The Revolt of the Pendulum

by Clive James

  But they had listened; and being his best pupils they had listened critically, because critical listening was the best thing he taught. Dedicated always to his war against the ideal, he was reluctant to sum up his philosophical teachings: a summary might have smacked of the transcendental unification that his pluralism existed to stave off. But he once let slip that if forced to the point he might say that goods do not conflict. (It is interesting that Isaiah Berlin, himself tentative on the subject, decided that they probably do.) The best evidence that Anderson might have been right on the point could be seen among his pupils. Those with soft hearts for their fellow man were encouraged to develop hard heads. Anderson’s toughness of intellect was thus socially beneficial while he was alive. As always happens, there were prematurely middle-aged reactionaries in three-piece suits who were glad to have their prejudices endorsed from the pulpit, but the typical young Andersonians had a thirst for the common good, and were grateful to the magnificent old man that he warned them so convincingly against regarding their mission as a picnic. Beyond that, there was his chastening example to writers of any kind, even if critical enquiry was not their field. In his ability to analyse and punish loose language, Anderson was up there with Karl Kraus. Any writer of expository prose who imagined Anderson looking over his shoulder would soon check his flying pen. Perhaps just as importantly in the long run, for the next generation he left a heritage of scepticism that helped set limits to the influence of international gauchiste theorizing, so that the characteristic tone of the Australian realistic voice survived and flourished in the backwaters and bunyip-pools of the media even as the mainstream became a muddy flood. Eventually Gresham’s Law took over, but never completely. Anderson’s tart remarks set a tone for the bright, and Studies in Empirical Philosophy is one of those books that will always attract the sort of reader who thirsts for the acerbic.

  The Monthly, July 2005

  BEA MILES, VAGRANT

  As I recorded in my book Unreliable Memoirs, I did a disastrous stint as a Sydney bus conductor to earn money while I was a student. The story about trapping the old lady’s head in the folding doors was true. But I did something even worse to Bea Miles. She was the town’s most famous eccentric, even more famous than Arthur Stace, the man who wrote ‘Eternity’. Everybody in Sydney knew that Bea Miles was allowed to travel free on public transport. The main reason was that she kicked up a tremendous fuss if she was asked to pay. She looked like a bag lady minus the bags but she could kick like the wrestler Chief Little Wolf uncorking his celebrated flying body-slam at Leichardt Stadium. Everyone had heard of her except me. I tried to sell her a ticket and she went for me.

  Luckily most of the violence was verbal, at least initially. ‘You f***ing c**t,’ she explained. After that her language got worse, but I valiantly persisted in trying to extract the fare. The bus came to the next stop and I attempted to ease her out of the back door. It was like trying to shift a grand piano with rusty castors. The driver got sick of waiting and we were off again, while I continued to point out to her that travelling without paying the correct fare was an offence. Finally a Kelly climbed aboard.

  The Kellies were the transport inspectors who trailed the buses by car, ever on the alert for a conductor who might supplement his income by taking the money without pulling the ticket. The Kelly on my case must have been some kind of philosopher. Patiently he explained to me that Miss Miles (the appellation Ms was not yet in vogue) was an asset to the city and that any attempt to extract a fare from her was like trying to argue with the Harbour Bridge. Well, I could vouch for that. He praised her to the skies, specifying her individuality, her bravery, and her incarnation of a modern city’s success in preserving the spirit of the frontier. She listened to his encomium, nodding her head in approbation at each point, and then called him a f***ing c**t.

  In the next few years, as I roamed the city in search of new pubs where a poet in flight from his allotted studies and yet another failed romance might sit and compose masterpieces, I often saw her jumping on and off buses. I was always careful not to be on any bus she might catch, but one night there she was, sitting down beside me. She searched my face with a burning stare, but nothing happened. She had forgotten me. I have never forgotten her. The difference, there, between an upstart and a legend.

  Somebody must know the precise day she disappeared. I suppose it is recorded in the register of births and deaths somewhere. Like thousands of people, I only noticed that the days when you didn’t see her were accumulating into weeks, then months, then years. When I myself was down and out in London, I thought of her often. I wondered if my true vocation might not be as a vagrant, and wondered also if I had the panache to bring it off. It takes a kind of courage. In New York, which was the world capital of the bag ladies before Mayor Giuliani waved his magic wand, there was definitely a ranking from stardom to nonentity. A run-of-the-mill bag lady had only a few plastic bags full of stuff. A top-echelon bag lady had a shopping cart piled so high with precious junk that she had to periodically shuffle sideways to see where she was going.

