by Clive James
Like Conan Doyle and Leslie Charteris, C. S. Forester was too good a technician to be classified as a sludge writer tout court, but his central character was that same sludge basic: Horatio Hornblower, the best strategic brain in the Royal Navy, was so brilliant that he could work his way to a just preferment only through penetrating the defenses of the envious and mediocre. Pretty much like school, really. Saying the minimum like Gary Cooper in High Noon or Alan Ladd in Shane, resigned to being misunderstood like Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s great tetralogy (a sludge masterpiece daringly masquerading as literature), to whom else was Hornblower designed to appeal except an Australian schoolboy whose class marks were going steadily down the drain?
It was clear to me even at the time that Forester had based Hornblower solidly, not to say shamelessly, on the original of the heroic figure occupying the top of Nelson’s Column. Along with the leading character, everything in the Hornblower saga had its basis in historical reality. Forester knew the concrete detail of the period inside out. Years later I wrote myself a starring role in a Footlights sketch as a pirate captain who did nothing but lurch about shouting orders. (“Belay the thwart bollocks and lash down the foreskin!” etc.) I was congratulated afterwards by a yacht-owner in the audience who kindly suggested that I must have known the authentic nautical terminology quite well in order to parody it so effectively. Actually my own nautical career had consisted of one terrified trip across Sydney harbour as the other half of the crew of my friend Graeme McDonald’s VJ, a journey during which the mere thought of the sharks cruising below froze my hands to the sheets. I got my technical talk from Forester. “Bumscuttle the larboard strakes, Mr Bush!” I got it from him in full confidence that he got it from reality. But Forester’s painstaking verisimilitude should not be allowed to disguise the fact that Hornblower is a fantasy.
I hope I spotted that at the time. For a short while I might have attempted to address my classmates the way Hornblower addressed his first mate, Mr Bush—saying the minimum, asserting his authority, bridling at contradiction—but taciturnity was not my natural style, nor tolerance theirs, so the imposture could not have lasted long, and anyway it was obvious that in at least one vital respect Hornblower was a wish fulfillment. He could steer his ship into the massed broadsides of the whole French fleet and the enemy cannonballs would hit everyone on board except him. They just curved around him. They had been manufactured in the same ordnance factory as the Hollywood bullets that swerved past John Wayne on Iwo Jima. When Hornblower did get hit, he got hit at the edge, leaving all the bits that mattered still working. The same could have been said of Nelson—it must certainly have been said by Lady Hamilton—but Nelson spent as little of his career as possible facing overwhelming odds, whereas for Hornblower the odds had to be overwhelming or he wouldn’t bother pointing his bowsprit at them. In recent years the indecently gifted Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte, taking a tip from Stendhal, has been turning out a wonderful series of novels and novellas about what war was really like in the Napoleonic period. His key trick is to build a central character you can’t help sympathizing with and then kill him off at random. This is a cruel literary strategy but in the cruelty lies its truth. War was like that, is like that, and will always be like that, until the day when Full Spectrum Dominance, or whatever the nerds call it, allows a battle with no people in it at all. In reality, flying metal doesn’t care what it hits. Least of all can flying metal be staved off by moral stature. An invulnerable character is inviting you to join him in dreamland, the land of flying sludge.
As a war orphan myself, I don’t think I ever quite lost sight of the truth about the insouciant randomness of the Grim Reaper’s scythe, but there was perhaps an element of compensating for the absent father figure. I think it more likely, however, that I was just fantasizing about the possibility of individual initiative and valor having some effect in a world which I already knew to be unjust. Some of my heroes were fascists in all but uniform. My adolescence had taken place after, and not before, the era in which the supermen had done their worst, but I didn’t spot the connection: perhaps because I was unusually obtuse, but more likely because adolescence takes place in its own time, and refuses to be pre-empted by history. Putting the best possible construction on it—something we ought not to do for ourselves, but there are times when it is necessary in the interests of justice—I think I admired my collection of superior beings for how they did their duty, not for how they indulged their eminence. From far off, beyond the walls of my bedroom, history had already reached me as a wave of shock. Clearly one was powerless, and yet here were these marvelous people who had power: not power over others—that never really appealed to me, a blessed blank spot on my crowded list of vices—but power over events. The only drawback was that they were fictional.
In my next phase, I moved up to reality, but read about it as if it were sludge fiction. After World War I, the books that told the story of what the war had been really like did not start coming out until about 1928. After World War II, the flood of realistic accounts started almost immediately. In Australia, my generation of schoolboys grew up reading about British heroes: Guy Gibson in Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters and in Gibson’s own Enemy Coast Ahead, Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky (Brickhill again) and all those resourceful RAF types in The Great Escape (Brickhill yet again). Paul Brickhill was an Australian but he might as well have been working for the British Council. I took in all the factual detail but as far as the characters went I was still dealing with Biggles, Bulldog, and Sherlock. In The Big Show and Flames in the Sky, Pierre Clostermann was the French Biggles. When I read Adolf Galland’s book The First and the Last I was almost sorry the Luftwaffe hadn’t won: clearly they would have, if only Hitler hadn’t been so stupid about the Me-262 jet fighter’s potential. Galland, if not precisely the German Biggles, had a lot in common with Eric von Stahlhein, the caddish but talented gentleman spy and ace pilot who had almost brought Biggles to earth in Biggles Flies West. When I read Desmond Young’s Rommel, I was overcome with grief that he hadn’t won in the desert: clearly he would have, if only Hitler hadn’t been so stupid about strategy. My three-color drawing of Rommel, copied from the dust jacket of Young’s book, decorated the wall beside my bed. From my mother’s angle it might as well have been a drawing of General Yamashita, but she knew how to wait.
