Simon Patton interviews Philip Salom

Award-winning Western Australian poet Philip Salom is both surprised and delighted by the response to his first novel, Playback. Simon Patton spoke to him recently during a brief visit to Melbourne. After having read Playback, the story of Jack Biner, a folklorist who visits a small country town to collect oral histories, I could not help feeling that I was re-enacting an episode from the book. Sitting down with Salom with the cassette recorder going, I realised that, like Biner, I was involved in the process of collecting someone else’s words, and that I would inevitably understand them in my own way in order to weave them into a coherent ‘story’. But the irony of the situation provided plenty of stimulus to the conversation As a poet, Salom is well aware of the ‘massive underestimation’ of poetry in our culture, a fact driven home by the comprehensive coverage the novel has received in the media compared to the attention his poetry usually attracts. He is bemused by the attention: One of the reasons why I’m here now is because I realised there was an interest of that kind. Suddenly there’ve been reviews in all the papers and presumably there are reviews in the magazines. I mean, I knew it could happen, but all the same, when you experience it, it’s a shock – ‘Oh how wonderful’. And then you think how awful it is for the poetry. The prose/poetry dichotomy is only one of many that interests Salom. He’s fond of the meeting of opposites and the creations of new combinations – themes of central importance in Playback. A scientist by training (he wanted to be a geneticist), he spent two years on a Cattle Research Station. A change of direction led him to take on an Arts Degree in English and it was during this time that he began to write poetry. This conjunction of interests provides much inspiration to the writer. He admits to an obsession with ‘breaking through barriers all the time’ in his work and in his understanding. The publication of his first novel represents another achievement in a career that has seen him win two Commonwealth Poetry Prizes. Binary opposites in Playback are signalled by names. Jack Biner is clearly a clue, although, as Salom adds, it’s a clue reviewers have missed: No, no one’s picked it up. The only person who has is my boss where I work. He came in one day – he’s a psychologist – and he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about the name Jack Biner. Did you have anything in mind?’ And I replied, ‘Well, you know I did!’ Unfamiliar with Salom’s poetry, some reviewers of Playback appear to have overlooked the complexity of the novel and concentrated on sensational readings of the plot. The fault is not entirely theirs. After all, the book has been cheerfully marketed under the slogan ‘a novel of sex, lies and audiotape’. A more accurate version of this line (how about ‘genetics, subjectivity and communication theory’?) lacks consumer appeal. The way advertising has to simplify its message in order to sell the product (so that, in this case, some of the book’s interesting complexities are missed) is, in itself, a neat encapsulation of the problem of reading. How often do we fall into the trap of reading only what we wish to read or according to preconceived notions of what to expect? Salom is not optimistic: What worries me about reviewing is that I don’t think people are bothering to consider what they are reading. There’s a kind of status quo about reviewing and the status quo of received positions. Generally speaking, they find the novel problematical in many ways, but they don’t take on the book and really look at it. During a radio interview, it was suggested to him that there was no politics in his novel. To this he replied, if you look at the roles, look at the games, look at the interactions – and if you look at the process of the text and how it works with reading techniques you’ll see there’s a lot of politics involved’. Sexual politics certainly plays a big part in Playback, particularly in the characters of Laura and Don Ridout. Here Salom attacks the narrowness of the ‘typical’ Australian male role in contrast to the expressiveness and determination of the female character. Although not overtly feminist in orientation, Salom tells me that the reaction from women to the book has been largely positive. In many ways, his dissatisfaction with conventional gender roles has been shaped by personal experience. I was brought up in the country, so I know some of these people and some of the types very well. I have worked with boors from every level of society, from the ditch-digger level to the highly intellectual – all absolutely boorish sods – and I know how violent and repressive they are. As a child and young man the only people I really understood – and who seemed to understand me – were women. The feminine has been traditionally associated with both poetic language and mystery. Salom admits that he is often trapped by his love of complexity but refuses to