autobiography

METROPOLIS

IN RETROSPECT it's not surprising that Andrew Riemer wrote so insightfully about Shakespeare's comedies. Those green worlds of transformation are expressive of longing and nostalgia, of social order being restored through the acceptance and reconciliation of opposing forces. That the brute, material world is partly dealt with through nostalgia, fantasy and parody is an idée fixe of Riemer's elegantly written autobiographical books.

Here Riemer discusses his long academic career, almost entirely spent at Sydney University. He highlights the theatricality of academia, though often it is a theatre of war. I remember Andrew Riemer during my time as a doctoral student at Sydney. I never spoke to him, even though I was writing about Australian autobiography and he had just written one. It was that kind of place, or I was that kind of student. In the context of this book this seems suitably Riemeresque, given his own experiences of academia's reticences and codes. Despite my diffidence, I sensed that his lugubrious style was a product of a developed sense of humour, as much as a masking of it.

In Sandstone Gothic Riemer chooses English as an undergraduate, more for style than substance, after failing medicine three times. Riemer argues that in his self-fashioning, setting aside his Hungarian years, he was ineluctably drawn to English because of Australian cultural conditions in the early '60s. Riemer's nostalgic sensibility was compounded by Australia's nostalgia for Britain; his sense of exile compounded by his living in a country defined by exile. His 'sentimental education' was received at an institution whose motto, loosely translated, reads 'the same mind under different skies'. The nostalgia inevitably leads Riemer to postgraduate work in England. Instead of Oxbridge, he heads for the University of London, partly through a fear of being found out as a parodist, and partly through a desire to live in a metropolis, a European city, rather than a provincial one. London, not the University, gives him the required education.

It may be a commonplace criticism these days, but nevertheless I feel that this work is under-edited. In the earlier books, Riemer seamlessly joined the autobiographical and essayistic spirits. Here there are, for me, a few moments when tension is lost, and repetition stands in for exposition. Once in London, though, Sandstone Gothic really takes off, perhaps because Riemer's gift is for recovering long-gone moods through the evocation of earlier times and places. (In this case in that nether world that was then the British Museum's Reading Room). He also has an eye for absurdities of English life then. In addition, Riemer seems unconstrained in his representation of people, such as his supervisor, whose 'seminars' where held in the Dickensian local, and who only showed interest in Riemer's thesis when it involved 'real' research, such as within the 'underwater gloom' of the Public Records Office.

The set piece of Sandstone Gothic, however, is Samuel Goldberg's attempt, as Challis Professor, to make the English Department at Sydney University in his own, Leavisite, image. In the last twenty years Leavisites have been so discredited that it is hard to imagine how Australia could have been so dramatically affected by them. Despite being more even handed than John Docker's account (in In a Critical Condition) of these early theory wars, there are moments when old bitternesses seem to show like weathered, but still visible, wounds on a tree.

Though Riemer may spend too long on this issue for his general audience, there are some wickedly funny moments. The department's fracture into two is described intimately, but the episode has no scène àfaire. G. A. Wilkes, then the holder of the new chair in Australian Literature, finesses a situation whereby he can devise English courses. The Berlin Wall that eventuates is unsustainable and Goldberg and his supporters leave, mostly returning to Melbourne University (about which Riemer has little to say). Perhaps, this anti-climax is intentional. 'It is ever thus', Riemer seems to be saying. In this section my own few memories of Wilkes are surprisingly borne out, especially with regard to his presence in departmental meetings. Tall, taciturn and impassive, Wilkes' striking white plumage was never ruffled by the more strident calls of the cockatoos and lyrebirds around him.

The real climax of Sandstone Gothic comes when a similarly evangelical brand of literary studies makes its way into the University in the '80s (known, risibly, to the press as 'Theory'). This eventually leads Riemer to take early retirement and engage more fully in writing and reviewing.

Sandstone Gothic is framed by encounters with three figures of Riemer's student days: Jill Ker Conway, Germaine Greer, and Robert Hughes (no Clive), described with varying degrees of effectiveness.

David McCooey was a doctoral student at Sydney University, 1990-93. He now lectures at Deakin University.

Return to June 1998 / AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW