A NOVEL APPROACH TO PUBLISHING POETRY
Robyn Cohen

The Cape Times Review
May 3 2005

Finuala Dowling's first published novel, What Poets Need, is getting much-desired rave reviews, reports Robyn Cohen, who spoke to her at home in Kalk Bay.

A recent obituary on Nobel laureate Saul Bellow suggested that his work was very much a biography of place and in a sense, Finuala Dowling's novel What Poets Need (Penguin) is a biography of a house Ð a decaying house in Kalk Bay with John the Poet in residence.

Almost 40, John's future is not looking bright, financially, artistically and romantically. He is home alone with his niece and her issues. Her mother, John's sister, has gone walkabout in pursuit of fulfilling her own desires. In addition to being cook, schlepper and surrogate parent, John battles with his own issues - like the fact that the love of his life, Theresa, is married.

In obsessive e-mails to Theresa, he muses about life (his and others', love, desire). To fix gutters and pay bills and do most unpoetic chores, John becomes a scribe of verses used on the menu of a local restaurant. This may be a modern version of the artist's garret, but John is no recluse as he feeds himself (and his soul?) at eateries in Kalk Bay, Muizenberg and surrounds. Threaded throughout the novel are John's poems and the poems he is gathering for an anthology he is collating.

Dowling cleverly weaves prose and poetry into a delicious read. At the centre is the old house, providing a framework, containing John, his aspirations and inspirations.

The poems scattered throughout the novel are witty, humorous and often painful evocations of everything from how to clean the house to creativity. They are all Dowling's, previously published in small journals and in her debut anthology of poems, titled I Flying (Snailpress, 2002).

I had read that Dowling wrote this novel as a device for getting her poetry in print. This was not the case. I Flying was published to much acclaim - critically and commercially. She was awarded the Ingrid Jonker prize. The first edition sold out so quickly that a second printing followed. In the world of poetry publishing, this is spectacular. Poetry does not sell. Poetry in Cape Town with teensy poetically inclined audiences definitely does not sell.

Indeed, quips Dowling, you don't write poetry with the intention of making money. "You have to be cooked to do that." Because there is no expectation, or shouldn't be, of sales, it frees you, she reflects, to write for the sake of writing and for the sake of writing for the 10 or 11 people out there who want you to write. "Poetry is read in the funniest of places in Cape Town. People say: 'Are you giving a reading Ð please let us know, we'll be there.' They wanted me to write." Pausing, she glances out of the window towards the bay and continues, "They smile and smile when I read out aloud."

After a moment she adds: "I think that poetry was such a gift because it helped me to find my voice."

Dowling has a masters and PhD, has worked as an English lecturer and is teaching English at Unisa. Although she has taught poetry for over 20 years, her career as a poet only began about six years ago when she was going through a bad time, financially and emotionally: "I am very new to this Ð poetry took me by surprise. I always wanted to be a writer, but I never thought it would be (pause) poetry."

For a long time, her writing career took second place to academia. Talking of which, there is an anti-academic backlash in the novel where John's father warns him that being a scholar reduces one's chances of being a creative writer.

Dowling: "There are two main reasons Ð life is just marking, meeting and (departmental) in-fighting and I don't think that is good for a writer's spirit. You're almost a servant to other writers."

You've managed to free yourself, I prompt. "Yes, but I am aware that it has slowed me down. I am only getting my first novel published now at the age of 42, but then again," she chuckles wistfully, "I always take the scenic route. In my family, you never go through Du Toitskloof tunnel, but right over the mountain pass. You take your wagon and oxen and look at the views. (Long pause) That's what I have been doing Ð I've been at the picnic sites of life."

That may be, but in the last five years, there's been plenty happening at those picnic sites. Her play, the Bungee Writing Finals won the Audience's Choice Award at Spier as part of the Pansa (Performing Arts Network of South Africa) new play writing festival. She has worked hard at her craft as novelist, paid the proverbial dues of rejection and disappointment. Before What Poets Need, she wrote two novels which were rejected: "I'm glad. On reflection, I am glad they were rejected."

