by Clive James
It’s in chaos. The pontificator with plans for fixing the world can’t organize his own desk, and as for what lies beyond the desk, forget about it. The evidence that I’ve spent years forgetting about it is all out there. Piles of old newspapers and magazines. Stacks of box files containing folders containing memos about the necessity to buy more folders and box files. Hundreds of books uselessly hidden behind hundreds of other books. A small statue of a Sumo wrestler, or else a life-sized statue of a small Sumo wrestler. A bag of random receipts that my accountant might have found quite useful in their year of origin, 1998. But let’s start with the desk.
Or rather, let’s not. The desk is too much. Little of its surface is visible through piled notebooks and shuffled papers. But observe this vertically striped earthenware mug full of ball-point pens. If the phone rings with information I must take down, I reach for one of these pens and find that it does not work. In the same vertically striped mug there are fifteen other pens that do not work either. Vaguely I remember the day when I planned to sort through these pens and retain only those that did work. But I got distracted. What else is in the same mug? Jelly beans, several of which have grown fur.
And that’s just the mug. What about this desk drawer over here on the right? Ah, there’s a touch of organization here. Every year I put a new set of vital names and addresses in the designated section of my appointments diary. But I never get round to transferring vital names and addresses from previous diaries into the current one. So there are ten years of diaries in this drawer alone, to supplement the line-up of twenty years of diaries standing over there in the corner of the room behind that valuable stack of obsolete phone books. Or, as I have just typed, obsotel nophe kobos.
All over again I count my blessings that I have not been chosen as one of the subjects for Eamonn McCabe’s series of photographs called ‘Writers’ Rooms’. In London, an exhibition of these photographs has just opened. The photographs have been running as a series in one of the upmarket newspapers. When I looked at the early photos in that series I was envious. Would I be chosen? Then I started praying that I wouldn’t be, a prayer which has mercifully been answered.
There are some prizes I would like. I would quite like the Nobel Prize, if the money could be delivered tomorrow in a suitcase, clearly marked ‘Nobel Prize money: bank immediately or it will burst into flames’. I would quite like the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the Forward Prize and the UNICEF prize for the chronically disorganized. I can hear myself pontificating while accepting any or all of those awards. But what I don’t want is to be photographed in this room, because any shred of credibility I had as a pontificator would evaporate instantly.
I noted with shame that even the most shambolic of the writers’ rooms in the photographs was better organized than mine, and the majority of them might have been deliberately arranged to remind me that I myself was working in a skip. These paragons had got it all together without it getting on top of them. You could tell that everything was there for a reason. If a woman writer had the propeller of a Sopwith Camel mounted on the wall, it was because her greatgrandfather shot down Baron von Richthofen’s second cousin in 1917. Writers had their books arranged by category, in alphabetical order. I moved into this office ten years ago, the books came out of their tea chests in any old order, and any old order is still the only order they maintain on my shelves. There are books I know I own but I have to buy them again because I can’t find them. Let me add that everything is well dusted. A cleaner comes in once a week and she does a good job. But she is under instructions not to move anything, in case I need it. So she has learned just to polish the whole lot as if it were an installation at Tate Modern.
Other writers clearly find it easier to get their act together, and no doubt most non-writers do too. But judging from my own admittedly extreme experience, they can only get things under control by striving mightily against a force of nature that wants things to be disorganized rather than not. Scientists call it entropy. Back in the early nineteenth century, Carl von Clausewitz, in his great work about military strategy On War, called it Friction. Clausewitz said that you have to have a plan for the battle but the plan had better include plenty of room for the absolute certainty that the plan will start growing fur from the first moment of its execution.
I have just been checking up in my copy of Clausewitz – I had to buy another copy, because my original copy is somewhere in my bookshelves, which means that it might as well be on Mars – and I can tell from every sentence that he was writing with the insight conferred by self-knowledge. I’ll bet all the money in my foreign coin collection – it’s over there in the fruit bowl, and some of those hundreds of obsolete francs and Deutschmarks are sure to be worth something to collectors a hundred years from now – I’ll bet all that money in the fruit bowl – and if you’re asking where the fruit is, I gathered up all my powers of organization and threw it out only a month after I forgot to eat it – I’ll bet all that money that Clausewitz, when he was working on his magnum opus in his last years, was sitting at a desk that looked like the morning after the Battle of Waterloo.
His name for the accumulated effect of Friction was the Fog of War. When I read that, I could tell straight away that here was a man who, like me, couldn’t toast a slice of bread without filling his apartment with smoke. When his widow prepared his manuscript for posthumous publication, she probably found sandwiches in it.
When DVDs came in, I rarely played my VHS tapes again, but the VHS tapes did not move out. There are several hundred of them here, stacked on the floor. My first copy of Clausewitz might be somewhere behind them. I know there is a squash racket behind them because I can see the edge of its frame sticking up. Will I ever play squash again? Of course not, so why is the racket still there? Perhaps it’s trying to remind me that the best-equipped pontificator is the one who is aware of his own propensities towards chaos. Unable to organize his own breakfast, he will be less ready to condemn officials who can’t organize an efficient system for sending out student grants, or collecting private information onto a CD-ROM that won’t be left on a train.
But even the most self-aware pontificator is still likely to expect too much of the world. Rarely will he be sufficiently amazed that society functions at all, considering some of the human material it has to work with. In ancient Greece, the philosopher Diogenes, wedded to simplicity, lived in a tub. But he still roamed the streets of Athens by daylight while carrying a lamp. He said that he was looking for an honest man, and everybody wrote it down, saying that Diogenes the cynic was a piercing analyst of the human condition. But maybe he just didn’t know how to turn the lamp off.
