essay
LA TROBE UNIVERSITY ESSAY
SAVAGE AND SCARLET
Peter Craven
THE STORY IS OFTEN TOLD that when J.I.M. Stewart, the Jury Professor of English at the University of Adelaide, a man who found himself trapped in Australia during the war, had occasion to lecture on Australian literature, he declared that there was none and that he would lecture on D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo instead. I don't want to add to the history of colonial mongrels having a go at the corpse of J.I.M. Stewart. Under the pen-name Michael Innes he was to give a lot of literary and other people round the world a good deal of pleasure by writing the Appleby detective stories in which the hero would waltz onto the scene of the crime and start quoting Aeschylus in Greek or a particularly baroque conceit from Crashaw before the corpse was cold. Besides there was something prescient about Stewart's appallingly imperial remark because the Lawrence of Kangaroo caught some aspect of Australia, the bush and the sweat of the gums, the tenor of how people talk here or walk down the street, with such a crazy power of projection that he continues a long shadow. It's not for nothing that, when Stewart as Innes was sending up an Oxford education and the foibles of the English aristocracy with a vehemence of nostalgia to which his exile in Adelaide must have contributed, a young Australian called Patrick White was deciding to relinquish his life as a literary hanger-on in London and when the war finished to head back to the country he came from. It doesn't take an oracle to point out that much the biggest influence on the novels of Patrick White, the greatest things written by an Australian in my lifetime, is the work of D.H. Lawrence. And it's hard not to see precisely those haunted eerie landscapes in Kangaroo as feeding in to the dense sensuousness of White's The Tree of Man.
I WANT TO CONCLUDE this roundabout essay about Australia and the world (those component parts of a world we imagine in the process of reading) by talking a little about how I stumbled on the world of writing.
We are always trying to confine Australian literature, to pretend that it exists in a national vacuum whereas in fact the opposite is the case. We live in a small country on the periphery of the consciousness of the world and we are also the inheritors of the great English language imperium. We have something like an equidistance, for what it's worth, between the English of Britain and the English language as it is written and spoken in the United States. (Of course the whole world has some proximity to American English but the whole world does not have our historical inwardness with first England and then America and with the two taken together).
It's possible to construe this situation as the worst of all possible worlds but there's little advantage in doing so even if it happens to be true. We might as well concentrate on whatever advantage constitutes our strength. The most obvious thing about our status as a parish of the Anglo-American centres of publishing is that we not only know infinitely more about them than they know about us, we are also -- at least arguably -- inclined to know more about London and New York, British and American writing than they know about each other, and, necessarily, to have a position on those somewhat different traditions that is untinged by loyalty to one or other metropolitan centre, in a way that is not possible if you are English or American (or at any rate not easy).
This is a banal reflection and we should be careful of the warning of Northrop Frye that in a postcolonial country the question of 'Who am I?' is always being displaced into some absurdity like 'Where is here?' Frye is right about this, that kind of obsession with geography as the domain of anxiety and self-consciousness is reflected in the names of so many of our literary magazines (from Westerly to Quadrant, with Overland somewhere between them). Of course a parochial nationalism is the curse of little countries and perhaps particularly the kind of little country that inherits the language and laws and political systems (our federal system derives, in part, from the American model) of countries which will always be culturally mightier in our own minds or at least in those parts of our minds that see 'us' as distinctive from, rather than continuous with, the rest of English language or indeed world culture than we ourselves.
