It is the story of Victorian social mores superimposed on one of the most violent cultures on earth, of pockets of tenderness amid extreme brutality, and of a remarkable tribe of fugitives, missionaries, and romantics drawn to this remote outpost of the world.
The deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius. In the end, it is about love enduring when nothing else is left.
It is the story of Victorian social mores superimposed on one of the most violent cultures on earth, of pockets of tenderness amid extreme brutality, and of a remarkable tribe of fugitives, missionaries, and romantics drawn to this remote outpost of the world.
The deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius. In the end, it is about love enduring when nothing else is left.
Paperback
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
It is the story of Victorian social mores superimposed on one of the most violent cultures on earth, of pockets of tenderness amid extreme brutality, and of a remarkable tribe of fugitives, missionaries, and romantics drawn to this remote outpost of the world.
The deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius. In the end, it is about love enduring when nothing else is left.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781907970054 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Daunt Books |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2012 |
About the Author
C. S. Godshalk, who lives north of Boston, began Kalimantaan while working in southeast Asia. Her short fiction has been widely anthologized, her last two stories selected by Mark Helprin and Richard Ford for Best American Short Stories. Of one, Joseph Coates in the Chicago Tribune said, "a small Flaubertian masterpiece, alone worth the price of the book."
Read an Excerpt
Half the face sags as if something has pulled down on it, the shoulder sloping oddly from the chair. She circles him, then slowly folds herself to the floor and takes the wrist in both her hands. Sunlight slides across the wood and climbs her knees. Her thighbones ache as they ached in her first pregnancy, but she does not move. It is the first time in forty years that she has sat alone in a room with this man without some strain. It was in this room with its few thick pieces of furniture that he mortified her beyond reason, she standing naked but for a little rose-veiled hat.
No one can tell this story. Every time you nail it to earth, it stares up at you with a different face. You think you know; then a word, a phrase in a letter, an expression on a face long dead says it was not that way at all. Lytton tried. He, perhaps, would have been best able, a natural observer, a professional accumulator of information. He wrote ten pages and gave up.
In one of his notebooks there is a description of the Yellow Insurrection in two sentences in the margin of notes on the family of pitcher plants. Two sentences to describe that month of hell and thirty-seven pages on a plant.
Yet the story appears most clearly in the marginalia. Guilt, remorse, rage, desire, sorrow that defies description appear most fiercely in postscripts, addenda. The horror described in the margin of a minor botanical discovery; sexual paroxysm along the edge of a recipe; bastard notes to no one -- paper stuffed in cupboards, chests, boxes, written in solitude, meant for no earthly audience -- come closest to a true chronicle. Some songs, too, may have escaped with their pure message, and maybe Dawes' dissertations, for the maniac faced everything head on.
She opens her eyes and breathes in the salt air, the fist like cold lead in her lap. There were singular conditions to that life, holding sway in that place and nowhere else. The eerie speed of some things and the wretched slowness of others. The speed with which one sickened and died. The eternal lagging of a letter. The months it took to work through those forests and the blinding velocity of the rivers, a flash flood carrying you sixty miles in a day. The almost daily attendance of death and the violent inrush of life.
There were other things. The electromagnetic spectrum extended well beyond its known range in that place. It simply kept going, sending out tentacles at either end and these crossing, merging. Colors seeped through the fingertips, the soles of the feet, warmth coated the retina, a throbbing sexuality pounded in the ear. Chairs moved, birds spoke, trees commanded courtesy. And love -- blind, skewed, intense -- bloomed and bloomed.
There was the currency of heads, their removal and collection, cherished coffers of semanggat. There was the flow of merchandise, medicinals, light luxuries, rotted dainties, youth disposable as water. Then the mesmeric beauty of the place, its people, its rivers, its music resonating in the bones of the skull, the symphysis pubis.
She hears voices. The night before, she heard Gideon's laughter as if he were as near as he is now, resonant between rows of daylilies. They stood in her mother's cutting garden at the start of her life. A large female child and the Rajah Barr in dank wool. She gazed at the gloves in that fist, an idiot's idea of proper attire in midsummer, and he laughed, tossing them on the hedge.
She had gone with him, out to those rivers and airless forests and plains of mud. A big girl, eyes wondrous, easy to water, one of those women who is, in ways, a natural embarrassment, standing at the brink of it all with a box of watercolors to record her impressions of tropical flora and aboriginal life.
