Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  By the time that was grasped, the more trend-conscious out-of-condition executives had given up jogging and moved on to lifting weights. Men barely capable of lifting a double brandy were pounding themselves into the carpet lifting weights at home. They were the wrong weight. There was nothing wrong with the principle. There was just a lot wrong with the practice. People who had spent thirty years getting out of shape weren’t going to get back into it in thirty minutes. Luckily the gymnasium movement arrived before they all ended up in traction.

  The great majority of Cannons members, of course, are young executive types who have never been very far out of condition in the first place and consequently have little trouble either getting back into it or else simply maintaining an impeccable physique. I try not to hate them. Some of the women look very cute in leotards and I try not to ogle them, an activity reprehensible at my age, and no longer tolerated even amongst the young. But I can’t help sneaking a sideways look at the aerobics classes. It must be fun to bounce around like that. Certainly it seems to induce an intense camaraderie. In the snack bar afterwards you can see the aerobics experts describing their moments of glory to each other like fighter pilots after a dog-fight. The après-sweat social facilities at Cannons improve after each rebuild of the premises. If I had my life over again I would spend most of it in the gym, staying in my magnificent original trim as I strode manfully between the Nautilus machines and the punching bags, writing my books at a cafeteria table with nothing to drink except a can of Dexter’s, buffing up my immortality.

  Life didn’t work out that way. An old buffer has nothing left to buff up. But he can put the brakes on his decline, and feel hale again if not hearty. Like the other older senatorial figures who come to the gym I enjoy my solitude, the only hour in the day when nobody wants anything from me. You can see us in the sauna, each alone with his head in his hands, getting back in touch with the physical life, re-establishing the almost but not quite lost connection between the sound mind and sound body. There’s something Roman about it. A thousand years from now, when they dig up the railway station, find a gymnasium underneath it, and decide that ours must have been an advanced civilization after all, they won’t be far wrong. I can recommend without reservation that anyone worried about the deceptive comfort of his or her swivel chair should follow my lead and rekindle that old flame immediately: don’t let even a single decade go by.

  An introduction to Total Living by Ron Clarke and others, 1995

  ON THE LIST

  Grizzled Aussie expatriates who thought they were safely holed up in this country have been shaken to their foundation garments by the explosion of interest in the subject of Australian republicanism. There was no dodging the issue. Some said it was the first eruption of a long-simmering volcano. Others thought a squib had gone off. The initial evidence supported the latter theory. Meeting the Queen during her tour of Australia the Australian Prime Minister’s wife had several times failed to curtsy, while the Prime Minister himself, on at least one occasion, had physically touched the Monarch.

  For a while it was not established whether these were deliberate acts of lèse-majesté or examples of disarming Australian casualness. But the prominent British art critic, Brian Sewell, was already certain. The Evening Standard ran a full-page article from him recommending that all Australian expatriates in Britain should be deported back to their inherently treasonable country.

  My own name was high on the list, with a full description. I reacted with some alarm. Though Auberon Waugh once made the same suggestion, he had been talking about voluntary repatriation, like Enoch Powell. Brian Sewell’s tone was less kindly. I had always thought he sounded like a decorative attack dog, a sort of pit bull poodle, but this time he was really barking. Those British cultural journalists of the second rank who enjoy baiting Australians as a form of licensed racism had previously worn muzzles. Brian Sewell gave you a taste of what it must have been like to be Jewish in occupied Paris when Brasillach was writing for Je suis partout. First the denunciation, then they wake you up during the night.

  Sleeping that night with my passport in my pyjamas pocket, I was woken early by a telephone call from the Evening Standard. Quelling the urge to answer in a disguised voice and exit backwards through the bedroom window, I bravely asked them what they wanted. It turned out that Prime Minister Keating, responding in Parliament to a taunt about his behaviour vis-à-vis the Monarch, had condemned Britain’s shameless indifference to Australia’s fate during the Second World War. Would I care to comment? I told them to ask Brian Sewell.

