Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  Let’s see, what have I forgotten? Oh yes, ‘The Saga of the Saucy Mrs Flobster’ is here too – one of his maddest things. And there is a killing parody of John Buchan called ‘The Queen of Minikoi’. And there are all the walk-on characters who turned up in story after story, like the singer Emilia Rustiguzzi and the chatelaine Stultitia, Lady Cabstanleigh: that airy profusion of magic names which came bubbling up inexhaustibly from Morton’s slightly psycho talent. Evelyn Waugh spoke nothing but the truth when he said Beachcomber had ‘the greatest comic fertility of any Englishman’.

  Well, all that marvellous ‘stuff’ (Ingrams says that Morton calls his stuff ‘stuff’) is here, alive and kicking. Yet so much is missing. When I take the aforementioned By the Way down from the shelf (and I could just as easily take Gallimaufry or any of several others) I find Beachcomber’s protean multiplicity made assimilable in a way no latter-day selection is ever likely to match. There are learned notes on setting Ronsard and Leconte de Lisle to music (did any other writer for the Daily Express ever allude to the Song of Roland or quote in Latin?) coupled with a typical counterfeit sea-shanty conveying his distaste for that tedious branch of folk art (‘Blow the Man Up’). And here are Madame Sapphira’s Sixty Superlative Mannequins, making, so far as I know, their one and only appearance. But the bright young thing Boubou Flaring was always coming back, as were the ballet-dancers Tumbleova and Trouserin. Here is the sole mention of ‘Fluffy’ Whackabath. And here, in all its ga-ga splendour, is If So Be That, one of Beachcomber’s miniature serialized novels – a form conspicuously absent from Ingrams’s book.

  If So Be That, by Helpa Kitchen, is a romance of the Spanish-American War, which is why its opening chapter is set in Arabia and features the Sheik El Blista. A later chapter stars Okuno Pigiyama, Japanese Plenipotentiary Extraordinary with or without portfolio at the Court of Athens. (‘But on the footplate of the Silver Monster, all unheeding, Ingeborg Maelstrom, the first Norwegian woman renegade politician to cross the Rockies, is braising carrots.’) Frayn included If So Be That in his book, which is probably why Ingrams left it out, but how could that extraordinary tale Hark Backward! be ignored by both? Nowhere in all Beachcomber is there a mightier battle than the one fought out for the hand of Petunia Pewce between Captain ‘Nark’ Fiendish (a clear precursor of Foulenough) and the radiant and well-groomed Nigel Barriscale (triple blue and fourth in Archaeology), an Etonian dullard who converses entirely in permutations and combinations of ‘Oh, I say’ and ‘Oh, I say, what?’ (But he finally wins Petunia by donning skates and inscribing ‘Play Up, You Fellows’ on the ice in ancient Aramaic.)

  Nigel Barriscale (whose epic climbing-party from Niederschwein to the peak of the Bumbelhorn included the mysterious Vivacity Dumpling) was merely the earliest of Beachcomber’s researches into the psychology of the Upper-Class Twit. (He preceded Monty Python both in this and in his use of very long, extremely silly names – vide the full title of the Viscomte de Malsain-les-Odeurs-Subterrannées du Brebingotte Nonsanfichtre, which goes on for half a page – but then, he preceded everybody in everything.) His arch-conservatism was humanized by an irrepressible taste for anarchy, and indeed he was apt to rhapsodize seriously about the French revolutionary heroes. A nose for aristocratic cretinism led him onwards to invent one of his greatest characters, Big White Carstairs, but not even that ramrod-backed blockhead was his final word on the subject. The figure of the well-bred dumb-bell recrudesced to haunt his delicious fiction of World War II, Geraldine Brazier, Belle of the Southern Command – which is not in Frayn or Ingrams or anywhere I know of except an obscure anthology called The Phoenix Book of Wit and Humour, edited by Michael Barsley and published in 1949.

