Out of the Line of Fire Read online

  MARK HENSHAW was born in Canberra in 1951. He studied at the Australian National University and the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

  His first published work, Out of the Line of Fire (1988), was one of the best selling literary novels of the decade in Australia and has been widely translated. It won the FAW Barbara Ramsden Award and the NBC New Writers Award, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award.

  In 1989 Henshaw was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fellowship, and in 1990 he held the Nancy Keesing Studio residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. He received the ACT Literary Award in 1994.

  Under the pseudonym J. M. Calder, he has written two crime novels in collaboration with the Canberra writer John Clanchy: If God Sleeps (1996) and And Hope to Die (2007). Both were published in Germany and in France, where they were subsequently republished in Gallimard’s Classic Crime Novels series.

  From 1986 Henshaw was a Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Australia. In 2011 he returned to writing full time. His second novel, The Snow Kimono, was published by Text in late 2014. It will be published in the United Kingdom and France in 2015.

  At various times Mark Henshaw has lived in France, Germany, Yugoslavia and the United States. He lives in Canberra and, when not writing, enjoys spending time on the Australian coast. He is married with two children.

  STEPHEN ROMEI is a journalist, writer and critic. He is literary editor of the Australian newspaper and a former editor of the Australian Literary Review.

  ALSO BY MARK HENSHAW

  The Snow Kimono

  With John Clanchy, as J. M. Calder

  If God Sleeps

  And Hope to Die

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Mark Henshaw 1988

  Introduction copyright © Stephen Romei 2014

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  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 by Penguin 1988

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2014

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922182555

  Ebook ISBN: 9781925095463

  Author: Henshaw, Mark, 1951-

  Title: Out of the line of fire / by Mark Henshaw ; introduced by Stephen Romei.

  Series: Text classics.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Where Truth Lies

  by Stephen Romei

  Out of the Line of Fire

  Part One

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Two

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Three

  Chapter 20

  Text Classics

  Where Truth Lies

  by Stephen Romei

  MARK Henshaw’s enigmatic and intriguing novel Out of the Line of Fire, published in 1988, the nation’s bicentenary year, sparked a debate about Australian writers’ place in the world and the relationship of their work to exciting developments elsewhere. It was the same year that Love in the Time of Cholera was first published in English—Gabriel García Márquez being the novelist who Peter Carey says ‘threw open the door I had been so feebly scratching on’. Eminent Australian critics such as Don Anderson, Peter Pierce and Helen Daniel lauded this debut novel by a thirty-seven-year-old Canberra-born writer, both for its European sensibility and postmodern inclinations, making comparisons with authors such as Italo Calvino and Peter Handke (who are among those with cameos in the book). Others complained on the same grounds, with David Parker arguing that Henshaw’s sophisticated European setting and high-literary references, and readers’ appreciation of same, were merely a new manifestation of the old cultural cringe. (‘Burying the hick, speaking as the chic’ was a clever line.)

  It’s not every novel that arouses such passions, not by a long shot. Out of the Line of Fire was shortlisted for the 1989 Miles Franklin Literary Award, though the laurel went to Carey for Oscar and Lucinda which, due to a shift in the Miles Franklin timetable, had already won the Booker. As an aside, it is to the credit of the judges that Henshaw’s novel, with its ambiguous connection to ‘Australian life’, was recognised, when in more recent times important works such as David Malouf’s Ransom and J. M. Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus have not been.

  So what is Out of the Line of Fire about? Well, that’s a good question, one I suspect the author—most authors?—would prefer go unanswered. As there will be readers who are encountering the book for the first time, I will not give away too much of the plot—the novel is on one level a thriller, after all—and I most certainly will not reveal the radical ending, which readers tend to take as a slap in the face or a pat on the back, depending on what they believe a novel is supposed to do. But here is a synopsis, just so you know the book you hold in your hands is not about, say, a child befriending a pelican.

  Out of the Line of Fire is in three parts. In the opening section we meet a narrator, an unnamed Australian writer living in an apartment building in ‘romantic Heidelberg, Germany’s oldest university town’ at the start of the 1980s. He is befriended by Wolfi Schönborn, a brilliant Austrian student of philosophy. He becomes fascinated with Wolfi’s early life and fractured family. But this narrator is an outsider. We are reminded, via Kafka, that Australia was a penal colony. In Europe in the early 1980s, Australia signifies only distance, physical and cultural. ‘For a long time now,’ the narrator tells us, ‘I have had the impression that I observe life but don’t participate in it, that somehow life flows straight through me as if I were transparent.’

  He makes a study trip to Rome and when he returns Wolfi is gone, to Berlin it is said. ‘It was as though he had never existed, and a couple of weeks later I returned to Australia without having seen or heard from him again.’ So, in the space of twenty-odd pages, we have cause to wonder about the very existence of our narrator and our protagonist.