  There was no getting out of it that easily. Over the next few days, Newsnight, The World At One and most of the newspapers were all on the trail. Everyone wanted my expert opinion on the Australian constitutional issue. Did I look like an expert on the Australian constitutional issue? I tried on a false beard, but it made me look like Tom Keneally, who is an expert on the Australian constitutional issue. He is in favour of an Australian republic. I’m not, but I’m not sure why. To get out of having to dodge any more questions, however, let me give the few answers in my possession.

  Paul Keating is a man of conspicuous virtues. He has a nice line of invective which could have made him a successful debt collector in another life. When the moment came to pull the lever which dropped Mr Hawke through the trapdoor to the waiting crocodiles, Mr Keating did not pretend to share their tears. His boldness is proved by the unblushing confidence with which he now proposes to rebuild a national economy that all Australians, including possibly himself, are well aware he destroyed in the first place. He will probably make a good, long-serving Prime Minister in the not impossible event that the opposition remains so short of credible leadership that it can’t beat even him.

  But he knows nothing about the modern history of Australia or anywhere else. He left school early and has too readily excused himself from making up his educational deficiencies late at night. Instead of reading English books, he collects French clocks, which can tell him nothing except the time. Compared to most of his predecessors as leader of the Labor Party, he is an ignoramus. Dr H. V. Evatt might be said to have been privileged, because he went to Sydney University and had a dazzling academic record; and Bob Hawke was even more privileged, because he went to Oxford University and drank beer; but Ben Chifley, though his school was the footplate of a locomotive, found out about the world by asking. Paul Keating doesn’t ask. He can’t be instructed because he is always instructing. Tempted out of his field, which is bare-knuckle politics, he finds himself compelled to relay, as a substitute for what he has found out from experience, stuff he has got out of the air. What is of interest is not his belligerence but how the stuff got into the air.

  As Alistair Horne made clear, when the posh papers wheeled him into the argument, the idea that Britain deliberately did less than it could to save Malaya, Singapore and finally Australia, has no basis in fact. It shouldn’t have needed Mr Horne to point this out. Republican-minded Australian revisionist historians have been able to float the notion only by blinding themselves to the obvious. The Malaya campaign was a bungle which cost Britain dear, and if there were any plans by Britain to abandon Australia, they were scarcely more sweeping than Australian plans to do the same. Planning against the worst is a military necessity. When the Australians counted up their resources they had to face the possibility that if the Japanese got ashore the only defensible perimeter would be the eastern seaboard: ‘the Brisbane line’. This proposal, which was drawn up in some detail, is no reason for the inhabitants of Adelaide and Perth to now demand a separate country of their own. Luckily the American navy fought a crucial draw with the Japanese navy at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Australian army stymied the Japanese army in New Guinea, so the prospect of abandoning Australia ceased to loom. But it might have happened, because it might have had to.

  The Australians showed more resentment for the Americans who came to their rescue than for the British who had been so ineffective in defending the Emp
ire. The idea that Australians should have borne ill-will towards Britain was hatched subsequently by revisionist historians with an interest in republicanism. It is a legitimate interest, especially in view of Britain’s undoubted indifference to the sensitivities of Australia and New Zealand at the time of its belated entry into the Common Market. But to play fast and loose with the truth in order to further a political interest is not legitimate, and nothing is more likely to make Australia go on seeming provincial than this propensity on the part of its artists and intellectuals to tinker with ideology. You can understand it from the Murdoch press. Its proprietor favours Australia’s cutting itself off from Britain because he has cut himself off from both countries, in pursuit of some dreary post-capitalist Utopia in which the hunger to acquire is exalted as a spiritual value, and the amount of debt magically testifies to financial acumen. But there is no good reason why some of Australia’s most creative people should share his bleak vision.