  Geraldine Brazier (the loveliest WOOF in the British Army) is a German spy, but she is so beautiful that none of the male officers believe it, even when they catch her going through the safe. Neither Captain Roy Batter-Pudden nor Colonel Fritter can bring himself to condemn her, mainly because they are extremely stupid:

  ‘That was not your mother,’ said Colonel Fritter haughtily to Geraldine Brazier, as Captain Batter-Pudden and several officers dashed in pursuit of Ludwig von Rümpelgutz. But the girl was no whit abashed. ‘Nein,’ she said savagely, ‘and I his daughter am not.’

  Awkwardness with women is the norm in Beachcomber’s ruling class. Awkwardness, and an utter deficiency of brains.

  The old Beachcomber anthologies are getting harder and harder to find second-hand, and new readers have to start somewhere. Between this book and Frayn’s they will get a good part of the message. No student of humour can do without a working knowledge of Beachcomber, but studiousness need not – and in this case could not – drive out enjoyment. Beachcomber hated (hates – he is still alive) the modern world, and there is about his work something of the frantic music of a death-dance buoyed up by the mutter of only half-forgotten guns. Wild liberty is the mark of his humour; not careless but carefree; as if the whole of his creative life had been a stolen evening. ‘Ne vois tu que le jour se passe?’ writes Ronsard in one of Morton’s favourite poems. ‘Je ne vy point au lendemain.’ Believing that, Beachcomber could have done nothing. Instead, he did his ‘stuff’.

  New Statesman, 20 December, 1974

  POSTCARDS FROM THE OLYMPICS

  Apart from the programme note, these dispatches appeared in the Independent between 16 September and 2 October 2000, and were syndicated in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age.

  A NOTE FROM THE OFFICIAL PROGRAMME OF THE OPENING CEREMONY OF THE SYDNEY OLYMPICS, 2000

  Mount Olympus, meet Sydney harbour: you belong together. After a century of modern Olympiads, Sydney in the year 2000, even more than Melbourne in 1956, is the perfect place to put the games back in touch with ancient Greece. The reason, which at first hearing might sound like a paradox, is that Sydney is the last place in the world where the classical ideal of white-on-white, empty-eyed austerity can be achieved. But there is no paradox, because the classical ideal never had much to do with ancient Greece. The classical ideal was hatched two thousand years later, in the eighteenth century ad, when every piece of sculpted Greek marble that came under the scholarly magnifying glass had long since lost its paint. In ancient Greece the marble statues were painted in bright colours, and those vacantly staring eye sockets we see in the museums had jewels in them. Ancient Greece looked nothing like a cemetery. It looked like fun. When the ancient games were on, the air was hot, bright and vibrant with music, and sparkling water was never far away. Does that remind you of anything?

  It reminds you of Sydney, which as long as it doesn’t get too puffed up with seriousness is bound to stage the best modern games ever. Luckily, Sydney has never been a suitable place for sustained solemnity. I can remember how in my childhood the local population would manage to stay solemn for the first half of Anzac Day, and then the joy of life once again took over. Shutting the pubs at six o’clock in the evening, our wowser authorities did their grim best to keep the joy confined, but it would always burst out, even before the postwar migrants gave us interesting things to eat and drink. We used to do pretty well even with the uninteresting things: prawns wrapped in newspaper and a few beers, with the odd Lamington for a touch of luxury. Nowadays you hear a lot about what an unsophisticated life we used to lead, and in many ways that was true: but it was a blessed life too, fed with fruit, bathed in sunlight, and full of playful energy. A lot more energy went into play than into work, but that was inevitable. Too many of the best things in life were free. Hence the fact, much complained of by those who cared for our cultural welfare, that sport counted for more than art. Art was something you had to work at shut away. Sport, even if you were slogging to be a champion, could be pursued out there in the open air, the sole difference between you and one of those ancient Greeks being that you were only practically naked, instead of naked.

  Australians worshipped sports champions as a way of giving thanks for the land we lived in. In a vociferously egalitarian culture, to prai
se the tall poppy was an activity rarely well received even by the poppy, which sensibly feared for its vulnerable stem. Even today, Australians can feel uncomfortable about singling themselves out: it might be taken for conceit. But our athletes were assumed to be personally no more ambitious than Phar Lap, who ran fast because it was in his nature, having been born under the Southern Cross. Yes, our medal-winning swimmers were remarkable, but weren’t we all remarkable swimmers? At the baths, the champion was just the one who charged up and down the pool all day while we hung around the sandpit with the girls. We all thought of ourselves as sports experts simply for having been born here. We could talk about the finer points of a sport as if it were an art.

  Looking back on it, I can’t see that we were wrong. Pundits who bewailed Australia’s philistinism were missing the point. Culture was not to be had by elevating our pretensions, but by broadening our range of spontaneous enjoyment. And that was exactly how it happened. Music had always been a natural form of Australian expression. Long before the First Fleet arrived, there had been music in the air. And any singing teacher will tell you that merely to grow up speaking with an Australian accent equals ten years of free lessons in how to place the centre of the voice up there where it belongs, just behind the nose. Back before World War I, the Australian Impressionists had already proved that their country was a natural open-air studio. Literature was longer on the way because it had further to come: requiring more thought, it was more easily discouraged, and only in recent years have our writers begun to carry themselves with the confidence of our painters and musicians – which is to say, with the same confidence as our athletes, who have always wanted to take on the world, and always known that there is nothing incongruous in such a wish.

  There ought to be, of course: though a big country on the map, we are a small one by population. But history doesn’t work that way. Most of the nations big enough to do even better than Australia in the Olympics of the last century would have given, at the end of it, an awful lot to have been called back and asked to start again. We, too, had to fight to stay alive, but our social fabric stayed in one piece, and with the help of many who escaped from less lucky places it grew to maturity in a way that has made us the envy of the world – a nation where all the creative possibilities of life can flourish at once, and so reveal themselves to be more complementary than opposed. There never was a real opposition between sports and arts; there only appeared to be; and now we can see for a fact how they join up. All we have to do is look at these buildings and their natural setting, and look forward to the voices of the children’s choirs. The Sydney Olympics are already an aesthetic event before a single starting pistol is fired. If the ancient Greeks could have seen this, they would have said: yes, that’s it. That’s the classical ideal. You’ve got it right at last.

  1. CARRY THAT TORCH

  Just after lunch on Tuesday I left a London that was running out of petrol and on Wednesday evening I arrived in a Sydney that had everything, up to and including the Olympic Games. The contrast was stunning. Prosperity, energy and sheer friendliness flooded the atmosphere even at the airport, where I was busted for drugs in the nicest possible way. In the customs hall a sniffer dog took an interest in one of my bags. Interest escalated into a passionate relationship. While the mutt was humping my holdall, its handler, a dedicated but charming young lady with freckles, regretfully insisted that she had to frisk me. Jet lag was joined by trepidation: what if some pharmacist for the Chinese swimming team had disguised himself as a baggage-handler at Bangkok and planted a gallon jug of human growth hormone in my spare underwear?

  Barely had half my intimate garments been unloaded on the examination table before it transpired that the canine narc had been turned on by a box of chocolates I was bringing in for my mother. I should have guessed. Even when of German extraction, an Australian dog can only be a hedonist, and Sydney was out to prove that it can do hedonism better than any other city on earth or die trying.

  If that sounds like a contradiction in terms then it fits Australia’s collective state of mind as the games get under way. Never in the world was there such a degree of national well-being plagued with so much insecurity, although it’s a fair bet that most of the paranoia is generated by the press rather than the people. For the media and the intelligentsia – two categories which in Australia share the one mind to an extent rare in the civilized world – there is a nagging, never-ending doubt about whether Australia has yet taken its rightful place as a Mature Nation. Will the Sydney Olympics finally work the trick? Or will we screw the whole thing up?