simplify for the sake of accessibility. Playback throws around the terms ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ with all the connotations of masculine and feminine, fact and fantasy, truth and fiction. On the one hand, Salom has a research scientist dedicated to the production of ‘enhanced’ bull sperm. On the other, an artist who paints her canvases, her body and the rest of her studio in search of another kind of truth. The pursuit of ‘hard facts’ is shown to be fraught with unconscious interferences, plagiarism and the perverted desire to obtain the correct results at the expense of reality. Artistic truth runs the risk of madness and alienation. As for Jack Biner, his ethics and objectivity are undermined by his unavoidable participation in the stories he hears. He is unable to resist the urge to untangle the contradictory threads of his research in order to find a more coherent truth behind the different points of view. A lot of it is about authenticity: authenticity of roles, authenticity of dialogues, authenticity of Jack Biner and his folklore, authenticity of the plot. The plot is deliberately unravelled towards the end when it becomes - as one reviewer said - ‘incredibly incredible’. Well, of course it’s meant to be. It’s meant to fall apart. In fact, the character of Jack Biner is used to explore some of the dilemmas confronting the writer of ‘fiction’. Biner composes a chart that comes progressively to resemble an intricate mosaic detailing his knowledge of his subjects and the complex relations that exist between them. Inevitably, the folklorist comes to feature in his own diagram and this creates its own tensions. When he writes up his informants’ stories in a series of newspaper articles, he is taken to task for what he leaves out and what he transforms for his own purposes. The eventual falling apart of the plot is the writer’s way of pointing out the way we as readers trap ourselves by projecting our expectations into what we read. Unlike the parrot Georgette who simply mimics the human voices she hears, neither writer nor reader can pretend detachment. Salom’s narrative speeds towards its formal ‘conclusion’ with the momentum of a tape winding to the end of its length. Paradoxically, the more Biner learns of Windrup and its inhabitants, the more he becomes a minor player in a wider intrigue he is never fully aware of. This interest in the problems of narrative is not something restricted to prose writing. The Projectionist, Salom’s second book of poetry, is a sequence featuring elements of both narrative and character. As with the novel, there is a concern with different viewpoints and the tensions of human relationships. This is reflected in the poetry as an experiment in syntax. The Projectionist, in fact, seems to want to read like a novel of the psyche, and Salom is aware of its strong narrative potential. I actually did once think of rewriting The Projectionist to make it into a ‘shrunk novel’, opening out some of the poems into prose and keeping some of the poems but running them in different ways. In that book I was really experimenting with two things: one was syntax, abrupt syntax and bent syntax, which I think I overdid a bit. The other thing was psychic intensity, the narrowness and the psychic difficulty of that sequence is very deliberate. The narrative elements and the philosophical elements that can actually be talked about and discussed are there in Playback. In The Projectionist I was looking at emotions and psychic quirkiness. Altogether, The Projectionist is a much more cryptic book and it doesn’t attempt the breadth of the novel. It is ironical that the cryptic poet goes on to produce a novel that is read as a kind of lyrical pot-boiler. I suppose this situation reflects the rather Jekyll and Hyde notions entertained about poetry and prose For all that, Salom obviously relishes the attention he is receiving and is already sketching out ideas for a second novel (probably about an immunologist). The good news on the poetic front is that his fifth collection has been accepted by Penguin, although it won’t be on the shelves until the end of next year. When I asked him about current projects, he told me that he had landed a job interviewing scientists for a documentary film dealing with science teams working on thalassaemia, a disease which has to do with iron toxicity in the blood. Shades of Jack Biner? Or perhaps it’s a fact that truth is no stranger to fiction ...

From the New Issue

Missing Persons, Or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills

The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789 by Robert Darnton

The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift

Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein debate to the riddle of entanglement by Jim Baggott and John L. Heilbron

You May Also Like

Future Tense with Michelle Michau-Crawford

Open Page with Sheila Fitzpatrick

Open Page with Sarah Sentilles

Poet of the Month with Alex Skovron