  And yet they do. In Australia the conspiracy theory of history wins in a walk and the cock-up theory comes nowhere. At the Dardanelles, three times as many British troops were uselessly thrown into the same boiler as the Australians, but the fact doesn’t get a mention in the Australian-made film Gallipoli because its writer, David Williamson, favours a republic. Williamson is a gifted man who must know the truth. But he has an end in view. The conspiracy theory that Britain cynically exploited Antipodean cannon-fodder in both wars is seen to further this end.

  I wonder if it will. Ordinary Australian people, less bound by the requirements to write a neat article or a clear-cut screenplay, are more likely to favour the cock-up theory, especially if they are old enough actually to remember what the war in the Pacific was like. Indeed, some of them might be inclined to extend that theory to a full-blown view of the world’s contingencies, one of them being that if the British had done everything right in Malaya, they might still have lost.

  It is racism of a particularly insidious kind to imagine that the Japanese were able to advance only because we retreated. General Percival, commanding for Britain, was certainly no genius, but even if he had been Montgomery and Slim rolled into one he would have had trouble with General Yamashita, a strategic prodigy in command of an army which comported itself brilliantly all the way down to platoon level. After the fall of Singapore, a jealous Tojo banished Yamashita to Mongolia, but with the war almost lost he was brought back to stop the rot on Luzon, where the Americans, by then wielding limitless resources, found to their horror that his troops had to be cooked out of their holes, and came out shooting even when they were burning.

  Mr Keating’s assumption that a modernized, Asia-minded Australia needs to be a republic might be greeted with some puzzlement by present-day Japan, whose economic clout dominates the region and whose Emperor, at his coronation, spent a night in the embrace of the Sun Goddess. Mr Keating’s real problem, however, is with my mother. Though fiercely proud to be Australian, she has made a point of seeing with her own eyes all the officially visiting members of the Royal Family since the present Queen Mother, then the Duchess of York. When the present Queen first visited Sydney in 1954, my mother came in by train to wave. She was there again for the Queen’s visit this year. The two women are very like each other, sharing the same past, if not the same income. My mother did not, and does not now, regard my father’s death as a pointless sacrifice on behalf of British interests. She believes that he was defending civilization. Though Mr Menzies took care to keep her war widow’s pension small so as to encourage thrift, she voted for the Liberal Party as often as for Labor, and always according to her assessment of which party had the firmer grip on reality. She has personally elected every Australian prime minister for the last sixty years and if Mr Keating thinks he can do without her vote, it might be his turn on the trapdoor.

  Nor should he put too much faith in the argument – much touted by the Murdoch press and slyly put forward as fact by the Australian broadcaster Mike Carlton in his entertaining article in the Sunday Times – that as Australia’s demography alters to put people of Anglo background in the minority, the majority are bound to prefer going it alone. Whether from Europe two generations ago or from Asia in the last generation, many of Australia’s migrants were refugees from political instability, and won’t necessarily favour any proposal that encourages more of it in their chosen home. Their progeny might be persuaded, but let it be by reasonable argument, on a basis of truth. Meanwhile for Australians like myself, resident in Britain but still holding on loyally to their Australian passports, caught between Mr Sewell and Mr Keating, queuing in the ‘Other Passports’ channel while ex-SS tank commanders are given the quick welcome reserved for the EEC, there is nothing to do but wait, and screen all incoming calls.

  Spectator, 7 March, 1992

  UP HERE FROM DOWN THERE

  When London Calls by Stephen Alomes, Cambridge

  Billed as a senior lecturer in Australian Studies at Deakin University, Stephen Alomes, with his latest book When London Calls – subtitled ‘The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain’ – has made a timely intervention in the perennially simmering local discussion about why the Australian expatriates went away and what should be thought about them by the cognoscenti who stayed put. As its provenance and panoply suggest, this is most definitely an academic work, but the reader need not fear to be dehydrated by the postmodernist jargon that threatened, until recently, to turn humanist studies in Australia into a cemetery on the moon. Instead, the reader should fear a different kind of threat altogether.

