by Clive James
There are a lot of us who sincerely hope that Kevin Rudd will earn a comparable eminence, as the head of a cleanly elected government in a rising country, an ex-colony which, having concentrated and transcended all the virtues of the old empire that gave it birth, is now busy providing an example to the world of what can be done by a bunch of creative people backed up by prudent management and double-entry bookkeeping. That last bit was always Howard’s ace in the hole. Often speaking from comfortably subsidised positions, Australia’s gauchiste commentators called him a money-grubber and condemned the voters for being too easily seduced by prosperity, but more than half those voters ticked the box for him as long as he looked as if he still had his head screwed on.
Certainly Rudd himself never made the mistake of calling Howard anything less than competent. That was one of the ways the new boy won the election: he promised to do almost everything that Howard had already done, but just do it younger. For Howard to answer that one, he would have had to attack Rudd’s hairstyle, pointing out the cruel truth: that it’s an incipient comb-over, and that time, which improves most men, is the mortal enemy of any man who can’t accept it. But Rudd might start looking and sounding less bogus as he gets used to office. Power can do things for you, until the day it doesn’t.
The Australian, December 22, 2007
Postscript
Though I had always favoured Howard against the popinjays that the Labor Party put up against him, you will notice that I was careful to give Kevin Rudd credit for a deserved win and to wish him well. The Labor Party, and not the Liberal Party, is, after all, the one I favour by upbringing and conviction. There is plenty of good will for Kevin Rudd and some of it is mine, albeit aimed from a distance. But even during his first year in office – which from the media angle was all honeymoon – he showed himself capable of a level of foolishness that would have disqualified him if it had been generally known before his election, and might well deprive him of a second term later on. His denunciation of the invasion of Iraq had always been a tenable position, and when he brought our troops home he was fulfilling a promise. But when they paraded past him he praised them for having risked paying the necessary price for the defence of freedom. Hypocrisy is bad enough, but inanity is worse. Similarly, it went beyond cynicism, and far into comedy, to tell the old-age pensioners that he couldn’t live on their pension either, so he would do something about it the following year, after his experts had reported. What would they report? That thousands of wrinklies had died of hunger? Has he ever heard of Tartuffe? And even some of his media supporters are still wondering why he permitted a story to leak out that President Bush had proved himself ignorant during a telephone conversation. As we go to press, Prime Minister Rudd has still not given a satisfactory explanation of what he was up to, but it seems fair to infer that he was grandstanding. To be Prime Minister of Australia should be a grandstand big enough for anybody. It certainly was for John Howard, who would never have done any of these things; who had a mind of his own with no comb-over to conceal its inner workings; and who might soon be missed even by his sworn enemies. At least, with him, you knew where you were.
ABR 300
The Australian Book Review, commonly called the ABR, asked for messages from contributors to celebrate its 300th issue in April 2008. This was mine.
In Australia, one of the penalties for having survived long enough as some kind of literary figure is to be asked, in one’s senior years, to write a chapter in the latest distinguished volume devoted to the history of Australian literature. Such requests, though flattering, oblige the victim to write a story from which he must leave himself out. My powers of self-abnegation stop well short of that, so I always say no. Why should I leave myself out when I have so many contemporaries to do it for me?
But if I were forced at gun-point to write such a chapter, I would begin by saying that the growing prominence of the independent literary magazines in recent years has helped to create an inhabitable Australian literary world, and that the ABR has been in the vanguard of this development. Long wished for, an Australian literary world was slow to arrive, partly because it was so keenly awaited: the pot grew nervous from being watched. Especially in the field of poetry, the pre-modern era was dependent on the newspapers, with the Bulletin counting as a kind of amplified newspaper. The requirements of popularity had some strong results. (Les Murray has always been right to stress the importance of what he was first to call the ‘newspaper poem’, and, gratifyingly often, he still writes it.) Looking back to my own beginnings, I remember the magazines as being few, thin and hard to find unless you were attached to the same university as they were.
Actually this memory is inaccurate: it was always worthwhile to keep a file of Meanjin, for example, and when James McAuley started Quadrant he raised the stakes for everyone. But when I sailed for England in the early 1960s, that was the way the Australian picture looked to me. From here on, my brief account gets personal. Peter Porter, I suspect, has a more informative story about what it meant to become an expatriate Australian poet. He had more reason to think about what was involved, because poetry was his whole endeavour, and the problem of maintaining a spiritual presence in the homeland he had physically left would be a matter of life and death to him. I could never claim that kind of thoughtfulness. Working more by instinct than by strategy, and always more by luck than judgment, I had a big enough task establishing and maintaining a poetic reputation in Britain, where my other reputation as a professional entertainer seemed determined to get in the way. Get caught on screen with your arms around Margarita Pracatan and see what it does to your status as a lyric poet.