And we should be careful of the wisdom of Northrop Frye, real though it is. Frye is dismissive of the absurdity of the question 'Where is here?' but it remains true that somewhere needs slowly and elaborately to be imagined before it can be thought to exist. When Stephen Dedalus in the purple prose that Joyce uses to both mock and honour him, says that he wants 'to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race' he is being a bit over the top and yet the words have generally been taken, with some validity, to indicate a real ambition of Joyce, however romantically expressed. Ireland is a famously little country which has had its great spirits in the last hundred years or so (the greatest poet, Yeats; the greatest novelist, Joyce; and a swag of the greatest dramatists -- Wilde, Shaw, Beckett, Synge, O'Casey). Indeed it's possible that Stephen's vaunt (which is Joyce in the act of parodying himself but not the thing the parody points to) is an example of the outlander passing from ontology to geography with a very confident stride indeed. If A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a book that excavates the question of 'Who am I?' with such self-scrutinising exhaustiveness that it reduces it to a kind of evolution of style (and an implied genesis of the Author) Ulysses is very much a 'Where is here?' book. The Telemachian Stephen is less central to the book than the polytropic and Odyssean Bloom. And, yes, Bloom is, absolutely individualised but he's a product of the place in which he lives and his wonderful response to the Citizen, that mad dog nationalist, when he (Bloom) defines a nation 'as the same people living in the same place...or in different places', is some kind of cheer for an Ireland that is not reducible to nationalism as a dog gone mad. Just as there is some truth to the idea that 'dear dirty Dublin' is the hero of the book. Where else in literature is there a place so mapped and known and excavated?
I'm worrying at the question not because I want to wish literary nationalism on anybody, God forbid, nor because I want to re-invent the cultural cringe, but simply in order to say something about Australian writing apropos of the world of writing we all inhabit and something about that small part of the world which we call the 'literary world'.
Don Watson, at the eleventh hour before the Republican referendum, said that he hoped a minimalist change would allow us never again to carry on about things being 'unAustralian'. This is certainly a step in the direction of Northrop Frye and a necessary one. There is, after all, a deep absurdity in the Qantas ad about calling Australia home and also a deeper worldliness. A nation that has to sing ditties about still calling Australia home is a nation made up of people who have nowhere to hang their heads. The giveaway and the wordliness (as well as the desperation) is in the correlative: all this nostalgia is being invested in the reality of potential and actual expatriation.
It's possible of course to find precedents for this kind of nationalistic clamour in the history of America (and in the present that history generates). Maybe it's simply a new world self-consciousness with the children of pioneers looking over their shoulders, maybe it's a version of the complex fate Henry James wrote about so tellingly (and which certainly used to afflict people in this country in a big way): the sense that everything which forms you and nourishes you comes from the great world elsewhere, not from the land of your birth. This both is and isn't true in the most obvious ways. In her recent Boyer Lectures Inga Clendinnen wrote with a refreshing lack of cant. She wasn't frightened to defend the Australian sense of decency, the Australian honouring of those defeated in battle, mate-saying, Crocodile Dundeeism, the full two bob. And she saw no contradiction in defending this 'essentialist' and traditional view of the nation and with the urgency of coming to terms with of reckoning on and reconciling with the Aborigines. Robert Manne is another person who would share Clendinnen's broad view of the question of the nation: he has said that the civilisation that came to Australia with Phillip and the First Fleet was many hundreds of years old and he is on the record as saying that he thinks it was a good thing that it was British civilisation they brought. There is no contradiction between nationalism and internationalism given that they are both necessary fixations, however blinded the former may sometimes seem, at other times, how inevitable. Shakespeare (of all people) is a salutary instance in this case. I remember nearly twenty years ago seeing the playwright Stephen Sewell taken to task for daring to set his plays elsewhere. He replied -- naturally enough -- that Shakespeare had set the vast majority of his plays outside of England. It's true. We sometimes forget that the Bard would fail to qualify with Hamlet for a Miles Franklin prize if comparable national criterion (write about your birth place) had been applied to him. And yet who could ever forget John of Gaunt's speech, or Henry V's Crispin speech. And -- at the furthest extremity from this kind of nationalism with its transfigured jingoism -- there is the nearly meaningless fact that Lear, his greatest play, and Falstaff, his greatest character, are British to their bootstraps. Well, why wouldn't they be?
