Journey to India

JOURNEY TO INDIA: VICKI VIIDIKAS, TOMMO AND ME
By Adrienne Sallay
Journeys and Journalling Conference, Kangaroo Island, December 2004
[With accompanying slideshow] 2845 words

I am a fiction writer. I tell stories. The story I want to tell you concerns the creative writing journey I undertook in order to write a particular scene for my novel-in-progress. The scene, in which my male protagonist has an audience with the Dalai Lama, is set in the Indian Himalayas in 1972.

My project consists of two components: a novel and a six-chapter dissertation of critical analysis. My dissertation explores counter cultural women writers of the 1970s. In particular, I explore the work of Vicki Viidikas, who wrote poetry and short prose. Her fascination with India lead her to journey to the sub-continent to live and write there for prolonged lengths of time, over a period of twenty years. Her poem “Loaded Hearts” in her first volume of poetry Condition Red published in 1973 exemplifies the main concerns of the era, which included alternative spiritualities, music, the counter culture, women’s liberation, the use of recreational drugs as a political statement, and the Vietnam War. Line five from the poem, “Tigers are eating through walls and Hendrix is playing from hell”, makes reference to warfare in the Vietnam jungle. I have used the title of this poem as the working title for my novel, because it encapsulates the essence of the 1970s.

My narrative, Loaded Hearts maps the temporal and spatial territories of family secrets, cold war cocoon rebellion, communal and expatriate lifestyles, identity, place and belonging, across two centuries and four continents. The reader meets a young couple living a counter-cultural lifestyle in Sydney in 1970. Through the lives of Maxine, who is a Vietnam War protestor, and Tommo, who fights in the Vietnam War, my novel explores the ways women and men deal with their changing roles and identities.

If, as Kevin Brophy says, “[t]he quest is to speak of the personal, the inconsequential, the embarrassing, the normally hidden – to break the rules of any code constraining any discourse, to find a way to tell the story…”, then my task is to impart the flavour of post sixties Australian youth, to explore Maxine’s quest for ‘freedom’ and ‘independence’, which were key defining quests for women.
Through Tommo, my novel addresses events faced by soldiers in the Vietnam War and some of the issues of disruption, healing and recovery faced by Vietnam Veterans. The last line of Viidikas’s poem invokes that idea: “We’re making weapons of our dreams.” Tommo (not his real name) is a character based on a Vietnam Veteran whom I interviewed as background research for the novel. In real life he drove the Overland Route from London to Delhi five times with a double-decker bus full of backpackers. His memories of being accidentally caught in the peripheral strike of a napalm bomb I transcribed almost word for word, and his bus-driving adventures also informed my fiction. Tommo’s journey to India coincides with the fascination for India with which Vicki Viidikas was consumed.

My own journey to the Himalayas in 1975 was journalled in aerogrammes sent back to my family in Sydney. After reading my letters thirty years later, I asked myself could it be that Viidikas and I shared rooms in the same ex-British Raj house high in the mountains overlooking the Kulu Valley? Was she, like me, fortunate enough to be given an audience with the Dalai Lama? And was it likely that she might have met a Vietnam Veteran like Tommo?

In the year 1967 three events occurred which affected the youth culture of the day. The first of these was The Beatles’ journey to India in search of spiritual guidance and new musical directions. Ravi Shankar had taught George Harrison to play the sitar on a houseboat at Srinigar’s Lake Dal the year before (“Himalaya With Michael Palin”). A famous photograph, taken by Paul Saltzman, records the meeting between John, Paul, George and Ringo and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Saltzman published his photos from the ashram as a photographic essay in 2000 (The Beatles of Rishikesh). Of their music, Saltzman says:
When the Beatles first incorporated an Indian string instrument called the sitar in the first notes of their classic song Norwegian Wood, they would forever change the sound and direction of pop music. They were beginning a love affair with Indian mysticism and music that would take them on a historic pilgrimage to the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (3).

The second event affecting the youth culture was the “Be-In” at the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco organised by American poet and activist Allen Ginsberg. Naming Ginsberg as the leader of the Beat poets, Hunter S. Thompson recorded the event for Rolling Stone magazine, describing the attendance of thousands of hippies and flower-power children (“When the Beatniks” 353). Another Beat poet, Parke Puterbaugh, maintained that the hippies, “to a degree, embraced the literary precepts of the Beats” (357), who “offered a bold, forthright template for revolt and uncensored self-expression” (362). The Beat poets valued confessional, free and spontaneous writing. Holly George-Warren’s description of their poetry is interesting when we consider the influence these poets had on Australian poets of the late 1960s:

As a literary movement, the Beat Generation gave us a cacophony of fresh, new American voices; the common thread running through the work was this: to say what hadn’t been said in a language as unique as one’s own thumb print (ix).