She heard other voices. She heard Dickie. She saw that long muscled body and gilded head, the crooked feet propped on the porch at Lingga. She saw the broad back turned to the memsahibs, the glistening yellow arc singeing the lily beds with a contempt he could not put into words. His cousin, twenty years younger, a more brutal, efficient version of himself. She sat between them in her bridal years and realized she sat between halves of a single organism, their distaste for each other not impeding a queer synergy. It was wondrous how imperfect, incomplete beings accomplish, in the end, more than the rest of us.
A rudimentary system of residencies was established during that first decade to accommodate forts on four neighboring rivers. The fort at Lundu served as the seat for the first outlying district. These were nothing more than thick stone or wood structures in the middle of a thousand square miles of forest, housing boys, turning them, over isolated, dangerous years, into adept, queer men; boys passing through no middle phase, simply awakening one morning, dangerous themselves; desperately craving, above all, their leave, their holiday, a commodity of time which, when gained, was invariably misplaced; at a loss when faced with prolonged conversation, a woman in a hat, roads and road signs; boys, able to make a five-week journey through unmapped mud, trembling at the back of a two-penny tram -- Reedy sitting for a whole day in Piccadilly Circus, his brain frozen; relieved beyond reason to be back, beginning, almost instantly, to await the next reprieve -- at heart savages, yet in the middle of their own deaths calling their mothers. They were, in such vast areas, innocent. They were selfless and brutal. There was Beard, giving up his own rations to his wounded Dyak lieutenant during the seige at Sut, the next winter burning this same man's longhouse to the ground for cheating on his rice tax. They were required to concentrate so fiercely on survival, normal maturation went by the wayside. One found pockets of pure infancy in a retiree. One would meet the wreck of a DO in later years at a bar in Malacca or Penang and marvel at the childlike gaze.
In the first five years, half died. Three were murdered, four died of fever, two of infection. Then there were the mysteries. Dylan, the Resident at Tigh who, at little over the age of a choirboy, had lived through most of what a man can live through in Burma, was done in, Sutton wrote in the Death Book, by a tree: Martin Dylan, killed by tree, Sadong basin, Whitsunday, 1845.
"A tree?" Barr asked. "Why in hell put that?"
"Because it were a tree." Dylan spent three weeks tracking a head party in the Sadong basin and on the twenty-second day, a week into fever, had come across a kapok, its great roots uplifted, its branches buried in the earth. "It's something they do up there," Sutton said. "There's a reason, but I don't know it. Coming upon it at the wrong time can be bad." Dylan was found, without wound, at the base of this thing.
Walter Campbell, died sort of by drowning. The whirligigs of the encebung, the betel flower, a tri-petal with a dartlike shaft, spun into Campbell's stream in the Apo Sut, a pink blizzard. It reminded him, in his malarial dreams, of young ladies at the spring ball at Spars, and he waded out, spinning over his own rapids. Death, it was agreed, could be worse.
Then there were incidents of unsuspected health. If a man was not heard from for three months, one assumed he was dead, but there was the rare happy surprise, as with Hayden in '48, his family notified, his death allocation made, walking through Cakebread's door at Hari Maya Puasa, having "gotten lost."
How did one do this for ten years? "Time contracts or expands around the least you need to do to fill a day," Smythe, a long-lived type, once explained. With fever or dysentery, you could easily fill a day with sleeping or shitting. If the least was to preserve your life and those of your men in a drawn-out raid, you could fill a day with considerable work, going, as some did, three days and nights without sleep.
The Resident, the Kandjeng-tuan, was the chief judicial officer of a division. He was responsible for revenue collection and expenditure, public works, police, and a mystical department called "general affairs." He was assisted by one or more district officers, along with Dyak pengulus and Malay tuahs, the arrangement lifted en bloc from the Indian service. Aside from a short apprenticeship with a senior man, recruits were not subjected to any but the leanest entry education. This was bestowed by Sutton and finished by Barr in the form of a little speech.
"Good news travels fast and bad news uncommonly slow. No one wishes to file a negative report. It's damned depressing. So good news piles up like gas. I have found myself sitting on a wondrous mountain of it. Discontent, extortion, smuggling, graft, false accounts, must find their way into ink. Do not converse about it, write to your superior, even if you share meals. A chat can be changed, denied, and mucked up in truly amazing ways." Thirteen years later, preparing recruits for the Batang Lupar, he would say, "Talk to each other. Give no fear or speculation the validity of ink. Allow diplomacy a chance, and again." When Sutton reminded him of his original speech, he said, "That's impossible."
The younger they were, the more they took him at his word. Old hands used to layers of hypocrisy marveled at its absence in the reports of these children. And he read them. He could not grasp six out of ten items in committee, but he recognized when something wrong or astoundingly right or ingenious stared up at him from these sheets. "I say!" he'd exclaim. "How in hell did he do that? What a capital approach. Dunn, you say? Not Dunn? Reventlow? All the more remarkable. Send my felicitations. One of the new double-bores."
