Not
quite smart enough
Ian Britain
Jeffrey Smart
Not Quite Straight: A Memoir
Vintage, $24.95 pb, 468 pp, 978174166 6274
It is an eerie measure of a movie’s power when you come out
at the end of it and sense, however fleetingly, that you’re
still a part of its world, or that its world is all but indistinguishable
from the everyday one you’ve just re-entered. German director
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was grand master of this trick. His compatriot
Pina Bausch achieves a comparable sorcery with dance. Her audiences,
when they file out into the foyer, ineluctably take on the lineaments
of her choreography. Lewis Carroll’s refrain ‘Will you,
won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?’
suggests you have an option; Bausch’s spectacle persuades
you there is none. Among painters, one of the greatest contemporary
practitioners of this irresistible effect – not magic realism
but realist magic – is Australia’s Jeffrey Smart.
I recently travelled by bus from Canberra to Sydney to interview
Smart while he was revisiting Australia from his adopted home
in Italy, so those lushly stark vignettes of the modern city and
its hinterland that have become his hallmark were to the forefront
of my mind. How uncannily they blended, I continually sensed,
with the passing succession of views framed by the bus’s
windows. Down to the smallest details – the arrows painted
on the road, the corrugations of a metal fence, the artless graffiti
on a factory wall, the patterning of rivets on an overtaking truck
– it was as if such quotidian features of our visual diet
had all been conceived and designed by Jeffrey Smart for our unwonted
contemplation, as in any number of his canvases. Trompe l’oeil
rampant: so much so that the illusion works in two directions.
The reality assumes the guise of the art as much as the art assumes
the guise of reality, so that any conventional distinctions between
the two are unsettlingly called into question.
In another context, poet and critic Charles Simic recently observed
in the London Review of Books (20 March 2008) that ‘art
doesn’t represent reality, imitate life, or copy nature.
Experience is primarily an aesthetic matter.’ But it usually
takes an artist, in whatever medium or genre, to keep alerting
us to this and to insist on confronting us with it.
Without pretensions to being an artist in any verbal medium (he
expressly distinguishes himself from such), Smart was almost bound
to disappoint fans of his paintings when it came to producing
his memoir of 1996, Not Quite Straight. (See, notably,
David Marr’s exasperated review in ABR, November 1996.)
Neither in the tale nor the telling of Smart’s own ‘experience’
here is there much you could call ‘aesthetic’. Fitfully,
all but incidentally, he drops some tantalising hints about the
artistic or literary influences on the development of his work
and sensibility, and alludes to some detail of his professional
technique, his work routine or his chosen subject matter. But
he appears more concerned to drop the names of celebrities past
and present whose path he’s crossed at various stages of
his life, and to rehearse the sexual enticements of a succession
of more or less obliging younger men. There is a poignant sense
of transience to such moments, as he records them here, and also
of thwartedness: the opportunities he had, but just missed, for
meeting yet other famous ‘names’ still haunt him down
the years; strike him as ‘tragic’ in the case of an
aborted dinner date with Marlene Dietrich in the early 1950s.
But the piling up of such hits and misses is no way to give any
sense of structure, proportion, shape, form, or disciplined composition
to the writing – the qualities that are so radiantly impressive
in his painting – and the cumulative effect is desultory
in the extreme, where not (inadvertently) comic.
What’s frustrating about this for readers is that there are
occasional signs of real verbal flair (in such pungent phrases
as ‘rumoured to be vegetarians’ or ‘a Bloomsbury
bacchanal’) and of a capacity for set pieces that can grip
without recourse to social and sexual chit-chat. Smart’s
nightmarish evocation of his stint as a ‘pantry boy’
aboard a ship travelling to Europe via North America has something
of the intensity of Dickens’s or Conrad’s darker chronicles.
He manages to stretch this across nine chapters; it’s a Gothic
mini-saga that completely avoids his ritual invocation of the
rich and famous, though they have a way of creeping back in to
his reports of the onshore interludes en route, and not untypically
when he misses out on meeting them: ‘I had friends here [Philadelphia]
to whom I had written. The conductor Eugene Ormandy was one …
Alas, Mr Ormandy was away on tour …’ Alas, alas!
‘I feel that perhaps my painting is better than ever before,’
Smart tells us on a more upbeat note at the start of his ‘Postscript’
to the just-released paperback edition of his memoir. But characteristically
he recoils from dwelling on this subject of his creativity and
proceeds to reflect on the costs and pleasures of celebrity, including
his own. Why his obsession with this subject, I felt comfortable
enough to ask at the end of our interview (which had mainly centred
on his association with fellow-painter Donald Friend, the subject
of my current research). The answer had more to do with modesty
than with what he aptly calls in the postscript his ‘assumed
pomposity’ (emphasis mine). He seemed genuinely taken aback
by my imputation of name-dropping, and indicated (not disingenuously,
I felt) that he simply thought the names in question would be
the chief source of interest for audiences of the book. This chimes
with his belief, articulated in the new postscript, that the subject
of his own work and its recent success would be ‘too boring’.
The sad irony remains that if (in the words of David Marr’s
original review) Smart had ‘risk[ed] boring us’ more,
he might have ended up disappointing us less. Two of us, at least.
AUSTRALIAN
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