Rick Moody argues that in the work of the Beats:

[t]here is a devotion to spontaneity…and there is a devotion to affect…And there is also the matter of politics … and the deformation of the senses leading to “the most radical theme which is spiritual investigation” (xiii) [his emphasis].

A notion that recurs in the literature of alternative voices from Kerouac onwards is one of spiritual enquiry. Douglas Brinkley described Kerouac as “gathering material for On the Road in 1949, criss-crossing America in search of kicks, joy and God” (112). Further, he adds, “Kerouac stayed true to his notion that true liberation came from spontaneity of expression” (122). In his interview with Ginsberg, Barry Alfonso records Ginsberg’s priorities as “values of some sort, Eastern thought, the residue of psychedelic intelligence, meditation practice, gay and sexual liberation” (256). Puterbaugh adds that the Beats adopted “radical approaches to politics and spirituality, and alternative models for living” (360).
The third 1967 event of significance for this paper was the first publication of a poem by Australian poet Vicki Viidikas who was just nineteen years old. Viidikas left school at fifteen and attended Art College for two years, during and after which she worked at a variety of jobs, including bar work, typing and veterinarian’s assistant. For the poem, “At East Balmain”, published in Poetry Australia, she was paid three dollars.
Of her early writing Viidikas said in an interview with Hazel De Berg:

What I was writing was really confessional, it was just – I’d go out to a party or something and if anything upset me or I was depressed, I’d go home and scribble things down on bits of paper, really just what my inner feelings were at the time (Conversation 3 ).

In the same interview, Viidikas added, “I more or less write it off the top of my head, straight off, in one go. … My writing is done at any time of the day or night, it’s quite a spontaneous thing… (5)”.

During the late 1960s a group of writers and poets, whose origins grew in some measure from the Sydney left wing intellectual organisation known as The Push, gained a name as the “Generation of ‘68”. John Tranter defines the Generation of ‘68 as a group of young Australian poets who “identified with counter culture values” he describes as “not unrelated to an interest in sex, drugs and rock’n’roll” (2). He explains the writing of the Generation of ’68 as “iconoclastic and experimental”. Gig Ryan, in her obituary for Vicki Viidikas in 1999, described her as “an integral part of the rich flowering in Australian poetry that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, part of an extraordinarily talented generation…”(20).

Poet Robert Adamson details acquaintances of his Balmain period and includes a page of mug shots: Vicki Viidikas; writer Michael Wilding who taught for thirty years at Sydney University; Robyn Ravlich who became a well-known poet; Michael Driscoll a young poet and song-writer; poet and confirmed Bob Dylan fan Tim Thorne, and Adamson himself, who learned to write poetry in gaol.

Mikal Gilmore describes Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”, first published in 1956, as “the first major American work of that era that spoke to the outcasts, for the mad and the lost, and about what would soon happen to the nation’s soul” (235). The influence of his poetry can be seen later in the work of many of the Generation of 68, including Viidikas.

There is an interesting photo of Viidikas on the cover of her second book, Wrappings, of which Helen Garner says, “[t]here’s a terrific photo of Vicki Viidikas on the front cover which I liked looking at between the stories.” In a review of Wrappings in a 1974 issue of The Digger, Helen Garner describes the anthology as written with

…a background of knowingness against which the occasional sharp flash of sensual or emotional delight shows the more brilliantly for being unexpected. It’s dark, sometimes, but she doesn’t bullshit you; and there’s a real charge in the language, the way she can keep the whole thing surging along.

After this volume appeared, Viidikas lived and worked on and off in India. A Literature Board grant enabled her to complete her last published volume of poetry, India Ink, in 1984. Viidikas explains her interest in India in the “De Berg Interview” included in her Papers held at the Australian Defence Force Academy Library. She says:

My interest in India is a very complicated one…In India the emphasis is not on materialism, it is a deeply religious country and I felt as a Westerner that I had more freedom available to me to express myself with writing and with interactions with people, … (Conversation 6)

As a counterpoint, Indian journalist Gita Mehta’s 1979 views on the hippie romantic notions of non-materialism, from her a satire on the hippies’ pilgrimages to the mystic East in the 1960s Karma Cola, are quoted by Graham Huggan as:

global escapism masquerading as spiritual hunger [resulting] at worst in individual madness, at best in hard-won awareness that the benediction of jet-stream gurus was seldom more than skywriting, and that the mystic east, given half a chance, could teach the west a thing or two about spiritualism (Transformations of the Tourist Gaze 86).