He stressed accessibility. "Move around. Don't fix your route. If a man comes to you for a trivial reason, hear him. These people do not come for trivial reasons."
Kilcane was the main supply for recruits in the early years, but word eventually spread to Singapore and the Straits Settlements, and it turned out not to be hard to find English gentlemen with naval or East India background willing to spend ten years up some remote river. It had much the same appeal as the Company's service, only more so. A Bornean river was one step beyond the East India in romantic attraction and possibilities, and you did not have the heavy Company hand and cut. You could wind up with something. Then again, ten years does not look like eternity when you're nineteen, although for many it turned out that way.
Requirements were minimal. You had to be clever enough to pick up the language and customs of a primitive people, and of a bootstrapping disposition. You had to be between eighteen and twenty-two, unmarried, and to remain unmarried through your first ten years of duty. It was assumed you would take Dyak mistresses but breed up-country, not exposing these natural families to European life in Kuching or transporting them in government vessels.
For the most part, intelligent choices were made in these men.
The most successful and, in many ways, peculiar recruit in the early years was a young cousin of Barr's, Lieutenant Richard St. John Hogg: "Dickie." He passed two annual sojourns in Sarawak while on leave from the East India's marine, before joining the enterprise permanently. He was a silent young man, large and fit, with golden moustaches and eyes like flint. He had put to sea at eight as a gunner's boy and had known no other life. His superiors thought very highly of him.
Who can categorize those who are made to cast off their childhood before they can walk? They grow into strange organisms with great gaps that you fall into if you step the wrong way. Hogg was appointed for ten years to Lundu, the loneliest, most godforsaken outstation. He was twenty-two. Yet he went about his life up there in a bloodcurdling, matter-of-fact way. He learned the language of the Dyak and their habits and superstitions and simple aspirations as no other. Over that decade he established a mysterious bond with them. They became his and he became, in those years, no more nor less than a blue-eyed sea Dyak.
He had a seaman's sense of order and catalogued everything: ordnance received, fruit trees planted, cows purchased for the fort, heads confiscated -- these aligned in the bottom fort room, labeled as to who and where and when taken and by whom and how and where and when they were punished for it. For leisure, he taught himself to read French and sang little ditties he composed in that language. He made remarkably accurate drawings of his surroundings and neighbors at Lundu. There was a wonderful series of sketches of a wasp and her nest that he recorded over several weeks. And he fornicated nonstopping.
The first time Dawes passed through Lundu he was nonplussed. "Do you know what he's doing up there?" he said to Sutton. "Do you know what he's doing three hundred miles up-country, surrounded by twenty thousand heathen, dysentery, barmy solitude, anything female having more than two feet or wearing thirty pounds of brass coils and earlobes to her armpits? He's teaching himself French. French like no one's heard in this world. He's got all these little books. And he draws. Pictures of bugs. That's all I saw, but Reventlow says he has a whole 'curriculum' worked out." And he was single-handedly proving his thesis of the races. "They should be mixed." Peachy grinned, grinding his fist into his palm. "Breed until nothing's left but blond, blue-eyed Dyaks as far as the eye can see!"
Hogg never, to anyone's recollection, showed fear or pain. One got the sense that he had not so much conquered them as never had them. He addressed himself to the problem or assignment at hand, and anything could be stripped of its terror, its hopelessness, by procedure. Procedure was his rod and his staff; he invested all faith and love in it. His rod was procedure and its handmaids were French, sex, and entomology. He seemed beyond ailment. To get himself through fevers, he would recite passages from Bowditch, his blistering feet slowly feeling the cool bedrock of the words. The earth revolves around the sun, and since the direction of the earth's rotation and revolution are the same, it completes a rotation with respect to the stars in less time than with respect to the sun. "How much less?" he screamed one night, at a malarial peak. "Three minutes fifty-six seconds mean solar units," he answered, and felt himself sink from the burning heights, limbs cooling. Through the arctic segments, he'd imagine a fat lady he saw when he was six in a tent show at Romney Bridge, huge and pink, with a thin film of sweat her only true attire, a spectacle of fat, costing him five pence for two minutes of viewing, immense breasts bursting a little silk halter, monstrous thighs, the crowded tent all heat and tumescence, nothing again ever cold. He had these tricks. Later, he didn't need them.
