| Chapter 1: | Enamoured with Art and Ideas |
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volumes, which constitute my world of vision” (L 7). Visual impressions, too, and how they might be conveyed, fascinated him:
Pressing my thumbs on my closed eyes I sometimes see a pattern of blurred grey squares and receding lines on a caramel wash, a strange harmony of perspective and space I have never seen anywhere else. If I were a painter—and even though I am not—it would be worthwhile, important even, to re-create that. But how to get the exact colours etc? As I try to study it, gradually it begins to alter, then suddenly, goes. (L 23)
These interests swirl through the pages of Homesickness, as do sporadic allusions and analytical descriptions inspired by cubism and its antecedents; Bail has acknowledged that studying perspective in Australian landscape art and “[the artists’] way … of painting objects within space, made me write things more visually” (Chisholm 42). Painting, then, has been for Bail a dynamic source of inspiration, suggesting new angles of vision and firing his creative imagination: “Strolling from one picture to another in art galleries, even commercial ones, I am assailed by literary ideas which beg to be resolved” (L 47).
During his Wanderjahre Bail honed his eye, pen, and knowledge and broke decisively with antipodean cultural models. Before leaving Melbourne he had already written one-third of the pieces that would become Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories. Overseas he added to them and in London wrote a novel on an unknown subject. A notebook entry from his twenty-ninth birthday shows him full of purpose and intensely self-critical: “By 30, complete six stories, tighten entire novel (all over again). There is not enough reason for it at the moment (the novel)” (L 10). Despite compositional setbacks and occasional impasses, he increasingly recognised a “feeling of being ‘chosen’” (L 24). Although in dreams he still might figure as alienated and rudderless in a coldly implacable environment (L 66), during waking reveries, Bail confessed, “Often I see myself walking towards myself (even when I’m