  At the end of part one, the narrator, back home in Australia in September 1982, receives in the post a ‘carefully wrapped cardboard carton’ which contains Wolfi’s writings, along with photographs, news clippings, letters, postcards and other miscellany. This is accompanied by an ‘infuriatingly brief’ note: ‘Perhaps you can make something of this.’

  In part two of the novel, the narrator retreats behind a curtain, becoming the unseen editor parsing Wolfi’s papers to try to reconstruct his life: his intense relationship with his mother and sister, Elena; his deflowering by Andrea, a prostitute hired by his grandmother; his involvement, in Berlin, with the members of an experimental theatre group, most importantly the charismatic, criminal Karl. This long section contains the e
xplicit sex and violence that confronted some readers when the novel was published.

  The scene with the prostitute is pivotal. It also has one of the funniest lines I’ve read in fiction: ‘For the first time in my life, with Andrea bent tenderly over me, I became conscious of the real implications of the Hegelian dialectic…’ The experience is transformative in other ways, too. ‘I am a man,’ Wolfi announces to his family. Elena is impressed. She kisses him on the mouth, and ‘After that night things were never to be the same.’

  In the short and powerful final section of the novel the narrator, on an academic trip to Berlin in June 1986, stumbles across information that leads him to find out what happened to Wolfi, the role Karl played in his fate, and the true nature of Wolfi’s relationships with his father, mother and sister. Or maybe not. As I have said, the reader has a surprise in store that puts phrases such as ‘what happened to’ and ‘true nature’ on shifting ground.

  Henshaw makes no secret of his metafictional intention to interrogate the lines between fiction and reality, between writer, character and reader. Four pages in, the narrator muses:

  So there appear to be at least two problems confronting the writer writing about real events. Firstly, the words he or she uses seem to add some sort of fictionalizing distortion to the events they purport to describe and, secondly, even when a writer thinks they have got it right there still appears to be infinite room for ambiguity and imprecision. You begin to wonder where truth actually lies.

  ‘Where truth lies’ would be a good alternative title for this novel. The actual title words appear once, when we read of the late-teen Wolfi being awoken one morning by a shaft of sunlight reaching through the shutters of a hotel bedroom he shares with his sister, who is sixteen. He moves his head ‘out of the line of fire’ and looks at his sleeping sibling. Her left breast has come free of her nightdress. This ‘sudden confrontation with Elena’s emerging beauty’ is overwhelming, agonising, a rending of the soul. ‘It was as though, unable to raise my hands quickly enough, I had suddenly been blinded by the glare from some accidentally perceived truth.’ Another sort of fire, it suggests the start of something dangerous.

  Later, when Wolfi is being persuaded by Karl to mug an older, ‘dignified-looking’ man cruising for gay sex in a public toilet—a sequence that in its irrational yet unavoidable violence evokes the climactic scene of Camus’s The Outsider—he thinks (or so we are told): ‘I felt like a character in a novel written by himself who runs into a character in a novel written by himself.’ Indeed, Henshaw starts this winking at the reader before the novel even begins. It makes me chuckle, still, to read in my 1988 Penguin edition the standard disclaimer that ‘All characters are fictional. Any similarity between persons living or dead is purely coincidental’ and then, on the facing page, the dedication ‘For Wolfi’. I know some people don’t like being winked at, but in this case I think it is a compliment: the author is inviting us to take part in his creation.

  When I read Out of the Line of Fire a quarter of a century ago I was about the same age as its pointedly unreliable narrator. I was thrilled to find an Australian novelist writing about European authors I was only just getting to know: Calvino and Handke, Kafka and Camus, Robert Musil. Rereading the book I better appreciate the nuances of Henshaw’s conversation with these writers.

  There is a scene in part three where the narrator, seeking information on Wolfi, is granted an audience with a Berlin policeman. The Inspector (that capital I makes me think of Gogol) listens to Wolfi’s story impassively. ‘When I finished he remained silent for some minutes. “You like Handke?” he said finally.’ These are the same words Wolfi puts to the narrator early in part one, at the start of their friendship, yet in the intervening pages the question has evolved from something innocent and happy to something uncertain and unnerving.

  So why, in the years after his exhilarating debut, didn’t we hear more from Mark Henshaw, who is now sixty-three? The simple answer is that he stopped speaking, in a literary sense. Aside from a couple of crime novels (written, as J. M. Calder, in collaboration with his fellow Canberran John Clanchy), Henshaw did not publish, excepting the catalogues and other pieces produced in the course of his day job as a curator at the National Gallery of Australia.

  That long silence was broken in late 2014 with the publication of a new novel, The Snow Kimono. Its existence resolves a question its author might appreciate: is Mark Henshaw, author of the remarkable Australian novel Out of the Line of Fire, real? Yes, he is.

  Out of the Line of Fire

  Ort und Personen der Handlung sind

  frei erfunden. Jede Ähnlichkeit mit wirklichen

  Personen ist rein zufällig.