She had to wait quite a while. My hero worship was slow to fade, partly because the cast of characters in the war books had actually been pretty heroic. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that they had had the opportunity to cut a dash because their circumstances were favorable. But my voracious reading habit eventually led me to the uncomfortable truth. In The Scourge of the Swastika, by Lord Russell of Liverpool, I read my first accounts of another kind of prison camp from which no tunnels led out, and saw the kind of pictures I had no urge to copy. And when I read The Naked Island, by Russell Braddon, I got my first close-up of the war my father had been in, and they had all been in: a war to the death, a war in which men were very lucky indeed if they even got the chance to fight, and in which women and children had died by the million. Children like me. Time to grow up. After that, I continued to read everything that was real, and I still do. But I got the habit by reading everything that was false.
—TLS, December 16, 2005
NICOLE KIDMAN’S POETIC STALKER
There are few passages of poetry that I have ever underlined, put a mark beside, or made notes on, because any real poem or body of poetry is not susceptible to having fragments snapped from context without the fragments losing color. In the Selfridge’s Shakespeare I carry with me on long trips I put dots in the margin, but they are not admonitions as to what I should remember, merely guides back to what has already been remembered, so that I can check up on whether distortions have crept in. Otherwise, in less copious reservoirs, if poetry makes me remember it, I remember it all: omnia mea mecum porto. I carry it all with me. But here are two lines I marked in the margin of a
newspaper. “Nicole, your eyes are like the stars/ I think of them in various bars.” As far as I know, these two lines constitute the complete poetic works of Elmer O. Noone as they have come down to us, and perhaps repay study on the clinical level, if not the critical and aesthetic. To cease being coy for a minute, I should grasp the nettle, or poisonous coral fragment: Elmer O. Noone is a stalker, and his poem was addressed to Nicole Kidman.
When you know that much for background, his seemingly slight poem gains weight, in the same way that a cockroach would gain weight on the surface of Jupiter. In 2001 Nicole Kidman applied for a restraining order against Elmer O. Noone: an action which automatically ranked him high in her swarm of stalkers. Any female celebrity of her eminence attracts dozens of them, but we assume that most of them can be seen off by private action. Since to go public inevitably generates an atmosphere of vulnerability that excites a fresh supply of heavily breathing candidates to try their hand, Elmer O. Noone must have been unusually persistent even in a field where persistence is one of the chief qualifications. By what we know of him, he had a romantic sensibility to temper his determination, although it is fair to assume that his unsolicited tenderness made her feel even worse. He must have been horrifying enough when he rang her doorbell a few hundred times, but he also brought flowers. He invited her to the ballet. He offered to tutor her children, pointing out that such an arrangement “would give us the chance to know each other better.” Possibly it was his avuncular concern with her children that sent her to the cops, but his protestations of courtly love would have been enough.
The most depressing aspect—depressing because it concerns us all—is that it was love, and probably still is. I have talked of him in the past tense so far because time has gone by and he has not yet been given his own talk show. He has submerged, down to where the forgotten stalkers slowly swim. The three-year restraining order might have made him give up. (It sometimes happens, although I personally know two female television presenters and one actress whose stalkers regarded their restraining orders as a mere bachelor’s degree on the academic ladder towards a doctorate.) After the court found against him, he concentrated his efforts on suing Nicole for 300,000 US dollars on the grounds that she had defamed him, and on persuading the next court to find for him, on the grounds that his human rights had been abused. I had expected him to take his case all the way to The Hague by now. Whether he is out of action or not, however, he will never get over his relationship with Nicole. For him, the fact that the relationship never existed will be the least of his considerations. He believed it did exist. He felt it. But something went slightly wrong. He could have fixed it, if only he could have explained it to her: if only she had given him a chance. If only she had listened. And here is the connection with the rest of us. When we are given the elbow, there is always a terrible, sleepless period when we believe that one more phone call will set things right. The phone call doesn’t work out. She tells us we are making too many phone calls. No, it can’t end like this. She hasn’t understood. Better call her again. She’s not picking up. How can she do that? Luckily, in all this turmoil, the moment arrives when we realize that if we really love her, her welfare comes before ours, and that we owe it to her, for the love we have had, not to punish her for the love we have lost. Better call her and tell her that. No, better not. Put the phone down. The moment of sanity.
