However I have a second reason for linking Kocan and Cheever which I’ll come to. Before that, about the novels: they tell of some six years in the life of Len Tarbutt, from the age of nineteen to twenty-five. He spent these years in a mental hospital, after a short term in prison, and was diagnosed criminally insane.

Kocan has chosen to fictionalise his own experience which is thus summarised by his publisher: ‘At the age of nineteen, Kocan was given a life sentence for the attempted assassination of a Federal politician. During the ten years he spent in penal and psychiatric institutions, he began writing poetry and two collections of his poems have now been published. His first novel, The Treatment, written after his release, was published in 1980. Its sequel, The Cure, followed in 1983, and was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for that year.’

The hospital of the novels is an actual one in New South Wales. Its setting, by a lake, is as scenically beautiful as the novel describes. Long ago I abandoned a first career as a Social Worker in NSW hospitals. Because of my own experience I am sure that Kocan’s accounts of the hospital routines, its medical, nursing, and ancillary staff, and its patients, are, in both actual and fictional terms, recorded accurately.

Exactitude, and even great sympathy, compassion, and humour can be found in good reportage, as well as in art. How does Kocan fashion indisputable literature from such lives, such places? How does he include humour and beauty among horror and agony? How does he use brutal and brutalised dialogue without brutalising his people or their voices? How does he contrive to be … ? I was lost for an exact word. Cheever supplied it. It is ‘decorous’.

Cheever also supplies his particular meaning and resonance to ‘decorous’ in an introduction to the King Penguin volume I’ve mentioned. There he acknowledged many of his stories to The New Yorker whose notable editor, Harold Ross, ‘used to yell at any hint of the stirring of erotic drives, “This is a family magazine, God damn it”’. With a few glorious examples Cheever goes on to explain, as to Ross, that ‘his lack of decorum was pronounced … But he taught one … that decorum is a mode of speech, as profound and connotative as any other, differing not in content but in syntax and imagery’.

The italics are mine, to stress that Kocan, who left school at fourteen, and went slowly but violently mad, in a hospital by a lake discovered his own beautifully precise and decorous ‘mode of speech’.

Behind, and sometimes in the foreground of his story are instances of sadism and cruelty; of floors horrible with shit, scattered food and vomit; of gibbering madness, death, tragedy, and human waste; of gross mental retardation and physical deformity; of despair, frustration, and sorrow. To say that Kocan balances and contrasts unshirked horrors with occasions of kindness and concern; of times of serenity and times of hope; of cures and achievements, is not a satisfactory explanation for the overall impact. As I said, that is unexplainable.

I again emphasise that there is no direct stylistic correspondence between Kocan and Cheever, either in the latter’s short stories, or in Falconer, his novel of a prison. I have written elsewhere about Cheever and found it next to impossible to select a sufficiently short passage to indicate his magic. This difficulty holds for Kocan, too. The episode of Smiler must serve, for it is self-contained and not too long. I’d have preferred other examples except that their impact, depending upon their interwoven threads in the fabric, would take more space than I have here.

The day-screws begin to go and the night-screws arrive. You get tense when you see the senior night-screw is Smiler, an old enemy. You think you should go back and lose yourself a bit among the other men, but it wouldn’t help. Smiler knows you’re here. That’s the first thing they’d tell him.

Smiler comes from the office. He’s smiling of course. He always smiles. He says how glad he is that you got this transfer. He says he always would’ve bet money on you getting it sooner or later. He starts telling you that the essence of this ward is trust, and he even spells it for you: T-R-U-S-T. The security here is a sham, he says, and any bloke can piss off if he wants to. Smiler describes a few methods of escape and how a bloke could hitch a lift on the highway and be in the city in two hours.

“I’m a sportsman,” he says. “I’ll give anyone a head start. I’ll even unlock the door.”

All the while you are giving him a steady man-to-man look, as though you’re full of quiet respect for a straight-talking fellow. Smiler strolls and you return to the smoke and smell of the dayroom. You’d rather stay in the cool shadows and watch the moon, but it seems spoiled.

At the end of The Treatment Len Tarbutt wins a major poetry award. The hospital staff and other friends share his delight. He is interviewed on radio and photographed by a TV team. ‘Of course the publicity is mostly vulgar and stupid – they don’t care about poetry, it’s just that you being a mental patient makes a good story.’ At evening he watches hundreds of ducks from the lake,

rising into the evening sky … you’ll be seeing these ducks for years yet. Maybe you’ll be released one day but it doesn’t seem very important. You watch the ducks go over, each one frail and separate within the dark mass, and you wonder what you really feel about the hospital. Right now it seems very beautiful. The thought comes that the beauty could not be so much if it weren’t for the pain underneath. No, you can’t hate this place.

The beauty could not be so much if it weren’t for the pain underneath.

A mood. A vision. A tingle. Unexplainable.