I have been brooding about these questions (faced with the question of brooding about something in order to write an essay) because I am a creature of the Australian literary world and at the same time I am more than usually aware, more perhaps than the next insider, that Australian writing is only a part of what we attend to. In the last month or so I have read and written about a representative range of the things that preoccupy me professionally. There was Inga Clendinnen's memoir Tiger's Eye, David Malouf's Dream Stuff and Cathy Ford's novel NYC, all for the Sydney Morning Herald. In the midst of all that there was a piece on the German factionalist W.G. Sebald for The Australian's Review of Books and a number of the short 'Second Thoughts' pieces I write about classics for the Sunday Age. There was something about the poetry of Marvell, something about Mansfield Park, something about Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson's Civil War book and one about The Fatal Shore. The great Anthony Powell died recently so there was a separate feature about him for the Saturday Age. Then there was a string of reviews for The Age , all of them overseas books: the literary essays of Italo Calvino, Susan Sontag's long-awaited new novel In America, John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius (about the King and Queen in -- or rather before -- Hamlet. Then another longer piece for The Australian's Review of Books about Michael Ondaatje's new novel, Anil's Ghost.
How does the Australian material compare with the international? Not badly would be the short answer to that question. I don't normally think there's much point in comparing recent books (which tend to be oranges or lemons, rain or shine) still less on the basis of their point of origin (which in the last analysis is irrelevant). But here goes. The Clendinnen memoir is one of those cross-textured ungainly pieces of writing in which this country sometimes seems to specialise. (Has anyone noticed that we led the world in the concoction of faction as surely as the Hawke/Keating government invented Third Way politics before its time). It is a bright and brave book even though the fiction which punctuates the reminscence the way dreams punctuate a life, that is to say randomly, are uneven in quality -- some of the stories are terrific and some are not; some have a revelatory relation to the real life story and some remain opaque. At the same time, running along with this, we get the author's ideas about the nature of the self and a hundred other matters which tend to be presented without the quasi-fictional curtain which is usual as a form of decorum even in works of non-fiction when they take the form of reminscence. So how can this be generalised in national/international terms? It would be surprising, I think, if a work as eccentric or as wilful and crazily-shaped as Tiger's Eye were to be published in New York or London. Perhaps it's true that a metropolitan centre would be less likely to be interested in a university professor as a personality and she might be less interested herself. But then that may be just another way of saying that it is easier to experiment and easier to go naked in this country. After all it must have some significance that Tiger's Eye is an exhilarating and poignant book. The fact that the book could be deemed half-cooked editorially does not mean that it was literally so and the author is explicit that only her publisher believed in the book which would not have existed without his encouragement. And the book is brilliant in its energy and its depth of self-revelation. Its wildness and disarray are textured amd transforming.
If Tiger's Eye is a book a film reviewer would give an impassioned four stars to, Susan Sontag's In America does not fit on the map of anyone's reckoning. If this is to be classified, even for a moment, as faction then it is faction of the big battalion kind. It is in fact historical fiction which happens to follow the contour of the life of the nineteenth-century Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who emigrated to America and acted in English. The first thing to say about the Sontag book is that it opens with a chapter in which the 'persona' of the novelist (it really is that arch) beholds her characters at a party. Even though this novelist is not (of course) Susan Sontag she shares a far from obscure life history with her. This is, in its way, as gauche as any half-theorised doodling by an Australian academic tinkering at the borderlines between discursivity and yarn-spinning. The difference is that Sontag doesn't start getting facetious or nervous and she proceeds with an absolutely enamelled applomb -- which is not to deny that any self-respecting editor should have done her damnedest to have this chapter cut. And something similar is true of the book as a whole which is nevertheless marvellous in many, many of its parts. The prose in that technical sense that can be separated from its effects is everywhere smooth, measured, without excess or angularity. Compared to Clendinnen (or, for that matter, to jump the gun, Catherine Ford), Sontag always knows where she's going though at times this can seem to be off the railroad tracks altogether. There are whole sections of this book as good as any writer alive and the book as a whole is an imaginative as well as a historically recapitulative feat of quite a high order. But In America sometimes flags maddeningly. On the other hand the very last section, a monologue by the actor Edwin Booth, is more audacious than anything in Clendinnen's work that draws attention to itself but it works superbly.
Of course this comparison cannot be sustained with any inwardness because Tiger's Eye is an exciting and wayward memoir (both of an illness and a childhood) while In America is a markedly ambitious historical novel.
What is striking is that each book is modest and immodest in different measure. The tentative conclusion one would be likely to draw is that you would be better off in Australia if you had a partial and wayward idea you wanted to tinker with. And the difference in size means that a 'mad' book can receive more mainstream attention.
