea while I was writing, or for years afterwards, that the story referred to me—that it was prophetic of the end to which my longing for M (as I will call him, for short) would propel me.

I had drawn the sociopolitical background of the novel from personal experience. I had a friend, the famous left-wing Indonesian poet Sitor Situmorang, who, during the 1960s, had dropped by our pavilion for lunch several times a week. He and I had a running gag that if he were jailed for his politics I would smuggle him a file in a cake. One day he did not turn up. The following week his photograph was on the front page of the army newspaper: he was under arrest.

I was nauseous from shock. I went for advice to the head of the Secret Intelligence Service in our embassy. This man was a craggily handsome, sardonic character with an anchor tattooed on his wrist and the calm, menacing demeanour of someone wearing a concealed weapon. I asked, ‘Can I visit Sitor? Can I take him food and cigarettes?’ He regarded me with unfriendly, greenish eyes. ‘You could,’ he said. ‘But you’d be leaving the country in twenty-four hours.’

A decade later, when I began writing, Sitor was still in jail.

My fascination with M made it easy to write a love story. But as the work progressed I began discovering contradictory feelings about love of which I had been unaware. I found myself writing that my heroine’s fascination with her Indonesian lover was mixed and corrupted with anger and tension. In real life I had fits of jealousy over M that verged on nutty: one day I found myself glaring at the picture of a luscious minx on page three of the Daily Mirror, suspecting, without any reason, that here was another of his petites amies. We write out our sicknesses in books, Hemingway said. Well, yes and no: Hemingway shot himself.

Professionally, all was going well. The Kirby biography was published and was a critical success. The Indonesian novel, prickling with my unconscious confusions about M, sold to a good house (and won a literary prize). I began thinking about another novel. M and I were still seeing each other as often as we could, but the tenor of our relationship was changing. It was more intense. He was more intense; he was drinking heavily, and in his cups he was an irritable Dionysius. He was becoming unreliable about meetings and reckless about ringing me at home. My married life had turned cool and thin. I longed for everything, except my work and my son, to be different, but had no idea what I wanted.

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