biography
Robert Manne
Cassandra Pybus
The Devil and James McCauley
UQP $34.95Hb, 321pp
0 7022 3111 8
AROUND 1954 THE POET James McAuley committed himself to the anti-communist struggle in Australia. He made his decision a year or so after Stalin's death. For twenty-five years the Soviet Union had been ruled over by a self-deifying despot who had murdered millions of his subjects, consigned millions more to slave labour, destroyed all forms of spontaneous human association, subjugated the entire sphere of East-Central Europe to his rule, tethered the sciences and prostituted the arts. There is nothing about McAuley's decision which seems to me morally questionable or politically strange.
In The Devil and James McAuley Cassandra Pybus has written a peculiar book, at once genuinely perceptive and strangely blind. Although I did not know McAuley I did know several of the major characters in this book. In reading it I frequently had a curious feeling of things both quite familiar yet in some fundamental way misunderstood. In her portrait of Richard Krygier, for example, Pybus does not see the humour, the warmth or the charm, or why Richard was so dearly loved. The Santamaria I met had far more intellectual modesty and dutifulness, far more capacity for familial love and for caritas, than Pybus understands. Her portrait of Frank Knopfelmacher, however, disturbed me most. God knows Knopfelmacher was in very many ways an impossible man. He was also the most brilliant and generous teacher I ever encountered and the man who felt the meaning of the mid-century European tragedy -- of both Stalinism and Nazism -- more deeply than anyone I ever met. This quality of political feeling Cassandra Pybus simply cannot grasp.
In Western societies intellectuals, during the early years of the Cold War, responded to Stalinism in two main ways. A large group joined or supported the local communist parties, which worshipped at Stalin's shrine. They thought of communist rule as the wave of the future and of allegations of massive criminality as counter-revolutionary lies. A smaller group became committed anti-communists. In Australia James McAuley was one of the most prominent intellectual anti-communists. In The Devil and James McAuley , Cassandra Pybus has written both a political-spiritual biography of his movement towards anti-communism and a cultural interpretation of the Australian Cold War. Because Pybus is such an intelligent and attractive writer her portrait of McAuley is likely to prove persuasive. Because she appears to know so little about the nature of communism her portrait of the Australian Cold War is likely to perpetuate our current misunderstanding as to what was most seriously at stake.
Pybus's interpretation of McAuley's life goes, roughly speaking, like this. At the centre of his being McAuley was a tormented soul. As a young man he was torn between a life of lechery, drink and cynicism and a yearning for love, order and truth. His poetry was gloomy, filled with self-disgust, dread and shame. He experienced terrible nightmares and nocturnal rages, which frightened those who observed them.
The Second World War, to some extent, sobered McAuley up. He moved now into the grandiose, preposterous, self-mythologising intelligence unit of the army which had been assembled by the charismatic charlatan, Alf Conlon. As a member of the Conlon circle, McAuley, with his close friend Harold Stewart, concocted the Ern Malley fraud on a lazy Melbourne afternoon. More importantly, as a member of this circle, McAuley encountered New Guinea. New Guinea provided McAuley with a passing interest in anthropology and a postwar career. It also provided him with the most important encounter of his life.
In 1950 McAuley -- already drawn towards an anti-modernist traditionalism -- met the retired Archbishop of Papua, Alain de Boismenu, the first man he seems to have genuinely revered. Boismenu told him the strange story of Marie-Thérèse Noblet, a French nun who had founded an order in Papua in 1922. Like McAuley, Marie-Thérèse was subject to regular nocturnal visitations by figures she knew to be the Devil. The stories of her struggles with the Devil, according to Pybus, gripped McAuley's soul. By 1951, to the amazement of his university friends, through the message of the Gospels, the character of Boismenu, and the tale of Marie-Thérèse, McAuley had made his conversion to a Roman Catholicism of a stiffly orthodox kind. This conversion answered his inner need for order, ceremony and certainty. It offered relief from cynicism and self-loathing. It also brought him, for the first time in his life, to serious political engagement.
The political engagement happened thus. Through the Conlon circle McAuley knew John Kerr, a Sydney barrister deeply involved in the legal struggles of anti-communist trades unionists in New South Wales. Through his involvement with the Industrial Groups and the Movement, McAuley met with their most talented organizer, the Catholic Actionist, B.A. Santamaria. McAuley and Santamaria became lifelong friends. Both were profound pessimists about the modern age. In both an understanding of communism was intermixed with a religious impulse of a sometimes apocalyptic kind.
At the moment Santamaria met McAuley, the Polish socialist, Richard Krygier, was looking for an editor of the anti-communist literary journal he was planning. Santamaria suggested McAuley. Krygier agreed. No one could have been less driven in his politics by religion than Krygier, whose anti-communism was based exclusively on his intimate knowledge of the tragedy happening inside his former homeland. Santamaria always knew when to keep religion out of politics. McAuley's instincts were not so sure. Almost alone among anti-communists in Australia, McAuley conflated anti-communism with the fight against 'secularism' and 'liberalism'. Yet even he promised Krygier he would not, as editor of Quadrant , 'mix drinks'. It was a promise he more or less kept. In choosing McAuley as the vehicle for her analysis of Cold War anti-communist cultural politics, Cassandra Pybus altogether exaggerates the importance of religiosity as the driving force within the Australian anti-communist camp.
In truth there were serious divisions within this small group, but they had nothing to do with religion. Up to the time of McAuley's death in 1976, the real divisions within the Quadrant circle were mainly of a temperamental kind. Certain members -- like McAuley, Santamaria, Krygier and the Czech Jew, Frank Knopfelmacher -- were all, in their different ways, outsiders. Their anti-communist politics were tough and singleminded. They were untroubled by the social ostracism which arose as a result. Others -- like Sir John Latham, John Kerr, Hal Wootten and Henry Mayer -- were less singleminded in their anti-communism, more careful in their political methods and more distressed by the social disapproval of their peers. From the viewpoint of the radicals, the scruples of the moderates looked like weakness. From the viewpoint of the moderates, the behavior of the radicals looked more like the anti-communist obsessiveness of which Quadrant's liberal enemies complained. In the crisis of the mid-1960s, when the CIA funding of Quadrant was revealed, the moderates wanted to express regret; Frank Knopfelmacher insisted on answering charges with pugnacious pride. By temperament and belief, in this and other similar battles, McAuley was not on the moderate side.
It was, of course, the issue of communism which brought other members of the Quadrant circle together in the mid 1950s. Over the issue of communism, as commonsense and history have now shown, it was Quadrant and not its enemies who were right. And yet in must be said that, as the fundamental question dividing the intelligentsia moved in the late 1960s from communism to culture, around the Quadrant circle a kind of reflexive anti- leftism, a smug self-certainty and dull reactionism began to dominate. With the new questions now placed on the agenda -- Aborigines, feminism, homosexual rights, environmentalism and multiculturalism -- the Quadrant group was not so much engaged as flatly and complacently opposed. Among the non-moderate Quadrant inner circle Donald Horne grasped this first. McAuley never did. By the early 1970s his political mind had become so crusty that he mistook the Australian Schools Commission for the new enemy at the gate. His lacerating self-doubt was by now restricted exclusively to his interior world.