  Among ordinary people the same intensity of soul-searching is hard to detect. They just get on with enjoying the good life, on the sensible assumption that the rest of the world must be doing pretty well if it’s got anything better than this. A lot of the ordinary people were there among the milling foreign visitors as I arrived downtown in a cab driven by a Lebanese who had found the way with remarkably little trouble for someone who had immigrated the previous week. Squadrons of local roller-bladers in kangaroo-eared helmets zoomed politely through strolling swarms of guests joining one jam-packed pavement bar to another. Australians from out of town were easily identifiable, especially if they were wrinklies. A wrinkly is anyone my age or even older. Wrinklies often still wear the Akubra hat of legend. There were wrinkly married couples in the full kit of Akubra, many-pocketed leisure suit and bulging backpack, except that the whole ensemble was coloured Olympic blue. When there are wrinklies in the street at night, it means everybody is in the street at night. Ancient cries of ‘No worries’ echoed under the awnings, even as the fiendish music of the young blasted out of the bars.

  A wrinkly myself and creased with it, I checked into the Wentworth. My usual drum is the Regent, but it was full of the International Olympic Committee, an outfit famous for living high on hot money. The Wentworth was packed out with a guest list that pays its own way and helps pay for the games at the same time – the executives of the giant electronics conglomerate Panasonic. The foyer was alive with Japanese executives in impeccably tailored suits, giving each other the cool nod that nowadays serves as shorthand for the formal bow. In my travelling kit of M&S black T-shirt stained with airline food, black jeans with Lycra content and twenty-four-hour stubble, I felt lucky that my room hadn’t been cancelled. Born and raised in an era without air conditioning, I opened my bedroom window to let in the warm Pacific night and crashed out to the sound of happy laughter coming up from the street in twenty languages, some of them spoken in countries where life is a lot less attractive. ‘I know why they’re laughing,’ was my fading thought. ‘They can’t believe this is real.’

  I woke to a late morning of perfect sunlight and ambled down to Circular Quay to take breakfast at Rossini’s, my favourite snackeria on earth. For years it has been my custom to sit out in the sun at Rossini’s for a slow latte and cinnamon toast. The bridge soars on the left, the Opera House ruffles its wings on the right, and the office workers pile off the ferries as I relax with the morning papers. This time I had to queue up for a table. The whole of the quay was one big multilingual paseo of quietly ecstatic world citizens. The newspapers, when I finally got a seat, revealed that they, too, had caught the mood. Their big question now was who would be chosen to run the last few yards of the torch relay and light the cauldron at the opening ceremony. Dawn Fraser? Don Bradman? Phar Lap? On most mornings of the previous six months, their big question had been whether the games would sink to destruction under a growing load of drug scandals, corruption and administrative incompetence, thereby further delaying Australia’s pain-racked ascent to its rightful place among the world’s mature nations. If experience had not taught me better I would have expected to arrive in a city with the same festive atmosphere as Sodom and Gomorrah on the morning after a wrathful God spat the dummy.

  Certainly the press had not been deprived of grist to its mill. Two of Australia’s members of the IOC had performed less than brilliantly. Both ex-at
hletes of distinction, they had fallen prey to the Olympic Movement’s time-dishonoured habit of smoothing its way with fat from the pork barrel. Phil Coles had copped some heavily discounted holidays, during which his wife had adorned herself with jewellery of unexplained provenance. The depredation had amounted to only a few thousand Australian dollars – barely a small van-load of peanuts when you factor in the current exchange rate – but it had been enough to obliterate the kudos Phil had coming to him for doing more than anyone else to snare the games for Sydney. Phil is a simple soul whose true stamping ground is the sand in front of the surf club, but perhaps he should have known better. And Kevan Gosper, a more sophisticated spirit, should definitely have known better: when it was suggested that his little daughter might like to run the first leg of the torch relay in place of the Aussie Greek girl who had been scheduled for the task, he should have said no. On the other hand, his explanation – ‘My fatherly pride simply clouded my judgement’ – should have been held sufficient. For the Australian press that had already called him a ‘reptile’, his tardy but remorseful mea culpa was merely a further sign of arrogance. He went on to be inundated with the sort of abuse that Vyshinsky, during the Moscow show trials in 1938, used to unload on Trotskyite wreckers and other tools of imperialism who seemed to think that abject self-accusation could mitigate their perfidy.