Transcript: Brian Castro at the launch of Chinese Postman
Chinese Postman by Brian Castro was launched in Adelaide at the Ern Malley wine bar in November 2024. Read a transcript of Castro’s speech below, which followed from words by Ken Bolton. The event was presented by the J.M. Coetzee Centre.
Thank you all for being here. I haven’t seen so many people I know for a long time. It reminds me of Proust, when he once ventured out of his bedroom, and was astounded by the number of people in the street and he asked why was everyone going to the bank today? … In anticipation of some kind of catastrophe.
Thank you so much Ken, for your kind words. I realise it’s a real burden to be asked to launch someone else’s book. I normally avoid it, making excuses like ‘I can’t leave my dog’. Or ‘my grandmother just died – again.’ But honestly, one is never too old to be received by old friends. As you may know, Ken has a world-wide reputation as a poet. In David Bellos’ biography of the French writer Georges Perec, it was noted that when Perec was in Australia, the two people he most wanted to meet was John Forbes and Ken Bolton. Ken, of course, is a Zen master of life as a user’s manual, and the exacting quietude in his poetry is second to none.
I think you have to be a poet to have a good memory. Memory of course, is the music of syntax. But memory is now becoming more difficult for me. I have to sing the alphabet song to retrieve the names of people I know, and when that fails, it becomes a spectrum, sliding between the fictional and the factual. Like a dog, patchouli reminds me of my grandmother; Havana cigars of a great-uncle; Jean-Patou, the perfume of my mother. These synaesthesic correspondences have kept me in touch with the material reality of writing. To stave off rampant forgetfulness on my travels, I’ve always carried this postman’s bag as a security item, a mnemonic, a man-bag, a dog-tag, a reminder that my trade was epistolary and mortal. You can witness my double on the cover of the book, although he had the added luxury of an opium-pipe. According to the photograph taken in 1904, he was a postman in Shangdu, in Inner Mongolia, which, despite Olivia Newton-John, was also known by foreigners as Xanadu, and he may have delivered missives for a love-lorn Kubla Khan. I lost the bag once in a pub but a kindly patron returned it, saying it belonged to someone called Fidel Castro, and may have contained a bomb. Being a Castro was always going to cause trouble.
Let me give you an example of my eccentric second cousin who died recently, and who tended to annoy both Beijing and the British colonial government in Hong Kong.
Alan Castro was the Editor of The Standard newspaper in Hong Kong. A rival paper to The South China Morning Post. I’ll quote you a bit of his obituary. I know a launch is not an obituary, but those of you who read me will understand the irony: I quote:
Former Standard editor-in-chief Alan Castro, who has died aged 96, was a colossus of local journalism in an age of larger-than-life characters who helped chronicle the tectonic changes taking place in Hong Kong during the last decades of the 20th century.
Castro cut an imposing figure in the rough-and-tumble, pre-computer newsrooms of old, whether emerging from his corner office resplendent in an immaculately cut suit or a crumpled karate uniform.
Born in Hong Kong, Castro first joined the Hongkong Tiger Standard – as it was then called – in the early 1960s before spending more than 20 years reporting on Asia and working in London’s Fleet Street for a couple of years.
He returned to The Standard as editor-in-chief in the late ‘70s and was at the helm during the unsettled 1980s amid intense negotiations between London and Beijing over the very future of Hong Kong.
There you have it: a shit-stirrer from another age and another place. But you don’t get to the age of 96 without a whole lot of vitality. At 82 he married a woman of 32. Loud gasps were heard from around the North Asian world. He was no Rupert Murdoch, but he had style and as a 9th-Dan karate man, kicked the stereotypes out of the local bowling alley. He offered me a job on his paper when I graduated. I turned it down, preferring Australia, where as they say, one could be girt by sea and drunk by lunch.
So I began a career as a dodgy postie, I did sorting, collecting, and graduated to delivering. Something I did for eight months. What I learned from the Chinese Postman Problem was an algorithm stating that one should avoid walking the same street twice in the midst of life’s many crises. I discovered that the contrafact could offer a diversion. A contrafact is a jazz composition built using the chord progression of a pre-existing song, but with a new melody and arrangement. The alto-saxophonist Charlie Parker exploited it to great affect. In both jazz and writing, you can hear previous melodies inside your DNA, the future coming out of the past, then you re-work it, going up and down the spiral staircase until you grow dizzy. You become a copy of yourself and you remake yourself every day. As someone once said, existence is plagiarism. Quin is masquerading as Castro. Like Tom Ripley, he’s probably read about Castro in a biographical dictionary. He’ll see to it that I become autobiographical from the biographical. I’m happy to let him live on when I disappear. But then again, what do I know about posterity? I’m just the postman for other people’s fantasies.
Bernadette Brennan generously calls this withdrawal from subjectivity my late style. Late style is a concept Edward Said popularised, though he borrowed it from Theodor Adorno.
‘In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes,’ Theodor Adorno wrote in his Essays on Music. He said this positively. Age bids farewell to the Ego. In old age, sensitivity and the self explode into fragments without subjective intention, leaving crystals of truths which are only assimilable by chance, by some aleatory jig-saw puzzle. If you’re good, only luck could save you, because no one is going to read that closely in the tram going to work … except Einstein of course. The reader has to do some work at the speed of light, but time is not on the novelist’s side. Quin is discovering relativity through fragments and through negatives. Bitter and twisted as he is, he’s inviting you into his house for a drink, and we know where the conversation will be heading. And if you look at the word ‘catastrophe‘ you’ll find there’s only a short distance between it and the name ‘Castro’.
But of course, there is no getting away from death. As Anne Carson says about life:
‘There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not.’
My doorway is always blue, because that’s the colour of the interior life. And though I may play the blues, I hope you will always hear an irresponsible laughter emanating from the wings.
So contrary to my protagonist, that curmudgeonly Quin, may you take the levity of flight and the pen of thought to even greater heights. The ‘you’ to whom I’m referring, are my younger colleagues, those who still think in terms of aesthetics. In aesthetics you can discern the butterfly of beauty enjoying a momentary splendour in the grass before being captured in a rational net. Beauty trapped within reason sounds unfortunate, but it’s a brutish instinct with which the human mind is both cursed and endowed. Intellectual pleasure is always going to be bitter-sweet, a mixture of empathy and doubt, involving a degree of sado-masochism. There’s a very Portuguese term for it: the word saudade, which is untranslatable into English. You can hear it in Brazilian music, the chorinho, which means ‘a little cry, or a lament’. But it’s full of syncopation and counterpoint and there’s no time to linger in lamentation. So this book is a chorinho, which I hope will make you laugh as well as lament; whether you laugh at, laugh with, or laugh along. Laughter in the minor key is a form of deep empathy, because if you can still laugh, you are actually breathing in thought, and breathing out feeling.
My heartfelt gratitude to all of you for your presence here. Thank you to Anne Pender, Gemma Parker and The Coetzee Centre for organising this launch. It’s great too, to see some of the gang of six with whom I regularly drink lots of Guinness without guilt. Most of all, thank you to my partner Jennifer, who very early on separated fiction from fact, who understood unreliable narrators and the murky world of autofiction.
Last but not least, thanks to this wonderful establishment, Ern Malley, which sounds like a hoax, but is really the genuine article and last bastion of High Modernism left in Australia.
I now move my chair a bit further into the shade, in the way that Proust named his last volume À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. And you’ll have to translate that literally, both for its meaning, and for its wordplay, and of course, for its irony.
Read a transcript of Ken Bolton’s launch speech for Chinese Postman here.