  But she had confidence that wherever she was going was no less important than where you were going. And of course it’s true. We will all come to dust. The derros, as we once cruelly called them, just start early. Some of them do it with style, and become part of the city’s everlasting poetry, like the word Eternity. Bea Miles was one of those. Indeed, for a long while she was the only one: a solitary, mobile memento mori roaming without a destination, but reminding us that we, too, are going nowhere in the end.

  Time Out Sydney, September 10–16, 2008

  Postscript

  Sydney, like England, is fond of its eccentrics, and both of the two previous subjects ranked in that category. As far as I know, John Anderson and Bea Miles never met, although they almost certainly saw each other many times in the street as they went about their separate business. Until the advent of Gough Whitlam, Australian official bodies at all levels had a fine time banning books. John Anderson was a stout warrior against censorship, which he thought inimical to culture. But we shouldn’t overlook the awkward fact that he thought exactly the same about egalitarianism. He thought that culture depended on privilege, and he had no notion that privilege could be spread by social engineering. John Rawls came back from the war with a belief that a free society could spread benefits to all. According to Rawls’s famous Difference Principle, a society should tolerate no discrepancies that did not benefit the worst off. From Anderson, the worst off seldom got a mention. We can’t go to him for generosity or imagination. But if we preen ourselves on possessing either of those things, we can still go to him for the dressing down that we probably need. And if we have any bluster left after that, we can go to Bea Miles.

  RACING DRIVERS

  NIKKI LAUDA WINS GOING SLOWLY

  ‘The secret’, said Nikki Lauda, ‘is to win going as slowly as possible.’ This remark is sometimes attributed to another and even greater racing driver, Juan Manuel Fangio. Perhaps Nikki Lauda was quoting it without acknowledgment. Anyway, I actually heard Lauda say this, at a pre-race press conference in Portugal in 1984, the year he came back from the burns unit all the way to his second World Championship. As far as I know, I was the only reporter who wrote it down. None of the other Formula One correspondents had come to Estoril to study philosophy and neither had I, but even at the time it struck me as a profound remark from someone who had only one race left to snatch the title, and one way or another I have been thinking about what he said ever since. In its specific application to motor racing, the idea is simply right. You can’t win the race unless you finish, and the driver who is kind to his car is most likely to go the distance. A Formula One car has very little redundancy in its makeup: it can be hurt by a single missed gear change. In the turbo days the fiercer drivers blew their engines early. Whatever the current specifications of the formula, the tyres are always critical, so the smooth driver will soon be driving a different car to the one wrestled by the l
ess smooth, no matter how spectacular the latter might look. Fangio, Jim Clark and Jackie Stewart, three of the all-time great champion drivers (Clark might have won more races than the other two put together if he had not been killed in an accident that wasn’t his fault), were all kind to the car. Alain Prost, who won more Grand Prix races at a quicker rate than anybody until Michael Schumacher came along, was considered uncanny even by the other drivers for the way his cars held together: it was as if he could hear what was going on in the engine. Prost was the car’s friend. Other drivers treated the car no more tactfully than they treated women. I was actually Nelson Piquet’s passenger in a Nissan sports car on the ad hoc track at Caesar’s Palace hotel in Las Vegas when Mario Andretti went past in a similar car. It was supposed to be a demonstration run but Piquet immediately went frantic to catch up: he always drove with passion and that was his problem. He won the World Championship twice but broke down more often than he should have, and when his passion went he could scarcely drive at all.

  Stirling Moss, on the other hand, rarely broke down through his own fault. The main reason he never won a championship was that he condemned himself, through patriotism, to inferior machinery; but he could make it look superior by the economy with which he drove it. When I was making a television special about motor racing I needed an ordinary road licence – though always crazy about cars, I had never learned to drive – and we enrolled Moss as my instructor, starting with the very basics. Thus I was inculcated into his principles, which all sprang from his initial precept that the car, not the man, has the power, and the man’s job is not to interfere. Moss never, but never, touched the brake pedal unless the car was moving in a straight line. Braking and changing down were all done before he turned into the corner. As a direct result, he rarely span off. Formula One fans often asked me what it was like to be Moss’s passenger on an ordinary motorway. The answer is that it was hair-raising, but not because you thought he might be out of control. His personal car was a tiny Peugeot but it had plenty of hidden oomph – it was a wolf in shrew’s clothing – and you just couldn’t help wondering if all the huge trucks he went zipping closely past were being driven to the same standard.

