Inga Clendinnen - Tigers Eye

PRAISE FOR INGA CLENDINNEN
AND TIGERS EYE

This is a book by an essayist who is also a literary master. Tigers Eye is radiant with background memories as salient and insinuating as a smell. It is full of the tension that comes from the nearly overpowering sensuousness of its set of recollections. It is a tough, almost ornery book and I suspect women will adore it. They wont be alone.
PETER CRAVEN, SYDNEYMORNINGHERALD

Scarcely a line of Tigers Eye passed by than I was struck afresh by the grace and felicity of her expression or found myself moved by perceptions that have a grave kind of beautyin the creative outcome from Clendinnens reprieve from a likely death, we, her readers, have been blessed.
ANNE MANNE, AUSTRALIAN

What an astonishing bookclear and acute in its perceptions, disciplined in its resistance to pathos and sentimentality, energetically in love with a language that unfailingly rewards her love, it is wonderfully responsive to lifeAngry, resentful, tender, forgivingClendinnen is all of these things and always passionateAgain and again while reading I wanted to read passages aloud, to myself and to othersto savour the writing, to share the pleasure and to assure myself that it really is as fine as it seemed. It is, page after page.
RAIMOND GAITA, EUREKASTREET

Mesmerising, un-putdownable
KERRYN GOLDSWORTHY, COURIER-MAIL

Tigers Eye is a self-portrait of a rigorous analytical thinker teasing out the connections between her background and her passion for her particular disciplineThe great pleasure of Tigers Eye lies ininsights that reveal how deeply the life of the mind is embedded in the life of the emotions, the body and memory.
FIONA CAPP, BULLETIN

Astonishingly lucid and challenging, and enormously pleasing to readIt is an account of a personal struggle; it is a personal testament, a trumpet call for the importance of history; and it is full of a lifetime of sharp recollections and observations on the written and spoken word.
RITA ERLICH, EUREKASTREET

Clendinnens range is wondrousTigers Eye is such an imaginative book, wise and full of fun.
GERARD WINDSOR, FINANCIALREVIEW

Clendinnens starkly elegant style elicits emotions and images with an eerie sharpness.
SAMELA HARRIS, ADELAIDEADVERTISER

TIGERS EYE: A MEMOIR

Inga Clendinnen was born in Geelong in 1934. Her books and scholarly articles on the Aztecs and Maya of Mexico have won a number of awards. She is also the author of Reading the Holocaust which in 1999 was named as a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and won the New South Wales Premiers General History Award. In 1999 she also delivered the ABCs Boyer Lectures. Her essays and short fiction have been widely published.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Ambivalent Conquests: Spaniard and Mayan in Yucatan, 15171577
Aztecs: An Interpretation
Reading the Holocaust
True Stories (ABC Boyer Lectures)

TIGERS
EYE
A MEMOIR
INGA
CLENDINNEN

The Text Publishing Company
171 La Trobe Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia

Copyright Inga Clendinnen 2000

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 2000, reprinted 2000
This edition 2000, reprinted 2001, 2003, 2008

Typeset by Midland Typesetters
Printed and bound by Griffin Press
Designed by Chongwengho

The paper used in this book is manufactured only from wood grown in sustainable regrowth forests.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Clendinnen, Inga.
Tigers Eye: a memoir.

ISBN 978 1 876485 55 9.

1. Clendinnen, Inga. 2. Clendinnen, Inga - Health.
3. Clendinnen, Inga - Mental health. 4. Clendinnen, Inga
Views on authorship. 5. Women historians - Biography.
6. Liver - Diseases - Patients - Biography. 7. Liver
Diseases - Psychological aspects. 8. Creative writing
Psychological aspects. 9. Historians - Biography.
I. Title.

907.202

Reading Mr Robinson, Indians and Lace first appeared in Australian Book Review. The Misses Wan piece first appeared in Overland, Lillit first appeared in Heat and Island first appeared in Voices.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

TO ABSENT FRIENDS

CONTENTS

I sing of bodies changed into shapes of a different kind.
OVID, METAMORPHOSES

A decade ago, when I was in my early fifties, I fell ill. Fall is the appropriate word; it is almost as alarming and quite as precipitous as falling in love. It is even more like falling down Alices rabbit hole into a world which might resemble this solid one, but which operates on quite different principles. Pain, death and loneliness are domestic presences there, in grey-green masks and gloves. So are humour and kindness, which come in all sorts of uniform. You are granted the dubious privilege of being a child again in a place which sometimes resembles a childs nightmare, and at others a well-run nursery.

It is also a world in which, like Alice, you are subject to unscheduled and surprising transformations.

This is not the story of a medical crisis. If it were, it would be for medicos to write. To lie still as a crusader on a tomb while dreams spin behind closed lids, to surf the tumble of disordered memories as they dolphin away, to feel the mind disintegrate and to fear the disintegration of the self, is to suffer an existential crisis, not a medical one. And to try to understand any of this by transforming inchoate, unstable emotion and sensation into marks on paper is to experience the abyss between fugitive thought, and the words to contain it.

This is the story of what happened when I fell down my rabbit hole.

INTIMATIONS

It began with small things.

My dentist, a friend since student days, prodded my pulpy gums, frowned, and said, Inga, I dont like the look of this. This looks systemic.

I nodded, sagely. Systemic? What could he mean? I had only used that word, I realised, metaphorically. Systemic. Because he looked so solemn, because we are friends, I did not like to ask.

My gums continued to bleed. Blood crusted in my nose, crescents of gummy red. Then a cool dribble. I made a Desdemona handkerchief, spotted all over with strawberries of blood. I used to have nosebleeds, bad ones, as a child, but at my age?

In class, discussing bloodstained Aztecs with my students, my nose began to bleed in steady drops, like placid rain. It bled for five minutes. This group of assorted Australians was puzzling over what a group of assorted Mexicans, once alive, now five hundred years dead, meant by some complicated doings with tongues and obsidian razors and smoothed sticks and cords. What they mainly did was bleed. But who bled, and who was made to bleed? Did those who bled do so voluntarily, and at this distance how could we tell? Therefore a monsoon of jokes accompanied my genteel, chronic dripping-from-the-nose. My students said there would be much rain in Melbourne this season.