The man was not cruel, but over the years he developed the habit of power and it made him awful. Within his vast inland territory, he was used to complete obedience. A sudden fixity in those pieces of flint was enough. He had a violent temper and when he tried to swallow it, it made him physically sick. Consideration was reserved for the Dyak. He had no illusions about them, but he took pains to put himself in their skin. He was tenacious with enemies and had a long and dangerous memory.
Many of his successes could be explained by the fact that all his life he continued to be at sea. No one took advantage of the waterways, tides, bores, freshets, and other liquid phenomena like Hogg. Over time, the country entered his every orifice. All his sinews and blood ways and the taut neural web that he considered himself were invaded. He breathed it, ingested it, pumped it, and defecated it. He had one or two bouts of wretched loneliness in the first two years. After five, he no longer wished to come down.
His great talent was for war. No one could muster the Dyak for battle like Dickie Hogg. He used what ordnance and personnel were issued and took sublime care of them both. For two decades, the Tuan Mudah, as he was called, and his thousands of sea Dyaks became a formidable force at his cousin's disposal, fighting with Dyak cunning and the discipline of a marine brigade. The cogs would begin to turn in a relatively unimpressive way. He would send his calling-out spear with a string of knots for the number of days before these people must join him. In this way, he could raise six thousand men in a remarkably short time, the only payment being the opportunity to take heads. It was a maniacal way to keep order. With heads as payment, feuds were strung out for generations. Yet more and more rivers were opened, and these were kept safe for Europeans to travel a hundred miles upstream.
While Dyaks continued to take heads in government ballehs, he followed Kuching's directive, dealing with them severely for taking heads on their own. If they even consulted omen birds for an expedition, he sent his Sakarangs to burn their longhouses to ash.
His internal record-keeping was meticulous, but his reports were odd. One came away intrigued with what wasn't in them. "The conversation was a little stiff," he'd say of a meeting with chiefs from a newly annexed tributary. "It was interrupted by them going away from time to time, and many casualties." Another account of this incident, gleaned from one of his Dyak lieutenants passing through on leave, included a longhouse burning, an execution line, and two strangulations under nets.
"I hate these things," he said, when he was questioned at the astana a year later. He refilled his glass and settled into a chair. "I hate interrupting decent maneuvers with conversation."
He had what he called his small crises, described by others as bouts of violent paranoia, after which he would sleep -- in a chair, a boat -- and wake up totally refreshed. At these times, he was known to seek company.
He was not completely alone in Lundu for his full ten years. Reventlow was sent up the last year to assist him. The boy was bright and eager, and Hogg taught him everything he could absorb. He showed him how to keep order and discipline among the native fortmen, how to dismantle and clean all the firearms in the station, how to bake tapioca root and roast dragonflies and the big white slugs the Dyak pried out of dead wood, and how to bore and weight a blowpipe and develop the upper arm muscles necessary to use it. He showed him the wonderful way a mud wasp makes her home and how to sexually please the Dyak. For diversion, he made love to him once or twice himself.
While Barr came out unfinished, Hogg came out complete. He acted as the complete act, superimposing himself totally on the place in which he existed in time. Lundu was never Lundu when he was present. It was "the land trod upon by the Tuan Mudah."
One speculates what it would have been like if their appearance on the scene had been reversed. Barr was a romantic. His decisions were romantic, abrupt, attuned to the air he sniffed, and in that place, in that time, unerringly correct. Only a romantic could have cut out that cockeyed kingdom, and only a flat realist could have held it together and methodically expanded it. This was Hogg. Yet it was he who looked the romantic. He, in fact, looked demented, with his flowing blond hair and chawat. Dolan called him "a Dyak with English information." Depression, a chronic problem for young district officers up-country, was unknown to him. If he felt depressed, he looked around for the cause -- a long wet period, the start of ague -- and usually found it. Each year he gained in autonomy, rajah Ulu of his subrealm.
"He's doing a damned fine job up there," Barr confided to Kilcane, "but I can't stand him."
"Oh, he's all wight," the other replied. "Just don't make the mistake of ever asking his opinion. He'll give it, and then he might twy thinking again, and with six thousand sea Dyaks behind him that's unwise. You must keep on the wight footing with your cousin. You are dealing, at bottom, with a nine-year-old gunner's boy."
Later, after his decade was up and he stayed on, Hogg found it even harder to pay calls on civilization. His arrival from the interior always had something preposterous and sinister about it. "Have you seen him?" Dawes asked. "Wow-wow-wow! Comes in with five hundred personal guards. Head high as a topsail. Switchin' to ducks at the armory. Don't know if you're beholding a penglima decked out as toff or vice versa."