A fairer comparison with either book (and a kind of Australian classic) would be Drusilla Modjeska's Poppy. My memory of Poppy is that it has passages, particularly ones involving the Lalage (i.e. the Drusilla) character, which might advantageously have been excised -- something one wouldn't say, off the cuff, or any too lightly, of the different parts of Clendinnen, let alone Sontag. On the other hand, Poppy is a more continuous act of apparent, fictionally shadowed, memoir than Tiger's Eye and it is a more exciting and a more satisfying story than In America even if no particular part of it glitters so much as the best sections of Sontag.
Where do we go from here? The Calvino essays come from a culture more different from our own than the British or American. They are in their analytical and serpentine ways formidable things though not more so than the respective essays of Inga Clendinnen or Susan Sontag, even if we may invoke them under other aspects. Nor those of David Malouf and John Updike for that matter.
One suspects, at the end of the day, that John Updike's stakes are going to be rather bigger than David Malouf's (though not, I think, as high as Patrick White's), but Dream Stuff is a suppler, a more variegated and sap-filled book than Gertrude and Claudius, plain different things though they are. Updike's novel about Hamlet's mother and stepfather has an inwardness with Shakespeare that Malouf would readily understand and a kind of circumstantial gorgeousness and brilliance of chiaroscuro that Malouf cannot equal in any of his 'historical' works from An Imaginary Life to Conversations at Curlow Creek. But all this is something of a stage trick in Gertrude and Claudius where Updike is interested in creating two main characters whose fates (but not the details of their actions) we know -- and who are implicitly the characters in Shakespeare. Malouf, in a very traditional return to form, is back, by and large, to almost Johnno territory and in all but one or two of these stories the effect is remarkable. If Gertrude and Claudius is a rather remarkable five finger exercise for Updike, Dream Stuff is the kind of old-fashioned book by Malouf (very modest and very accomplished) which will surprise and move readers. Malouf may not be a short story 'master' but that hardly matters given the success of this book, blemishes and all. No, it's not William Trevor. But it would compel the admiration of someone who took William Trevor as his benchmark.
The Catherine Ford novel NYC has taken a long time coming and it might have been a more spacious, a larger-scale work, but it delivers the goods. It is marvellously observant, moving, full of heart, snapping with intensity. Sometimes the language might have been tighter but this book will hold its own in this company.
It is a more realised, though a less ambitious novel than Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost which paints a horrifying portrait of the terroroist side of recent Sri Lankan history but then peoples it with subtilised water colour faces, all ambiguity and stereotype. Ondaatje is one of the writers on earth most like David Malouf and it is strange to see, in a matter of weeks, the Australian returning to his old strengths (which we thought he might have forgotten) while the adoptive Canadian opts for a kind of shorthand poetic impressionism not unlike Malouf's less successful books albeit with a more Goyaesque effectiveness of background.
I need hardly emphasise that each of these books will take on a different light according to the oeuvre of their respective writers. None of them seem to me self-evident masterpieces in the way, say, that the thirty-something David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men did when it was released in February. Not one of them is a work by a brand new talent of an arresting kind as Michelle De Kretser and Andrew Riemer tell us the young black English writer Zadie Smith (all of twenty-three) is in her new book White Teeth. (On the strength of the first chapter they're certainly right that she's a talent and a charmer -- to know more I would have to read on.)
What, if anything, is there to learn from the habit of reading (and writing about) both Australian and international books? Well, apart from anything else it is a necessary exercise in perspective. I am in the position where I read and review more or less any book published in the English language world I want to look at. It is a paradoxical triumph of parochialism that I am probably in more of a position to do this than most people in the world, simply because we constitute a smaller world in Australia and the competition (as well as the remuneration) is less great.