Ironically, or perhaps serendipitously, the genesis of What Poets Need is a result of her poems. She contacted an international literary agent, hoping to publish abroad. "We'll take on a poet, if the poet has actually written a novel," she was told. So, off she went and wrote What Poets Need. "It was cheeky," she chortles. The bulk of the book was written over three months, during the summer of 2003 and 2004. Her family, in particular a sister who was visiting from the Channel Islands, looked after her daughter Beaty (now 11), ensuring that she did not miss out on her holidays.

Writing from 5.30am until 6pm, without much break, the poet of Kalk Bay allowed herself a day on Christmas and half a day on New YearÕs Day. She stops herself mid-sentence and remarks that it took immense discipline not to partake in the festivities of the season and the open house status of her family home.

The house (built in the 1920s) has been home to Dowling since she was nine. Before that, the family lived in a thatched house in Lakeside which burnt down.

It is a large family. Dowling is the seventh of eight children. In addition to her daughter, Dowling currently shares the house with her mother, Eve van der Byl, a brother and sister.

Current is the operative word as the shape of the house is constantly altered by whoever is staying. Two nephews stayed last night Ð somewhere in the honeycomb (of the house), she gestures. As if on cue, brother Nicky, who lives in Rondebosch, wanders in for a coffee. He says hello and discreetly disappears.

While we are talking, sister Cara walks up the path but does not venture in, possibly making her way inside through another route. Clearly, boundaries are respected in this labyrinth of rooms. They are a talented and creative family. Dowling's mother and father (Paddy Dowling) were radio broadcasters (Springbok Radio, English service). Sister Tessa lives in Muizenberg and runs a company called African Voices, which facilitates courses in Xhosa and Zulu and other languages. Brother Richard is a shiatsu masseur: "We don't have accountants or doctors", she sighs, obviously quite relieved.

Anyhow, Dowling says her self-enforced seclusion while writing the book was difficult, particularly on Sunday afternoons with "everyone gathering". It sounds very much like a salon with a Peggy Guggenheim or Gertrude Stein in attendance.

One can just picture this talented and creative family and their friends reclining on the covered porch with fabulous views while inside, Dowling wrote her novel. The house could do with some work but it is not the ruin I envisaged from the book.

Indeed, Dowling is not John, although there are commonalities between his and her life, but it is very much a work of fiction.

During the summer, Dowling wrote sitting in her little study off the kitchen. The cats and dogs in the menagerie kept strictly out of her way and as long as she did not go to the loo, she was left alone. The family did not disturb her? "No, there's a tremendous respect for my privacy by everyone.

"Each day, the family would chorus: 'How many words?'" She aimed for 1Ê000 worlds a day. "I'm noting all this, so people will know that writing is not for weaklings and sissies," she laughs again, but it is laughter which is edged by obvious relief as she recalls those hot months sitting in her study while everyone else was at the beach.

Throughout the writing of the novel, her poems helped her along and in a sense, became her muse as she took inspiration from them.

The idea of imbedding the poems in the text was not one which she intended to pursue in this book.

"I wrote the first page, thinking that he (main protagonist) would be an illustrator of anatomy books Ð a man living in Kalk Bay, being left alone with his niece, struggling financially and emotionally, in love with a person he can't have.

"And then on page two, it was like this message flashed from somewhere else - almost on a spiritual level - that he was a poet. I thought I could do that, in another book, setting poetry among prose - but the two books came together in one."

Writing from a male perspective allowed her to distance herself from the character: "I am after all also a poet living in an old house in Kalk Bay." It also allowed her to angle her gaze on child-rearing and house-keeping from a different view point: "If you put those things in the hands of a klutzy male, it is not easy."

The confidence that came from writing with a male voice was also an advantage in that it allowed John to be jealous, angry, full of libido - perhaps in a different way to if he were a she. Shifting gears, as if jumping from one line of a poem to another, she murmurs: "I'm going to write from the point of a woman next time."

Talking of which, what happened with the international literary agent after Dowling had written the required novel? "I e-mailed her in London and she replied: "That's great that you've published a novel, but we only deal with unpublished manuscripts."

"So guess what I have to do next! Another novel."