But precisely because Britain was in possession of a fully developed literary world, it had room for someone who broke its rules of dignity. In Britain, everyone is aware, even if they hate the idea, that the poet who doesn’t fit the picture might be part of the picture. One could be given the cold shoulder – any number of cold shoulders – yet not be frozen out. Even my poems about Australia found space in the literary pages of London. Eventually I found myself writing more and more such poems, and Australian editors – who were still keeping their eye, as always, on the British and American magazines – began asking to reprint them. I was glad to comply, although I hasten to insist that I had no plans for making a reconquista. It had long been apparent to me that the expatriate, should he wish for a return, was up against the same difficulties as a space traveller making a re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere: unless he got the angle exactly right, he would burn up, with the implacable Australian press waiting on the ground to interview the fragments. But really my poetry was proof that I had never been away.
It had already proved that to me. Any decent poem begins in feelings so deep that we might as well call them instinctive, and what I had been discovering was the nature of my instinct, which had been formed in Australia and never forgotten it, whatever my conscious mind might have thought. With a whole heart, I can thank the Australian magazine editors for having spotted this almost before I did. At the head of these editors was Peter Rose, who generously made space available in the ABR for poems I had published in Britain and America but which might also appeal to Australian readers who had no easy access to the periodicals they first appeared in. Later on there were other editors, and there were poems which had their first publication in Australia, but the ABR continued to provide me with my most welcoming landing strip for things I was sending in, or bringing back, from abroad: it was my Edwards Air Force Base. The ABR even ran the full text of the address I gave when I received, in Mildura, the Philip Hodgins memorial medal, which remains my sole big literary prize, and the only one I will ever need.
When I published that address as a chapter in a book, I gave the book the same title as the chapter, The Meaning of Recognition. Self-dramatising is what I do for a living – everything I write, in whatever form, is an unreliable memoir – but the drama, I would like to think, is not always entirely about me. In writing about the m
agnificent but cruelly abbreviated achievement of Philip Hodgins, I was an expatriate trying to fulfil what I think of as part of the expatriate’s duty: to help give Australia to the world, and to bring a world view to the task of clarifying Australia’s position to itself. Laid out as an argument, the full story of how I view that duty would take a book all on its own, but I would be surprised if my work had not been telling the story by implication for these many years. The ABR has played a crucial part in helping me to tell it, so I have a personal reason for being grateful for the magazine’s existence, and I am sure there has been many a contributor, over the course of its three hundred issues, who could say the same. Finally it comes down to the importance of having a forum in which the concept of intellectual freedom trumps all other political standpoints: a forum in which, wrapped in our separate togas, we can speak our minds to each other without being knifed on the way home. No literary magazine is worthy of its title if it doesn’t provide that. The ABR does.
THE VOICE OF JOHN ANDERSON
There is a tone of voice that you can hear in the way a sentence is balanced, even if you are not equipped to understand its content. ‘What the idealist has, in fact, to show is that there is no real distinction, and the answer is that in that case there can be no real relation.’ Thus wrote John Anderson, in Studies in Empirical Philosophy, and as soon as I read that sentence I was home. Actually I was leaving home. I read it on the ship to England. At Sydney University I had managed to avoid his lectures, as I had avoided the lectures of everyone else, but his spirit was all around the place. Everyone you met was either an Andersonian or a non-Andersonian. Now, as the Indian Ocean ran slowly past, I was an Andersonian too. Or perhaps a non-Andersonian. Either way, his name was in there somewhere. His name was all over Australia’s intellectual world. For good or ill, he was the national philosopher.
If Nietzsche had lived long enough, he would have been horrified at the consequences of becoming the national philosopher of Germany. But to be regarded as a national philosopher is not necessarily a bad thing. For two hundred years, Britain’s national philosopher was Hume, and to a great extent he still holds the job, because in the twentieth century none of the attempts to replace him quite worked out. Closely identified with Bloomsbury, G. E. Moore was thought too comfortable by those who were reluctant to accept Bloomsbury as the epitome of civilized Britain. Bertrand Russell was thought incorrigibly silly by anyone who found him less the embodiment of human reason than he did. A. J. Ayer was never thought silly, but he did seem to be having too good a time. For a while, among those serious about literature, Dr Leavis was drafted into the role, but the appointment looked less judicious when he showed signs that he believed it. Uniting all the candidates was a debt to Hume’s empiricism, which was still there when all their separate visions frayed. The first embodiment of the national way of thinking remained the best. In Italy, Benedetto Croce achieved the same position. He started much later, but then so did a united Italy. It seems to be one of the characteristics of any nation united by more than power that it will boast one man universally agreed upon as exemplifying its tone of thought. In Britain, the tone of voice is exemplified by Shakespeare and all the poets, but the tone of thought is exemplified by Hume the Scot. If my own country, Australia, has such a thing as a tone of thought –and I think it has – then the man who brought it into being was another Scot: John Anderson.