Two things are apparent from the rather privileged position I occupy. First of all it is never going to be likely that, in A.D. Hope's phrase, 'still from the desert prophets come' -- at least in a statistical sense. Australian writing is not much more likely than Scottish writing (which I'm told is going through some kind of renaissance at the moment with the likes of James Kelmann and Irvine Welsh) to dominate the world stage. And if it were to do so it would be because of a handful of unrepresentative individuals. But it is generally true that the best Australian writing (which is all I'm interested in reading) will hold its own with any kind of writing published anywhere. This is the sort of thing that is difficult to understand particularly for people who do not have much experience of these matters. It absolutely confused Mark Davis a few years ago when he imagined that the Australian literary market was overheated and that it was subject to the grossest kind of insider trading.
I suspect nothing short of practical exposure or a strong dose of hearsay can cure this kind of thing. It is quite difficult to believe in a world where publishing does not exhibit any marked literary knowledge, where the literary pages of the papers are hit and miss and have no bottom line and where the literature departments of our universities show no zeal in promoting any writing as better than any other, that the writing of your own country can maintain, at least at its upper levels, the highest standards. In this respect it is a handy thing to hold on to anecdotes. Frank Kermode says somewhere in his memoirs that it was his privilege to live among Australian poets at a time when Australian poetry was better than English poetry. He was referring to his time in the navy during the war when he was stationed in Sydney and knew James McAuley and Alec Hope. (This is a watershed moment in Australian literary history, the moment of Ern Malley, apart from anything else.) The other story, a simple one, is of Helen Garner standing at the back of a lecture room while a group of writing students listened gracelessly to an unassuming middle-aged American man named Raymond Carver. He liked that book of hers, The Children's Bach.
One of the things I learned when I edited Scripsi was not simply that you could publish some of the world's better known writers if you knew what you were doing but that one of your assets in that process was that they (the brahmins of whatever dispensation) could tell the quality of the work you published by people they did not know.
These things are always personal but representative (which is the only reason why they are worth talking about at all). I was born to parents who belonged to the last generation where reading was not just a birthright but an available and compelling form of entertainment and illumination. My parents were still in their twenties when televisions came to this country but my mother at least persisted with that older tradition of reading five books a week for the fun of it mixing her Agatha Christie and Paul Gallico, her Morris West and her Patricia Highsmith with Anna Karenina and Jane Austen. Thousands of people read like this at the time. It was much more usual than the way you or I might jump from Elmore Leonard and Shane Maloney to Don De Lillo or Drusilla Modjeska. More usual because less self-conscious and with little sense of the fact that the 'trash' is a pretty superior brand anyway. It was much more like the transition between watching The Bill or Charmed and going to see American Beauty or Three Kings.
There was nothing remotely discriminating about it but it was open to every kind of literary comer with the notable exception of Australian writers of literary fiction who were notably thin on the ground. I remember adults reading Nino Culotta's They're a Weird Mob and I remember the heyday of Nevil Shute's hardback bestsellerdom which seemed to me (at the age of eight) unapproachably glamorous. I remember grown up talk of D'Arcy Niland and Ruth Park and the war stories of Russell Braddon (The Naked Island) and Paul Brickhill The Dam Busters and The Great Escape. Terra Australis had a strong enough grip on the imagination of the young child because we were read Blinky Bill and Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and The Magic Pudding back in the 1950s and we might have dallied with Seven Little Australians or the Billabong books at primary school but there was a general sense of Australian writing as a kind of parochial thing, a sort of bush tucker for the mind. I remember this vividly because I can still bring to mind my visceral snobbery of a child when I used to sniff at the inferior paper and design of Angus and Robertson books which seemed to me then to smell and look like a decidedly inferior product. (Sometimes indeed when I open a parcel of the best and brightest Australian publishing can offer I get a Proustian whiff of something like the same thing.)
I am in no position to despise the first pre-literary world of books I encountered. I remember fondly enough some time not long after television coming to this country the enthusiasm with which my parents watched a BBC adaptation of David Copperfield, re-reading the book along with it. David Copperfield was played by the young Robert Hardy and the adaptation was in twenty-six half-hour episodes, which is a good deal more spacious than the last adaptation with Maggie Smith as Betsy Trottwood.