  Nobody who was following the fast cars in the 1950s will ever forget Eugenio Castellotti. But he didn’t last long, either in life or in most of his individual races. In the Mille Miglia he drove his Ferrari on the footpath when the road was full of spectators. He was always over the limit, like Jean Behra, another spell-binder who suffered the same fate. In more recent times, the flamboyant Keke Rosberg lived to retire, but it was something of a miracle: in the old days, before carbon-fibre monocoque construction made a crash more survivable, he would have been killed ten times. Rosberg’s style thrilled crowds but it strained the machinery. Gilles Villeneuve earned an undeserved reputation for being thrilling to watch. In his time at Ferrari, the car was a monster. He had to fight it all the way, and would have much preferred to look less dazzling: some people wise in the ways of motor racing still think that Villeneuve was the fastest driver ever but that he never had a car to match his talent. As for Ayrton Senna, he was so superior that he could keep the car right on the limit without breaking it. All the drivers in Formula One are superior, even the duffers, but Senna had the full eleven tenths. His winning strategy depended on his ability to go flat out from the jump, with no time wasted playing himself in. The other drivers were meant to be demoralised straight away and usually were, except for Nigel Mansell, who couldn’t be demoralised by a pistol held to his head.

  The answer to the question of whether Mansell was as quick as Senna is yes, but Mansell was just that crucial bit less easy on the machinery. Senna wasn’t killed by a mistake: he was killed by a component failure, and almost certainly it was not caused by any strain that he imposed – apart, of course, from the strain necessarily imposed by driving the car as fast as it could go, all the time. The most convincing proof of Senna’s fundamental smoothness was that even the car he drove in his first year at Lotus (a notoriously fragile beast, it was seemingly designed to fall apart before it left the garage) would go several laps before breaking down and sometimes even won.

  On the subject of Michael Schumacher, questions answer themselves. As was true of Fangio, if his car is on the pace then there are few races Schumacher finishes that he does not win, and for the same combination of reasons: ability, strategic judgment, and sympathy with the machinery. (Fernando Alonso might have all these things too, but he also has, for the moment, a slightly faster car.) The second and third reasons matter more than the first, although the first makes better copy. In reality, there was never that much difference in sheer driving ability between Schumacher and, say, Michele Alboreto in the period when they were still racing each other. But Schumacher’s car got to the chequered flag and Alboreto’s went to the junk yard. In journalism, it is more rewarding to talk about Schumacher’s supernatural reflexes than to dwell on his capacity to think ahead, and there is no mileage at all in writing about what doesn’t show – his gift for preserving the car against its own inbuilt tendency to disintegrate. A racing car is just the most concentrated possible form of a system tending towards entropy. Schumacher understands the second law of thermodynamics. So did Lauda.

  That Lauda’s principle has a general application to life might seem a truism. Obviously, as long as you get enough exercise, you will live longer if you minimise the time you spend running for a bus. But it gets interesting when applied to the arts. An artist must concentrate, and the more original he is, the more likely it is that he will focus his mental energy beyond the normal tolerance of the human brain in particular or his body in general, let alone the patience of his loved ones. Even if his compensating relaxations do not destroy him, he might well find life difficult. (As we learn from Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen, the greatest novelist in English was put out of action for ten years by an enforced change of residence.) Proust and his friend the composer Reynaldo Hahn were once touring the garden of a large private house. Proust stopped to look at a rose bush. Hahn left him there, slowly circumnavigated the house, and returned to find him still looking at the rose bush. They remained friends, but only because Proust chose his friends carefully. If you spend half your life in a contemplative trance, you must do your best to ensure that the other half is adapted to that activity, or your life will be short. The secret of applying energy is to economise on effort – to win going as slowly as possible.

  The Monthly, April 2006

  DAMON HILL’S BRAVEST DAY

  In his championship 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 candour 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.

  The German writer Ernst Ju¨nger drew a distinction between the generals wh
ose broad view of life helped them to fight well and the generals who fought even better because they were interested in nothing else. There was something to it. The principle can be applied usefully to the top rank of British racing drivers since World War II. Jim Clark, the most conspicuously talented even at the level where supreme talent is a common property, was fully focused on driving. So was Nigel Mansell when he wasn’t playing golf with Greg Norman. Mike Hawthorn was too much of a gentleman, James Hunt too much of a wastrel: they both had too much to them. Stirling Moss would have won at least one world championship if he had not been a patriot: for a crucial part of his career he condemned himself to the wrong cars just so as to fly the flag, and when he signed for Mercedes the small print said that he had to come second to Fangio.