If we consider philosopher Michel de Certeau’s premise that a subject learns the rules of spaces, practices and temporality as strategies, implying order, and that a subject can apply tactics of resistance by remembering and re-ordering that learning (221), then in her search for a different spirituality and an understanding of different cultures, the life and works of Viidikas could be seen as tactics of resistance towards the mainstream culture. In the “De Berg Interview”, Viidikas adds:

I found the conditioning I’ve had by Christianity something almost against life in comparison to what I experienced with Buddhists and Hindus in Asia and India, and I have tried to deal with certain conflicts you have, if you’ve been brought up a Christian and you’ve found that quite unsatisfactory. ( Conversation 7)

While Edward Said maintained that Europeans travelled to the East in the 19th and early 20th centuries in search of domination, “wherein “Westerners” were superior to “Orientals” in a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of a complex hegemony” (5), some members of the counterculture, including Viidikas, employed de Certeau’s tactics of resistance to this paradigm, even as India became a popular backpacker destination. Perhaps it was India’s “cultural confidence” as described by Inez Baranay “with its many centuries of production of art and literature and of the pilgrimages of besotted, freaked-out and fascinated foreigners” (28) which attracted Viidikas.
By 1984, the same year India Ink was published, when Helen Tiffin reviewed recent Australian/Asian fiction, she maintained that the stereotypical views of Asia had begun to be replaced with views of Asia as “a territory of the Australian psyche, one which prompts pertinent and challenging questions about Australian identities and philosophies” (468). Tiffen argued that Christine Townend’s Travels With Myself explored, in the narrator’s journey to India, alternatives to white middle class Sydney suburbia, while Blanche D’Alpuget in Turtle Beach conveyed alternative perspectives to conservative Australian attitudes. Adrian Rawlings’ 1984 review of India Ink implied a new way of writing about India when he maintained, “[n]o Australian writer before Miss Viidikas has seen as much of India as clearly and rendered it as tellingly as she does in this book” (31).
From the poet Robert Adamson’s autobiography Inside Out I gained some insight into the clothes and lifestyle of Viidikas. Adamson writes:

Vicki and Bob were a study in contrasts: she was small with blonde hair and wore velvet dresses; he was tall, with long dark hair and a beard, and often wore overalls from his day job as a signwriter. Their flat was decorated with crystals, peacock feathers, Japanese fans and lengths of Indian fabric, and they burned incense constantly in a losing battle against the stench of rising damp and cat piss. (287).

I was delighted to find a Viidikas short story of in a 1973 issue of Westerly, entitled “The Clothesline In the Himalayas”. The narrator tells of staying in a cold hotel room in Darjeeling. She and her friend Bear are broke.

Bear was making his 90th chillum for the day and hunting round for some string to make a gooley out of. The only string left was the clothesline. ‘Don’t smoke the clothesline,’ I said, feeling sorry for myself. ‘There’s nothing else to use,’ he grunted, undoing one end of the line, cutting and winding a piece of it artistically into a ball. He then stuck it on the end of a bent nail (his gooley nail) and set the ball alight till it was a perfect glowing coal. As he dropped it into the chillum I smiled – who wouldn’t smoke the clothesline when it was such magnificent grass? (18)

The story ends with:

Bear and I would come back from these morning walks lugging our mortal hearts and empty stomachs and collapse in our tiny room. Satisfied. Amazed. And when the clothesline was smoked Bear started on the string carpet, by the time we left it was five inches shorter. Our bland faced hotel keeper never knew, but the mountains in their veiled silence did. Pegs on, pegs off. The line of our lives (19).

A poem from India Ink in which Viidikas describes the Kulu Valley in the Indian Himalayas became another source for my scene. The second stanza describes the trees enigmatically:

A million pine trees
wave their arms
green and eyeless they stare out
immense, with silence

This poem jogged my memory. Reading her work I felt as if Viidikas and I had almost shared rooms in the same Himalayan mountain house. I went searching for a letter I’d written home from McLeod Ganj in 1975. As well as describing the house, it briefly detailed an audience I’d had with the Dalai Lama during my stay in the Ganj. The relevant sections of the letter read, the house

… is a half hour’s walk up the mountain … surrounded by pine forest and at back a long line of snow capped mountains, while in front the mountain drops away, and the Kangra valley, “valley of the gods” stretches out…

And later in the letter:

Oh yes! I also had a blessing from the Dalai Lama the second day I was here, he gave a public audience and we all filed past and bowed while he touched our heads, waved and chuckled away!