For the stalkers, the moment of sanity never comes. Love can unbalance anyone for a time, but Elmer O. Noone was unbalanced all the time. His feelings of love were so powerful that they drove him to poetry. But he was a solipsist. He believed that Nicole would reciprocate his feelings if she were allowed to, because he couldn’t imagine that she might not. It wasn’t that her welfare meant nothing to him: he thought that to love him was her welfare, and all she needed to do was admit the fact. Most men spend a good part of their lives learning that other people are alive too, but in a democratic society all normal men learn it to some degree. Elmer O. Noone never learnt it, because Elmer O. Noone was a psychopath. (I have changed his name in this piece, because on past evidence he is perfectly capable of bringing a court case that he is bound to lose, simply for the satisfaction of tying up a sane person’s life for years on end.) In him, solipsism and egomania were compounded into a one-man universe. The woman destined to be his bride turned out to be Nicole Kidman, not that nice-looking girl at the checkout counter in his local Wal-Mart. Apart from his eminence in the field of sexual allure, he was equally exalted in his worldly ambitions. He announced that he had plans to become “a trillionaire.” Being a mere billionaire obviously wouldn’t do. He wanted to be elected President. No Vice-Presidency for him, and don’t even mention Secretary of State. Where have we heard this sort of stuff before?
We’ve heard it from adepts of the occult: from people whose current earthly existence is a mere episode in their miraculous ability to be born and re-born in all the most resplendent epochs of history. Frequently to be seen on television—in America they have their own cable channels—they tell us who they used to be. The lady with the bangles, the purple bouffant, and the asymmetrically lifted face used to be Mary, Queen of Scots. The man with the mascara and the comb-over used to be Tutankhamun. He is one of the many currently practicing occult adepts who once held the rank of Pharaoh, supreme ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt. It is notable that none of them, during their ancient Egyptian incarnations, used to be the hundred and fifty-seventh slave from the left at the raising of the obelisk. What they used to have was a world in which their will was law, and that is what the stalkers have now: unrestricted individual significance.
When we are in love, we all have a touch of that. We get a taste of what it feels like to be deranged. It feels as if all uncertainties have been expunged. It feels, that is, like the very opposite of derangement. Luckily, if we are normal, we remain sane enough to realize that we have gone crazy. There is a way back to a pluralistic world, in which the possibility exists that the adored woman was born not to fulfill our lives but to fulfill hers. We can argue with ourselves, and make ourselves see reason. But the stalker brooks no argument: not from his victim, who is not really protesting, merely failing to accept the inevitable; and least of all does he brook argument from himself. He has a perfectly integrated personality.
Should women fear us? Only for what we might do. If they feared us for what we might think, there would be no end to it, and no continuing with human life. Female beauty projects a male into a realm of fantasy, and does so because it is meant to. Sanity is not to be without fantasy, but to know reality, and remember the difference. When I was much younger, I might have felt about Nicole Kidman the same way Elmer O. Noone did, and might well have written a poem, which might well have been even worse. (When I was still in short pants I certainly felt that way about Audrey Dalton, the ingénue in the best ever movie about the Titanic. A Google search reveals that she is still alive, in her early seventies. Does she remember what I said to her, as I lifted her into the lifeboat and kissed her goodbye? She should: I said it every night for months on end.) But even when young and stupid I would have turned away from Nicole’s door when my first bunch of flowers was rebuffed. Similarly with regard to my current fantasy about Nicole, in which I arrange a cheap date with Elmer O. Noone, stick the muzzle of my .44 Magnum in his mouth, and blow his diseased brains all over the back wall of Burger King. I don’t even tell her I’ve done it. I require no reward: not from her or from any other woman whose little problem I have been glad to solve. All over the world, the stalkers— they call me The Vigilante—are thinking twice before they order those flowers, book that ballet ticket, write that poem. I wish it could be true. But what can one man do? Well, one thing he can do is realize that when Nicole Kidman looks straight at him out of the screen, she is almost certainly in love with someone else, even if it seems to defy all reason that it should be so.
—Weekend Australian, April 15–16, 2006
DAMON’S BRAVEST DAY
In his champ
ionship year, I wrote and presented a television special in which Damon Hill said a lot of good things, but he was a guest on my weekly studio talk show when he said his best thing: “What’s the hurry?” His frustrating last season was coming to an end. It would have been easy to blame a slow car: the Arrows had some promise, but it was a farm tractor compared with the Williams he was used to. There was no need for him to admit that his motivation was gone. But it was, so he said so. Self-deprecating candor is typical of him, although nobody should ever underestimate his fierce pride: an abundance of confidence was the main reason why he could afford not to bottle up his honesty.
The scene he was evoking was the mad drag between the starting grid and the first corner on the opening lap of a Grand Prix—any Grand Prix. He had lived with that hurtling potential shambles for the whole of his career, and the day had come when he asked himself this question: the day to quit. The great drivers are never suicidal, but in the matter of the time taken between two given points they must have nothing else in mind except the minimum. Damon had his world championship and was unlikely to get another. He had a wonderful family he loved to be with. He had reached the point where he could weigh his achievements against the risks of going on. He had reached the point where he had started to think. Possessing a good, well-stocked brain to think with, he could reach only one conclusion.