  There was a time when Australian academics could be counted on for a donnish hauteur when it came to treating journalistic opinions relating to their subject. Alomes goes all the other way. Without knowing much about it, he loves the world of the media. If there is ever a Chair of Cultural Journalism at Deakin University, he could fill it the way he fills his reporter’s notebook. He gets out there on the interview trail himself. Most of the big names he wants to talk to, if not already dead, don’t want to waste any more of their lives giving soundbite answers to the kind of questions that their work exists to answer in full, but he has the professional pest’s remedy for that. He either gives them short shrift or plugs the lacunae from his clippings file, in which, it seems, any British journalist’s merest mention of an Australian expatriate’s activities – especially if the opinion is adverse – is preserved like holy writ, and in which anything that even the most uninspired Australian journalist makes of the British journalist’s opinion is carefully appended, the whole dog-eared assemblage being regarded by its assiduous compiler as a pristine Forschungsquelle out of which he may construct his own opinions by an elaborate system of cross-reference. This method seems particularly Swiftian in a book which nominally devotes itself to the proposition that Australia need no longer be in thrall to how its creative efforts are perceived in the mother country. Australia is a land mass of three million square miles and geographers have long debated whether it should be called a continent or an island. The bizarre spectacle of Alomes’s self-cancelling thought processes should be enough to settle the discussion. It’s an island all right, and it’s flying like Laputa.

  No doubt seeking to legitimize his gift for inaccurate précis, Andre Malraux recommended telling the kind of lies that would become true later. In Australia it is by now widely proclaimed among the intelligentsia that the era of provincialism is over. Would that it were true, but on the evidence provided by the mere existence of a book like this it isn’t yet, and later might mean never if the facts aren’t faced. One of the facts is that in Australia any discussion of the arts is likely to be bedevilled with politics. Another is that the politics are likely to be infantile. As opposed to the quality of the discussion, the quality of the arts is not the problem. With a size of population which only recently overtook that of the Ivory Coast, Australia has for some time been among the most creatively productive countries on earth. In the mortal words of Sir Les Patterson, we’ve got the
arts coming out of our arseholes. Painters, poets, novelists, actors, actresses, singers, directors: our artists are all over the world like a rash, and the days are long gone when the stars who stayed away were the only ones we had.

  Nobody now would be surprised to hear that the only reason Cate Blanchett left home was to get away from her more gifted sister. In Sydney a new Baz Luhrman lurks on every block, and Brisbane bristles with prêt-à-porter Peter Porters. Alomes has predicated his book on the up-to-date assumption that if Australia should happen to go on producing cultural expatriates, it won’t be provincialism that they flee from, because there no longer is any. The way he says so, however, would be enough in itself to make any current expatriate think twice before coming home for anything longer than a brief incognito visit, and might well recruit new expatriates by the planeload.

  On a world scale, the average cultural expatriate in the twentieth century took flight because if he had stayed where he was he would have faced death by violence. His average Australian equivalent has faced nothing except death from boredom. It might sound like a privileged choice until you find out how lethal the boredom can be. Try a sample sentence.

  In this period groups and institutions were either offshore replications of Australian support organisations or precursors of official and unofficial Australian organisations.

  To be fair, Alomes doesn’t always succeed in being as unreadable as that. There are lingering signs that the once-excellent Australian school system has not yet fully given up on its initial aim of teaching pupils to write coherent prose. Apart from the use of ‘manifest’ as an intransitive verb (‘Sayle’s happy knack of being on the spot where things were happening manifested early’) and a failure to realize that the adjectives ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ are too similar in meaning to be used as if they were different (‘The film was innovative and new’) he writes a plain enough English for someone whose ear for rhythm either never developed or was injured in an accident. There are whole paragraphs that don’t need to be read twice to yield their sense. The question remains, however, of whether they sufficiently reward being read once, except as an unintended demonstration of the very provincialism whose obsolescence their author would like taken for granted.