In his lectures at Sydney University from the late Thirties onwards – he was still there when I was a student in the late Fifties – Anderson carried the torch for realism. The pluralism that he claimed for himself was underpinned by the realism that he claimed for all the philosophers who ever mattered. He influenced whole generations of students, who in turn, because of Sydney University’s central place in the tertiary education system, influenced the teachers’ colleges, the schools, the broadcasting networks, the emergent media elite, and eventually the entire culture. Plenty of people were against Anderson, especially if they were religious. Catholic archbishops pronounced anathema upon him. My own Presbyterian minister, when he saw that I was going to the Devil, blamed the influence of ‘that man Anderson’. In the absence of a ship back to Scotland, his enemies recommended a slow boat to China. Nor were all his enemies on the clerical right. There were plenty on the atheistic left who thought his realistic stance a reactionary denial of the legitimate aspirations of suffering mankind. He was always being attacked from one wing or the other, often on the supposition that he had glossed over a difficulty in his line of reasoning.
He seldom had, but he was easy to misrepresent. Until his last years, he was practically in samizdat. His lectures were his main writings, and they circulated exclusively in note form until he collected them in the only book to bear his name while he still breathed: Studies in Empirical Philosophy. Typically I failed to enrol myself in the philosophy school while he was still active: it might have been too useful, too engrossing, too apt to distract me from the essential fields of student journalism, amateur drama, and bad poetry written late at night. But I was surrounded by Andersonians and picked up enough of their acerbic parlance to conceive a thirst for the whole picture. When I went to England the book was part of my luggage. Everything else in my bags might have been ill chosen (as I related in Falling Towards England, I was the only Australian ever to arrive in an English winter without a sweater), but I had brought the right book. Looking back on it, I can see my belated immersion in Anderson’s lectures as the first step in a long process of coming to terms with the country I had left behind: meaning, of course, that I hadn’t left it behind at all, but had embarked on a roundabout way of discovering it for the first time. Anderson would probably not have approved. Although he knew how to let his hair down in old age – I personally knew a famous beauty who had to take to the stairs to outrun him at a party thrown by the Downtown Push – he was no bohemian. He expected his students to buckle down, pass their regular tests in logic, and keep abreast of the background reading. My future wife won the Philosophy Prize for two successive years but she took endless pages of detailed notes while doing so: his powers of compression were a match even for her powers of application. Anderson wasn’t for dabblers. He would not have been pleased by the idea of someone reading his work unsystematically as literature. But for those of us condemned by our nature to read him in no other way, there is a lot to go on. Scattered among his dense pages of symbols are plain statements fit to resonate for a lifetime.
For Anderson, realism was the bedrock and idealism the aberration. But since so many kinds of idealism had been so prevalent for so long, the first task of the realist was to combat idealism in all its forms, starting with the pious notion that idealism could annul contention between social forces. This perpetual struggle squared well with his convictions about the necessity of conflict. Later on, when I read Croce, I recognized, in the principles that Croce had inherited and developed from Vico and Hegel, the same emphasis that Anderson had been handing down from his lectern like a renegade Presbyterian minister preaching the inevitability of an unjust world. ‘We can’t make the world safe for goodness,’ said Anderson, ‘it exists and develops in struggle with evil.’ For Anderson there could be no ‘higher’ reality: there was only reality, in which the facts were good enough. Realism ‘presupposes as the formal solution of any problem the interaction of complex things.’ The complex things would not simplify themselves in obedience to a wish, least of all if the wish were a plan.
Anderson’s withering contempt for social planning had far-reaching consequences for his political vision. It was not just that he had, like Pareto, a well-developed instinct for the law of unintended consequences. He didn’t even much like the intended consequences. The welfare mentality he thought essentially servile. (His view of the welfare state as a control mechanism was his point of contact with the Sydney Libertarians, from whom he otherwise differed in most respects, beginning with his capacity to own a watch, pay his bills, turn up for work on time and fulfil his du
ties.) Planning, he thought, applied only to commerce, and therefore never to culture, of which he had an entirely non-utilitarian view. If learning wasn’t pursued for its own sake then it could not be learning. ‘It is true, of course, that social equality is merely a mirage, but devotion to it has still done much to contribute to the destruction of culture.’ (The ‘of course’ was a typically back-handed placing of the banderillas.) Finally he made the idea part of his definition of culture. He said culture had to do with the opposition to levelling.
In retrospect, Anderson might look like part of a war-time politico-philosophical movement that included von Mieses, Hayek, and Karl Popper. In fact, however, he was out on his own, networking mainly with Plato. Perhaps the necessary reaction to progressive social engineering got into the air along with the idea itself. It was no wonder that Anderson was hated on the far left. The wonder was that he wasn’t equally despised in the centre, since he held out very little hope even to the mildest ameliorative impulse. Very little became too little when he expressed his contempt for planning. Planning had, after all, helped to win the war against enemies who, had they prevailed, would certainly have included empirical philosophy on their list of activities to be proscribed. With victory in sight, Arthur Calwell planned Australia’s post-war immigration policy. Many of the consequences were, naturally enough, strictly incalculable: the law of unintended consequences did not cease to apply. But the calculable consequences worked out quite well, and not just in the field of commerce. The country was transformed, incomparably for the better. Had Anderson lived long enough, he would have been required by his innate honesty to deal with the patent fact that his country – to which he himself had come as a migrant – had planned its future and succeeded in almost all departments, including that of culture. He would have been in the uncomfortable position of a philosopher counting himself lucky that his best pupils hadn’t listened.