When down-country, Hogg billeted at the fort. He took care of his business, picked up supplies, and left, his men waiting on the outskirts of the town until his signal to leave. In '54, however, walking upstream from the fort to cross to the astana, he passed a small but particularly orderly garden, die-straight rows of cabbages with strong wire fencing, pea vines tied to bamboo trellises with rattan bows. Returning in the dark by the same route, his eye drifted to a slice of light from a doorway above this place, in it a very pregnant woman who seemed to gaze straight at him, although she could not have truly seen him in the dark. This image returned to him at Lundu, so that he found, on his sortie down fifteen months later, he walked past the garden several times until he met its owner.
Oddly enough, Hogg came to feel at ease with no one white in those years except Mrs. Dolan. She never really spoke back to him, in the beginning, and looked annoyed at being addressed by this strange creature, half Englishman, half savage, while she tended her vines or melon bed. Yet after a while, because of his obvious harmlessness to her, his "need" to converse, and the peculiar innocence in those flint eyes, she let him rattle on. Unlike anyone except Dolan, he addressed her as Maureen. "Maureen," he'd say warmly, shyly, but then everything else sounded like a recitation from some naval ordnance manual. He knew it. To pull himself up, he would sometimes inject a non sequitur, commenting on the weather or paying a compliment to her garden or even, once, coughing violently.
He normally conversed with no one other than to establish facts or give orders, criticism, and a rare word of praise. Even at sea, he never had conversations longer than two sentences unless they involved something sea-minded. He spoke with his Dyak lieutenants in interchanges that waxed poetic, on occasion, but never conversational.
She'd glance at him, a handsome face that seemed as if it had been battered and then healed slightly askew. She came to think of him in the same category as some of the interesting forest specimens her husband brought in on his excursions with his dogs -- strange, occasionally beautiful creatures. Yet there was a day she put down her trowel, crossed her arms over her latest pregnancy, and began to listen to the shy, ragged recital. It was a description of his childhood. She could not conceive of him in infancy, any infancy, except perhaps hatching out of some steel orb.
"I entered Her Majesty's navy at eight," he said, rocking a small sphere in her melon bed with his boot. A little serpent slithered from the crater and, without seeming to reach for it, he flipped a short knife, pinning the creature below the head. "After twelve years I applied for my discharge, but owing to the kindness of Captain James Peel, I gained my lieutenant's step. They gave me two years to serve here. And then I returned. The Admiralty is glad to do this, I think." He withdrew the blade, wiped it on his thigh, and replaced it. "They feel naval officers are likely to be of service in the improvement of native states. This is true enough, I think. The discipline and obedience you take away are of great value. Don't you find it with the children, Maureen? I mean, you cannot learn to command until you've learned to obey." It was the kind of thing he said before one of his brutal disciplinary actions, yet here it was lapped in the tonalities of love. It was the only vocabulary he knew. It was rather like making a hat with nuts and bolts, odd and painful but still a hat.
"You come off ship with a sack of useful things. A little soldiering, knowledge of the artillery drill, care of ordnance, navigation, carpentering, an eye for management and order." He looked admiringly at the evenly spaced rows of beans, the neat line of wash. "That fellow may have a mate. I'd keep an eye out, Maureen."
"Aye," she said, and began again with her trowel. In the almost horizontal light, her hair wore a fiery halo, and before he knew what he was doing, he reached down and touched it lightly with his fingertips. She flipped the trowel around her head without looking up and continued to work.
"There you are," he said to himself, walking upstream. "There you are, you poor, fucking fool. You've made love, true love, for the first time in your life, to a pregnant woman who thought you were an insect."
For eight years, Mrs. Dolan had no idea of the altar erected to her in that fierce heart two hundred miles to the west. No one suspected this formidable individual who bedded Bidayuh, Melanaus, Dusuns, Muruts, and Sakarangs had fallen into irredeemable and timeless love with the C of E stick. Madness comes in all forms. "But this," Dawes was to say, "takes the cake."
Hogg would love two things in his life: the savage Mua Ari, a worthy and entertaining opponent for a decade and a half, and Mrs. Dolan; and here he loved purely, deeply, like a young, young boy, this doyenne of laundry wires and bleach solutions, this remarkable shaper of spaces -- legumes planted not only in rows but in concentric circles of increasing radii giving the Dyak final conviction that she was a witch, this field lieutenant of a crisp little army -- amahs, children, husband, animals -- all adhering smoothly to her will. She was "the distant thing." The distant thing he could never touch, antipode to all his dark accomplishments. She had hovered just out of range, in other forms, all his life a light-filled, forgiving thing. She was all fragility. She stamped her foot and it was laughable. If she had been robust, she would not have pierced him so. Yet his was not an ethereal love. What flesh she had burned him fiercely, the hundreds of brown spreading thighs across his forests drying into dust. The delightfully warm course of blood, when he spoke to her of things he could speak of to no other and not feel the fool, reached an organ he could not place. From here, it was but a little leap to the ruby aura of her hair, the nubs of breasts, the cool, efficient hands that he imagined, in the months and years ahead, wantonly caressing his long body. He wished her to suckle him, to croon to him. The only "faith" he ever betrayed was the belief that someday fate would kick out the bulwarks of both their lives and they would flow together.
