|
Craig
Sherborne
Hoi Polloi
Black Inc., $27.95 pb, 197 pp, 1863952217
A
LAUGHING MAN, according to Flaubert,
is stronger than a suffering one. But
as Craig Sherborne’s extra- ordinary
new memoir of childhood and youth shows,
the distinction isn’t that simple.
There is much to laugh at in Hoi
Polloi, but this is also a book
suffused with pain and suffering. Sherborne
is both a powerful satirist and a poet
of vulnerability. The poems by Sherborne
included in The Best Australian Poems
2003 show something comparable.
Those tightly controlled and acidic
poems explored similar ground to that
covered in Hoi Polloi. But this
prose account of childhood is even more
attuned to the doubleness of life, to
its mix of farce and tragedy.
Hoi Polloi opens with the narrator
and his parents living in New Zealand
in the late 1960s. The family hotel
(not a ‘pub’, according to
the narrator’s mother) is the setting
for the narrator’s early experiences.
The memoir opens: ‘The first time
I see drunks beat up my father I’m
six and standing at the bend in the
stairs.’ What follows sets the
tone for the rest of the work: prose
that illustrates an unsettling, almost
clinical, ability to describe painful
events, matched with a capacity to evoke
an empathetic pain in the reader.
This is all the more note-worthy given
that the events of this narrative are
outwardly undramatic: the family returns
to the author’s birthplace, Sydney
(‘of course, my son was born in
Sydney,’ the narrator’s mother
likes to tell the provincial New Zealanders);
the narrator undergoes a religious phase;
the narrator’s father buys a race
horse; the family begins to frequent
the racing world; the narrator attends
a private school; and the narrator has
a number of sexual experiences. But
it is the treatment of these events
that make this work so extraordinary.
The world depicted in Hoi Polloi
is an extreme one. The 1960s are far
from swinging, and the 1970s not really
super. Indeed, the book hardly seems
to inhabit these decades as we conventionally
think of them. This is one of the book’s
strengths. It presents the past as radically
different from the present, as a world
that requires more than clichés
for us to be able to inhabit it imaginatively.
Sherborne’s imaginative inhabitation
of these times and places is strikingly
negative. Australia and New Zealand
are places rent by classism, sexism,
sectarianism, bigotry and more physical
forms of violence. Both places are defined
especially by racism. Maoris, for instance,
are called ‘horis’ by the
white population, and the narrator struggles
to match his experiences with the models
of race presented to him by adults.
The narrator’s parents are the
key adults here as elsewhere, and they
are presented with a deeply satirical
approach. The father is referred to
as ‘Winks’, the mother as
‘Heels’. The mother, in particular,
is concerned with the niceties of class,
with the need to be ‘nice’.
Language is important in this regard.
As per the ‘hotel’, the family
lives in an ‘apartment’, not
a ‘flat’. Appearances count.
The narrator’s mother ‘knows
what’s in and what’s
out. In for a lady is to have
your hair swept up, the whole works,
into a bun and tinted peach or apricot
and sprayed stiff till it’s 100
per cent wind-proof.’ As the reference
to ‘the whole works’ shows,
Sherborne is attuned to the linguistic
markers of character and class.
In this respect, and in the generally
satirical tone of his work, Sherborne
could be seen as working in the tradition
of Barry Humphries or Clive James. But
Sherborne is, if anything, more of a
stylist than these two. A more accurate
antecedent is that stylist of stylists
and hater of bourgeois provincialism,
Gustave Flaubert. The technique pioneered
by Flaubert known as ‘free indirect
discourse’ (in which the views
and language of characters are presented
ironically through the narrator’s
voice) is one of the key techniques
used by Sherborne. And like Flaubert,
Sherborne is sensitive to the hypocrisies
of class and the self-serving way in
which people can engage our emotions
and sympathy. (One thinks here of the
narrator being told untruthfully that
his father has a heart condition and
only five years to live.) Like Flaubert,
Sherborne is a master of sliding from
the tragic into the farcical. This is
seen in a set piece in which a drunken
Maori is apparently killed by Winks.
When the narrator’s parents debate
what to do (tell the police that the
man was a robber? that he tripped?),
they find that the man has disappeared.
The episode degenerates into farce when
the Sherbornes discover that the man
is alive and urinating nearby, allowing
Sherborne to show his skill in delivering
punch lines.
But while the comedy is real, so is
the suffering. Understanding of suffering
comes from the sensitivity of the narrator,
a shy only-child with a stutter (magically
cured by a blow to the head), who witnesses
numerous violent and shameful events.
These range from drunken violence in
the hotel, to violent schoolboy ‘pranks’,
to the way horses are treated on the
race track, to the absurdly tragic death
of a boy who falls off a cliff while
running after his dog (which was running
after a ball).
Sherborne avoids presenting his younger
self as merely an innocent by showing
his passivity in the face of things
he knows he should respond to. A recurring
figure is the narrator’s inability
to act. He is unable to stop his father
from being attacked, unable to reciprocate
fully in sexual encounters, unable to
stop his peers from abusing a drunk
man lying in a street (in a scene reminiscent
of A Clockwork Orange) and so
on. The narrator is also far from innocent
when it comes to his own emotional hypocrisy.
A key moment in Hoi Polloi is
when the narrator pretends to be paralysed
after receiving a beating from his father.
As such episodes suggest, this is an
uncompromising work. It is darkly hilarious,
a condition that is also related to
the narrator’s parents. Faced with
a crying woman at a party, the narrator’s
mother asks the woman to tell everyone
what is upsetting her: ‘“Tell
us about it by all means,” Heels
reassures her half-heartedly. “You’re
among friends. I’m sure there’s
a laugh in the story somewhere.”’
This is the tonic note of the work as
a whole. There are laughs found in the
most singularly unexpected of places.
This is probably because the narrator,
like the author, is so singular a figure.
He stands apart from others and observes
life with a preternatural intensity
(seen, for instance, in the way he describes
a baptism). This singularity stems from
the narrator’s position of not
fully belonging. As a sensitive only-child
to unsympathetic parents, and as a member
of a private school whose class pretensions
he can’t aspire to, the narrator
stands alone. The issue of class, as
the title of the work suggests, is a
defining feature of identity. The narrator’s
mother uses the term ‘hoi polloi’
incorrectly, thinking that it refers
to the upper crust rather than to the
general mass of people. Caught between
these two meanings of the word, Sherborne
belongs to neither world. From this
outsider position, he has fashioned
a unique vision. He looks from the bend
in the stairs in horror and amusement
at what the hoi polloi enact, indifferent
to — or ignorant of — his
presence. Hoi Polloi is a brilliant,
searing memoir and a major new work
of life writing. It is both brutal and
tender, and it reveals, as Flaubert
might have said, the grotesque and the
tragic that cover the empty longing
of life.
|