  All characters are fictional.

  Any similarity between persons

  living or dead is purely

  coincidental.

  FOR WOLFI

  Acknowledgements

  Ludwig Wittgenstein’s letters to Bertrand Russell are taken from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell [Unwin Books, 1975].

  Ramon Fernandez, extended quotes from Internal Exile and other stories [Kreuzer Verlag, 1982].

  Klaus Brambach, ‘W.C.W. meets H.H. in Central Park’ from Neue Gedichte [Suhrkamp, 1981].

  I am grateful to Dr T. Hatzenbühler for allowing me to use five lines from an article by him that appeared in Schrift, vol. 9, no. 1, which was originally given as a paper to the Verein Deutscher Schriftsteller in June 1986.

  W.H. Walsh’s essay on Kant in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Crowell Collier and Macmillan, Inc, 1967] was of considerable use to me in the transcription of some sections of Part Two.

  Note: Wolfi’s name is pronounced ‘Volfi’. The initial syllable rhymes with ‘golf’. Andrea is pronounced ‘Un-dray-a’.

  ONE

  …and since your outer and your inner world are soldered together like the two halves of a shell and enclose you, the mollusk…

  Jean Paul

  Even mechanistic views of man which see him as a complex of complex chemical reactions still lead to the most astonishing situation. Here is an arrangement of matter which takes other matter, re-shapes it, and then refers to it as ‘art’!

  Swen Rhahkma

  1

  You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. These are the words Italo Calvino selected to open his novel If on a winter’s night a traveller. Astonishingly he sets them out in the same order. Had Walter Abish chosen the same words he might have begun, after, of course, placing them in alphabetical order: You, Italo Calvino, are a winter’s night traveler about to begin reading a new novel If. But as yet he has not, and until he does we will have to wait.

  In fact Calvino begins his novel: ‘Stai per cominciare a leggere il nuovo romanzo Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore di Italo Calvino.’ Thus the original avoids a peculiar problem which arises only in the translation—‘viagiatore’ with a single ‘g’ would simply be wrong.

  The cover of the 1982 English Picador edition of the novel shows the title, ‘If on a winter’s night a traveller’, set into a transcription of the first page. It too begins: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel If on a winter’s night a traveller.’ There is already then a difference, admittedly a minor difference, between the first line of the text on the cover of the novel and the first line of the text in the body of the novel itself—the difference between ‘traveler’ and ‘traveller.’ But is this difference as minor, as insignificant or innocuous, as it first appears? Isn’t ‘traveller’, with its double ‘ll’, English, whereas ‘traveler’, with its single ‘ll’, is American? And doesn’t this alert us to the fact that, as a translation, it has been filtered through a particular linguistic, cultural and conceptual sieve, that an English translation is likely to be substantially different from an American one, and that if we were to compare the cumulative effect of the differences which might arise in these two hypothetical translations against the origina
l, might we not end up reading three entirely different novels? And, in fact, isn’t this part of what If on a winter’s night a traveller is about; not the problems of translation (at least, not exclusively), but the nature of the problem of the perception of the original in the first place.

  Beginning a novel then is a difficult thing. Books have been written on the subject, from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: ‘Vse schastlivye sem’i pokhozhi drug na druga, kazhdaya neschastlivaya sem’ya neschastliva po-svoemu’ [All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way] to Camus’ The Outsider: ‘Aujourd’hui Maman est morte’ [Mother died today]. And what about Kafka’s problematical opening to The Trial: ‘Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben’ [Someone must have slandered Josef K]?

  Whatever the case, this first sharp barb designed to ensnare the reader, to capture his or her attention, is likely to cost the writer more time and effort than any other sentence in the entire novel.

  But what does one do if the novel is based on fact?

  2

  Through the half open door I can see the complementary arcs of an arm and a leg. The gap in the doorway is narrow and I cannot see the person’s back, although I can tell that they are facing away from me. Held in the outstretched arm is a wooden-handled mirror and because the arm is raised the shirt sleeve has fallen back to the bend in the elbow leaving most of the forearm bare. It is difficult to tell what the person, who is male, is doing. He could be practising fencing and even while I watch he appears to execute strange little lunging movements. He is muttering to himself as he does so but I am unable to make out just what it is he is saying.

  The upstairs toilet flushes and I assume that once again it has been fixed. This is the second time in the week I have been here that it has been blocked. As I move back down the corridor towards the stairs I can hear what sounds like an argument break out in the courtyard below. Then the ground-floor door crashes violently to and someone begins heavily ascending the stairs. I lean over the balustrade and my landlady’s large floral buttocks appear briefly on the landing below. I know this is going to be unpleasant. She has already made it clear that we are barely tolerated. Most of us are foreigners, we use too much hot water, our German is bad and worst of all, we compromise her social standing.