In the meantime, in his oddly domestic dreams, she would lift her chin in a doorway, a garden bed. "There you are!" she would say, her eyes drinking him in. "Heart of my heart," she would say these words.
Table of Contents
There are some stories so strange and yet full of heart that they are told and retold in the bars and backwaters of the world. This is one of that rare breed -- a story of bizarre achievement and singular love.One hundred and sixty years ago, a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world that resulted, boasting stone quays, elegant gardens, churches, and musical levees, eventually encompassed a territory the size of England, its expansion campaigns paid for in human heads. In this world, a version of Victorian colonial society collided with one of the most violent cultures on earth. The results were often startling -- pockets of tenderness and extreme brutality appearing in odd corners. A small tribe of fugitives, adventurers, criminals, and saints -- the madly talented and the simply mad -- peopled this world. This is their story.
The deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius.
What People are Saying About This
This book is a lovely surprise. I really never wanted it to end. It's like being taken to a magical unknown planet, yet suddenly realizing it all takes place on this globe, in mysterious Borneo and Sarawak: a beautifully written, elegant and rich dream.
Interviews
On Saturday, April 25th, barnesandnoble.com welcomed C. S. Godshalk to discuss KALIMANTAAN.
Moderator: Good evening, and welcome to our Auditorium, C. S. Godshalk. We are thrilled to have you online tonight to chat about your remarkable debut novel, KALIMANTAAN. Before we begin, do you have any opening comments for your online audience?
C S Godshalk: I don't have any opening comments other than to welcome you as well, and I know KALIMANTAAN has brought all kinds of people to the surface as I have traveled around the country -- those interested in the history and those interested in the place. It has been a wonderful experience, and I hope to continue it tonight.
Craig from Ann Arbor, MI: I have heard your book mentioned in conjunction with Conrad's LORD JIM, how both sprung from the same historical events. Could you tell us about the history, for those of us who know very little about it?
C S Godshalk: Well, in the 19th century, a young Englishman named James Brooke went out to that part of the world and managed to carve out a private realm on the coast of Borneo. His dynasty would last over a century. It was a bizarre achievement and attracted a lot of interesting controversy. One of the people interested was, of course, Conrad, who knew members of the Brooke family. However, he in fact wound up using little more than the Christian name of this man, James, for his novel. The actual story was not used except for the locale and time.
Greg W. from Oregon: I read in your First Fiction interview that you learned to write "in a vacuum -- without writing seminars, workshops, support groups" -- many of the things that writers depend on for growth. How did you learn without these things? Not to say you can't write without them, but did you turn to anyone for critique? How did this influence your growth as a writer, your style, your voice? What was it like to write in this environment?
C S Godshalk: That's a wonderful question, Greg. The short answer is I had no choice. I didn't have time for creative writing classes or seminars or support groups because of my lifestyle. We moved a great deal, I had a young family, and I was also working. And so, you work in a vacuum because that's your lot, and it's lonely work, but it also has its compensations. You learn to hear your own voice and trust it, and not to rely on outside opinion. It perhaps takes longer to learn how to write this way, but you are fairly immune to all kinds of criticism -- especially second-rate criticism -- this way. I think I said somewhere, I was quoting Annie Dillard, who basically described writing as going into your workroom in the morning, opening the window, and stepping six feet out into the air and beginning to write. Ultimately, you can't depend on anyone but yourself.
Betty G. from Mount Holyoke: Your book sounds fascinating -- just the names and places alone have such a beautiful and alluring ring to them. I have just ordered it, and I can't wait to read it! But I know very little about the place you describe, so okay -- I'll be the first to ask -- what is a raj?
C S Godshalk: That's a common question, and I'm not sure I can answer it as accurately as I'd like to. A raj is basically a kingdom. The word itself derives from the Sanskrit, and was used both by the Hindu and Muslims in India; and Borneo as well as other parts of that archipelago is in part Muslim, so it's a natural designation for them as well. It also was used by the British. The term was "British Raj," which basically described the British raj in India. That's the long answer. The short answer is it means kingdom. And I must say to Betty, I thank her for taking the chance to get to know a completely new place, but she will find she will have to make an investment of herself in KALIMANTAAN. I think I would advise her to stay loose, and let it through.