Books were squandered upon me as a child, more because I liked them than because anyone wanted to improve me. Lavish and beautiful editions of children's histories of England, dozens of retellings of the King Arthur and Robin Hood stories which I particularly adored. Strange kitschy volumes which I imagine would be worth a fortune now which were expensive-looking novelisations in hard back with sepia pics on high quality paper and colour plates of whatever Hollywood tale of derring-do. Zorro and the TV Robin Hood and Classics Comics (what an introduction that was to the canon!) mixed in with Kipling and Tom Sawyer, Uncle Scrooge and the whole damn lot.
No one should ever despise these things. I am sometimes accused of being rather a snooty élitist about such matters, sometimes by people who have retained the Leavisite habit of keeping their noses in the air longer after the belief in value has ceased to provide a justification.
Umberto Eco says somewhere in a penetrating half-truth that to understand your times you can disregard the high art but you cannot disregard the popular culture. This is shrewd if rhetorically weighted (Gilbert and Sullivan tell us something about the Victorian world that we can't learn from George Eliot, but not something more enlightening). What interests me, however, is the intimate and inevitable -- though always mad sounding -- connection between the popular and the 'arty'. Hugh Stretton, that most polymath of Australian thinkers, has his own version of the old Chesterton tag that the battle of Waterloo was not won on the playing fields of Eton but on scrappy village greens where scrappy boys played scrappy cricket.
Well, Waterloo's not the issue but Stretton has always been at pains to emphasise that culture does not come from silver service amenity, it comes from the clapped out piano in the old dusty spare room where a child in the suburbs picks out a tune and then begs for lessons. I can say quite honestly that my first experience of Shakespeare comes from watching the plays on television when I was -- what? -- seven or eight. Listening to the pure sound of sense, as Robert Frost put it, for no better known reason than that they wore old-fashioned clothes and might, just might, indulge in a bit of swashbuckling.
By the time I was twelve or so I could cope with modern dress if strictly necessary (despite the searing experience of spectaculars from The Ten Commandments to Spartacus, a formative experience I share with the rest of my hippie generation) but, in any case, I was hopelessly starstruck and stagestruck. The upshot of that was that I hungered to be in London to see Peter O'Toole open the National Theatre for Olivier in Hamlet. I wanted with even greater intensity to be in New York in 1964 -- the year of Shakespeare's quarte-centenary -- to see Burton play Hamlet in a production directed by Gielgud.
The only alternative to being there was to sit in a bungalow in the outer suburbs and make my parents buy all the recordings of Shakespeare they could afford. It's odd to reflect that the depth (not the range) of my knowledge of Shakespeare goes back to a time long before university, earlier even than the time when you are 'good' at English at school. It goes back to a time when I listened over and over to Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, to Burton as Hamlet and Henry V, to Redgrave as Hamlet and Macbeth, to Ralph Richardson as Iago and Sean Connery as Hotspur. I could still, more than thirty-five years later, tell you exactly how they stressed a line in a way which I imagine would escape the memories of those who saw the original performances.
Adolescents, particularly younger ones, are mad solipsistic creatures, and not long after this parts of my brain would be given over to the Rolling Stones or, more especially to Bob Dylan, but I am forever grateful for that Shakespearean connection, born, it may be, of the last moment of empire and perhaps not possible without it.
Australia was all but unimaginable as anything but the ground of whatever everyday experience had to offer. I saw Tudawalli in Jedda, the first film about Aborigines in the mid-50s and I do not remember another genuinely Australian film until the mid-70s with Picnic at Hanging Rock and Sunday Too Far Away. Although I was a stagestruck child Alan Hopgood's And the Big Men Fly (about the footy) is the only Australian play I remember before the advent of Williamson and Hibberd. (And how late it came, that strange experience of being in the presence of an Australian masterpiece of the theatre with Hibberd's Stretch of the Imagination.)
Literature was bound to be a little quicker. There was a priest at school who read Paterson and especially Lawson in the weatherbeaten leathery Sydney tones that are appropriate to that bush bravura and bush melancholy. When I heard of the death of Manning Clark I was in England and I went to his old college Balliol and stood in the empty chapel, as close to the altar as I dared, and recited stammeringly, as best I could, the end of Lawson's The Bush Understaker, which with its melancholy and understatement seems so close to Manning's sensibility.