Walking at 6am through a world full of mist, I was accompanied by Inga Clendinnen, reading her lovely lucid prose into the earpieces of my iPod. She deftly defined the essay form; she reminisced about the freedom of children and dogs when she was growing up seventy years ago; she waxed playfully paranoiac about the wayward nature of laptop computers. When she spoke of how she would greet death, like the French essayist Montaigne, with nonchalance, I felt a pang, remembering her on the stage at the Sydney Writers Festival last year, looking like an aged bird, frail and thin with a razor sharp beak. I wished I'd lined up to have her sign her book, Agamemnon's Kiss, so that I could have exchanged some sort of greeting, made some gesture of admiration, before it is too late. But how to get beyond the corny "I love your work!" in such a fleeting, queue-driven encounter? Perhaps a fan-letter would be a better vehicle? What would I say?
I remember that we met initially via the pages of journal articles and books when I was studying Latin American history in 1988. I was impressed by the clarity and complexity of your arguments and the precision and lucidity of your writing. When you reinvented yourself as a public intellectual and started speaking to me from Radio National, I discovered your views on more contemporary topics. Recently I have read your memoir, Tiger's Eye. Your description of the world of serious illness, peopled by characters horizontal and vertical, touched me. I wasn't so keen on your forays into fiction, though. I think your metier is creative non-fiction. But maybe that is just me, projecting my current preoccupation.
What would be the point of this, other than to give her the creepy sensation that someone of whom she knows nothing is watching, listening, evaluating? I can't imagine actually sending a fan letter to anyone. How do writers find out how highly we esteem them, unless readers become writers and rhapsodise about those who have influenced them? What a strange, one-sided relationship there is between writers and readers...