Madeline Phinney from Chicago, Illinois: What do you feel is at the heart of your writing? How do you think this is evidenced in KALIMANTAAN?
C S Godshalk: I think what lies at the heart of my writing, Madeline, is an enduring fascination with people who are trying to live normal lives in brutal places. And this certainly is true of my short fiction, which is very much unlike KALIMANTAAN. It's contemporary, and it for the most part takes place in this country. And in part, my short fiction has this in common with the novel. Certainly the people I discovered in this history -- especially in the letters and personal diaries that I came upon -- were people like you and me, who were living and loving and raising families in a savage environment. This sets what it means to be human in high profile, and it provides rich ground for fiction.
B. J. Nickson from Williamsburg, Va: The setting of your novel seems to have attracted the most expansive and various array of characters I have ever seen! What about the place drew these people, and how did you decide who would make their appearance in your novel? What was it like to write such a wide range of characters, and who is your favorite?
C S Godshalk: Well, another attraction of the story and place was the strange tribe of human beings that seem attracted only to these remote outposts. They are criminals, they are saints, they are adventurers, they are naturalists, and they certainly listen to a different drummer. So, historically, I had this rich, somewhat manic population to draw from, and I didn't always pick and choose. They often chose me. I wrote this novel over a long period of time in many parts of the world, and it traveled with me in a box. And I found, after a while, certain characters would not wait for me to let them out, but would burst out by themselves, and start kicking things around. And the only way to get rid of them was to write them down. So, consequently, it's a highly populated book, and just a great sprawling mass in which these people come and go.
As far as favorites go, I think I can tell who my favorites are by those who still insist on living with me. Gideon Barr, the Englishman who started this enterprise, was a man driven by an obsession. Obsessions have circular tracks, most often. These people don't necessarily change or grow. So, he was a still-point around which the story revolves. Melie, his bride, was quite the opposite. She went out to that world basically a child, and so was very open to it and grew in all aspects, and she is a great favorite. Hogg is another, simply because of his complexity. To have that much brutality and savagery and innocence and what turns out to be the tenderest love for an unlikely woman makes him a person I was always glad to meet on the page. And I suppose, to add one more, a man who occasionally appears at the foot of my bed at night, even after the novel is complete, with his one blue eyeball and the rank smell of him, is another favorite -- this is Peachy Dawes, a truly endearing criminal. So there you are.
Maya from Harrisburg, Pa: KALIMANTAAN is fictional, but I read that it is based on historical events. Did you find "sticking to the facts" restrictive? Will you continue to write novels from this perspective, or will you write novels set in contemporary times?
C S Godshalk: Thank you, Maya, for asking this question. It still, in some ways, perplexes me. I was writing fiction in KALIMANTAAN. However, it is very closely based on history, and I think you must make up your mind as a writer up front which one of those two things is going to be the driver. When you write fiction and use history, what Faulkner calls turning the actual entity apocryphal, you are doing dangerous work. History, for me, had to be a tool only. But it had to also be respected. You have to listen to what it's telling you. In KALIMANTAAN, just about all of the characters, major and minor, have an historical counterpart. I made some changes in relations. For instance, the original rajah was succeeded by his nephew. I made it his cousin, so that they existed together for a longer period of time and could interact more fully. There were other relationships that I changed along these lines, but basically the novel rides closely with the history. An interesting problem for me here was trying to give history a plausible place in fiction. So much of the factual story is improbable. Ballehs, the great Dyak war forces, could be as large as 10,000 men. These were gathered in six weeks, and of course, their sole payment was the opportunity to take heads. Cholera, or one of the other tropical diseases, plagues, could wipe out a settlement in three days. These things sound implausible, and so I found myself scaling them down.
Autumn H. from Phoenix, Arizona: It seems that your novel tells many different stories at once. Is this true? Is there one central story, or are there many lives being described at once?
C S Godshalk: There certainly is a central story, and at the same time, there are several other lives going on simultaneously. KALIMANTAAN basically traces the course and intersection of two love stories -- that of the Englishman who established that territory, Gideon Barr, and the young Englishwoman he brought out as his bride. And the second love story is that of the young man, a relative of his, who came out to man one of his outstations and would eventually succeed him. And his improbable love for the wife of the Church of England chaplain. Other stories weave in and out as the history did.