When Tess Brady, an Australian creative writing teacher, constructed her combined creative/critical project, she found that “[t]he academic became the creative; the creative became the academic”. With her desk covered in a mix of research materials for both her creative project and exegesis, the lines became blurred until “…[t]he academic and the creative slid into one another, nestled side by side so that one fed on the other, one became the other … Like marbling on paper ” (3).
My project emulates Brady’s stylistic methodology in that it seeks to integrate the critical, research and creative components. It is similar to the approach of renowned critic and fiction writer A.S. Byatt, who described her writing of “Angels and Insects” as “…a process like trawling, or knitting, and recurring patterns and themes began to make themselves [evident]”. Her recurring motifs became birds, angels, and hands touching. In my novel the recurring motifs are those that course through daily life: water, food, work, desire.
Using similar methodologies, I embedded Viidikas, Tommo and the Dalai Lama into the novel in a scene that explores ideas of redemption for Tommo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adamson, Robert. Inside Out: An Autobiography. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2004.
Alfonso, Barry. “Elder Statesman, Unrepentant rebel: A Chat With Ginsberg”. The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, ed Holly George-Warren. London: Bloomsbury, 1999: 253-257.
Baranay, Inez. “Not Such Bitter Dreams”. Australian Author. 36: 26-31.
Brinkley, Douglas. “The American Journey of Jack Kerouac”. The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, ed Holly George-Warren. London: Bloomsbury, 1999: 109-122.

Brady, Tess. “A Question of Genre: De-Mystifying the Exegesis”. Text 4.1. (2000). 13 August 2002 .

http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/april00/brady.htm

Brophy, Kevin. “Some Things About Creative Writing: Three Stories”. Text 2.1. (1998). 19 November 2002 .

http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/april98/brophy.htm
Certeau, M. de. “Travel Narratives of the French to Brazil: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries”. Trans K. Streip. Representations, 33, 1984: 221-226.
Garner, Helen. “Books For Fascination”. Rev. The Digger, 2-10 Oct. 1974.
George-Warren, Holly. Ed. The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture. London: Bloomsbury, 1999.
Gilmore, Mikal. “Allen Ginsberg 1926-1997”. The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, ed Holly George-Warren. London: Bloomsbury, 1999: 227-240.
“Himalaya With Michael Palin”. A Passage To India. Dir. Roger Mills, BBC. ABC, Sydney. 20 Nov. 2004.
Huggan, Graham. “Transformations of the Tourist Gaze: India in Recent Australian Fiction”. Westerly, 38, 4, 1993: 83-89.
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Moody, Rick. Ed. The Paris Review Interviews Beat Writers at Work. London: Harvill, 1999.
Puterbaugh, Parke. “The Beats and the Birth of the Counterculture”. The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture, ed Holly George-Warren. London: Bloomsbury, 1999: 357-363.
Rawlings, Adrian. “Supra-India: Steps To Understanding”. Rev. India Ink. Australian Book Review, Sept, 1985.
Ryan, Gig. “Obituary: Vicki Viidikas, Poet”. The Age Newspaper, 12 Feb., 1999.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
Saltzman, Paul. The Beatles in Rishikesh. Viking Studio, 2000.
Thompson, Hunter S. “When the Beatniks Were Social Lions”. The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and the Counterculture. Ed Holly George-Warren. London: Bloomsbury, 1999: 346-356.
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Tranter, John. “Pam Brown In Conversation with John Kinsella”. Jacket 22. (2003). 15 October 2003.

http://jacketmagazine.com/22/brown-kinsel.html

Viidikas, Vicki. “At East Balmain”. Poetry Australia, 19, Dec., 1967. 14.
—. “The Clothesline In the Himalayas”. Westerly, 4, Dec.1973. 18-19.
—. Condition Red. St Lucia: UQP, 1973.
—. Conversation with Vicki Viidikas. Interview with Hazel de Berg. 3 Dec. 1975. Papers of Vicki Viidikas. Canberra: Australian Defence Force Academy Library, MS 96, Series 6, Folder 34.
—. India Ink: A Collection of Prose Poems Written in India. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1984.
—. Knabel. Glebe: Wild & Woolley, 1978.
—. Wrappings. Sydney: Wild & Woolley, 1974.

By Adrienne Sallay, PhD Candidate, Macquarie University, School of Humanities, English Department.