Maura from Hicksville, NY: I know that this is your first novel, but can we read any of your other writing elsewhere? Have you written short stories?
C S Godshalk: Well, first, I haven't written short stories since '91, simply because I was obviously doing something else. My last two short stories are in THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES of I think either '89, '90, or '88. One of my stories is in the new NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION -- I guess Joyce Carol Oates put that one together. I don't have a collection. There are others, but that can get people started.
Nathan from Lexington, Massachusetts: What do you think of the development, deforestation, and Westernization that is going on in places such as Malaysia near the area which you describe in your novel? How do the people there receive the growth of industry?
C S Godshalk: Well, I can only talk to one aspect of that, because my real concern is 19th-century Borneo. I was in Borneo three years ago, and while Kuching, the main town in Sarawak, looks very much the way it did in the 19th century, a beautiful, white town with an astana and fort and prahus in the channel, the one startling change is the disappearance before one's eyes of the rainforest itself. Timber consortiums, largely Japanese, are levelling those forests at the speed of light. The only real protest seems to come from the indigenous forest tribes, people who appear in the novel KALIMANTAAN, and who now pathetically stand in roads trying to block these three-story-high pieces of earth-moving machinery. It means short-term wealth for the government, and it's a loss that we all will suffer dearly, I think, on earth. Of course, the one other most salient change is the Sultanate of Brunei, which in the novel is a small, impoverished town up the coast, and now is perhaps the richest country per capita on earth, due to its oil reserves.
Willoughby from Pasadena, TX: Could you tell us about how KALIMANTAAN developed into the novel that it is? As your first novel, it must have gone through many phases/drafts. Where did it begin for you, and how did it evolve?
C S Godshalk: Thank you, Willoughby. That's very easy to answer. This novel did not begin with the history. It began when I found, almost by accident, some original letters of the people who lived that life, and I suddenly was face-to-face with, in that case, a woman like me, trying to raise a young family on the equator, only in a much more savage environment. And then I discovered other things -- other private letters, diaries, journals -- and I found myself among people with aspirations, with private hopes, joy, despair, and I was hooked. As to how it evolved, I really could not devote great blocks of time to writing it. My life was simply too busy. I think over a decade, we moved 14 times. In those circumstances, you learn to write, in part, in your head. And if the story is strong enough, it doesn't die. And there was just one point I reached when I knew that the people I was writing about were living, breathing entities, and when I moved, they moved with me, so I had no choice but to finish it.
Henry Pforde from Watertown, NY: What was the most difficult barrier you encountered in writing this novel, and how did you overcome it?
C S Godshalk: I have to say the most difficult barrier, and it's not peculiar to this novel but to the life I was leading while I was writing it, and the one barrier I thought would be insurmountable, was time. This is a very dense story, and one could not pick it up intermittently. It had its own demands. But I found, in trying to accommodate it, some of the things that at first seemed most counterproductive, like being the mother of three children who require a great deal of time, turned out in odd ways to grease my writing. I think I said somewhere else that when you are writing while caring for children, you feel like murdering them. And then one day you realize you're using them. And so the children in the historical story, because I was living so closely with children, have a very strong part in the novel. And I think now, after it's finished, they have a very organic place there, and I am grateful to my own children for opening this door. And KALIMANTAAN is full of children -- children growing up fast.
Jim from Athens, Ga: Your prose is so rich, dense, and beautiful. I believe I can feel everything you describe perfectly. Thank you for writing such a beautiful novel -- I can't wait to finish it! How did you find the voice and proper distance for writing KALIMANTAAN?
C S Godshalk: Well, first of all, thank you, Jim, that's a lovely compliment. I really didn't have to find a voice for this. I think you simply have to be receptive to the place and its rhythms and not go into it with preconceived ideas. If you let Borneo and its history roll over you, you find the writing happening. It was a peculiar place in the 19th century, proposing peculiar problems, and the people who lived this story found, quite often, peculiar solutions. Someone recently described the book to me as a fever dream, and I think it's in a large part a good description. Fever was actually used by people. It could provide a queer sense of comfort. There's one character in the book, one of the most effective district officers, who in fact found himself looking forward to his malarial dreams as a respite from the brutality of the work. Once you accept that there are people like this addressing things this way, you give yourself up to the poetry of them, I think. And Borneo itself. Borneo is a violent but also strangely formal place. It respects things we don't even notice -- all things invisible, the feelings of animals. You have in many ways to listen more than to write, Jim.
Moderator: Thank you so much for joining us tonight. Any closing comments?
C S Godshalk: Thank you all as well for asking me these questions. I am delighted to find so many different people from different walks of life interested in this story.