Sitting at this computer, on whose keyboard I have just typed the word ‘lamp’ and actually written the word ‘lump’, I am face to face with an item of technology that Diogenes would not have known how to switch on. I barely know how to switch it on either, have often failed to switch it off – why does it ask me, ‘Do you wish to report the error?’ when I don’t know what the error is? – and yet I do know that its mere presence in the pile of rubble I call my desk is sending me a dangerous signal.
This miracle of machinery is telling me that order can emerge from chaos after all. Well, yes, it can, but only against heavy odds, because chaos is inherent even in the minds of those who make the miracles. And it is certainly inherent within the pontificator. I can pontificate about that with some certainty, even as I type the last words of this sprict, scirpt, script, reach for my mug of coffee, and get a mouthful of ball-point pens.
Postscript
I can promise that this broadcast was not a sly signal that I should be considered for the honour of having my room photographed by Eamonn McCabe. Shortly afterwards, however, the phone rang and the date was made. Heroically I did not neaten the room up before he photographed it – apparently almost everybody gets the builders in – but I was impressed to notice that in the published picture it looked neater anyway. Just as a film camera makes even grun
ge look premeditated, a still camera squares things up. Or perhaps the messes we make don’t look as bad as we feel they do. Malcolm Gladwell, early in his career, published an article explaining that the jumble on your desk is really a filing system in which an elaborate operational set of priorities is being observed. Instantly I felt a lot better about my heaps of paper. On a grander scale, Beethoven, had he been told that his personal chaos was really a form of organization, might have convinced himself that he would never have composed the Hammer-klavier sonata if half a cold chicken had not got lost in his piano.
Years ago the Library of New South Wales kindly invited me to hand over my papers pari passu, and as the years go by I burden the library’s basement with more and more used notebooks. I have to be careful, though, not to hand over any notebook until I have searched through it to extract vital marginal thoughts so that I can transfer them to yet another notebook which at the moment I can’t find.
If that’s the way you are, that’s the way you’d better stay. My friend Bruce Beresford, whose job as a film director entails the ability to run an efficient office, was the first in my generation to transfer all of his vital addresses and information to one of the new hand-held electronic devices. Not long after being loaded with the last scrap of crucial data, the device went missing, thereby sending him back to square one. Square one, in his case, was easily found. For most of the rest of us, square one is like the Lost City of the Jungle. But at least I know that all my stuff is somewhere, even if I can’t say exactly where. Somewhere in that fuzzy concept of putative retrieval is my capacity to concentrate on what I consider important. With few exceptions, most of the writers I know who do smooth work are scruffs in real life. They just haven’t got the time to neaten everything else up. There is an economy to winning effort. It knows what to concentrate on. Quite soon after the invading German army was fought to a halt before Moscow, German engineers examining a captured Russian T-34 tank noticed that it was well finished only where it needed to be, and as rough as guts everywhere else. They realized to their horror that their own tanks were too well machined, and that the discrepancy could very well cost them the war.
NATIONAL IDENTITY
Dates of show: 12 and 14 December 2008
In my homeland, Australia, the question of national identity is once again in the news as the assembled brains of the entire country wonder whether the new film about Australia, called Australia, will finally establish the national identity of our neglected island in the eyes of the world. Let me start out by saying that I have always found this supposedly nagging question of Australia’s national identity to be a mare’s nest. Everyone in the world knows that Nicole Kidman, the leading lady of the film Australia, comes from Australia, so how much more national identity does one nation need? But I’ll get to that later because I want to start out with another question: the national identity of Lapland.
Lapland’s national identity in the eyes of the world took a bit of a hammering this week when a Lapland theme park in the New Forest closed down in response to universal lack of enthusiasm. Ticket buyers were promised snow, cabins, elves and appropriate animals. The snow was sparse, the cabins closely resembled the kind of bolt-together huts you get on a building site, some of the elves behaved in a non-elf-like manner, and at least one of the appropriate animals was made of plastic. I won’t go into further detail because the newspapers were full of it, but let’s just say that, except from people who had been optimistic enough to actually buy tickets, a great laugh went up.
The great laugh told you two things. The first thing is that the British enjoy a bungle. They have come to see a bungle as part of their national identity: a tilting train that tilts too much or doesn’t tilt at all, a Millennium Dome with not much in it, a Heathrow terminal that separates passengers from their luggage on a long-term basis, a Lapland theme park with snow-deficiency syndrome. How very British. One might even say that the nicest aspect of the British national identity is that the British can laugh at themselves.
But the other thing that the great laugh told you was that Lapland really does have an identity problem, because apart from its status as the official domicile of Santa Claus it would have had very few things notably Laplandish to offer for a thirty-quid ticket even if the theme park had been a big-budget number. Cabins and reindeer, is that it? The expectations of Lapp culture are low. Not even a British stand-up comedian would expect to get away with the suggestion that Lapland is where the Lapp dancers come from, because everyone knows that almost nothing comes from Lapland. On the international scale of celebrity, Lapland scores low unless you are deeply interested in hearing the one and only real Santa perform in a Lapp accent, hoeh hoeh hoeh. And very few Americans even know where Lapland is. Right there we get to the heart of this supposedly vital question about national identity. Small countries want America to have heard of them.
Britain counts as a big small country because it has a lot of people in it, but even the British are apt to waste time caring about whether the Americans have heard of them. Not all their time, however: for which I bless their sanity. For smaller small countries – and I mean smaller by population – it can be a continuing obsession. The clearest case is Canada, which is large in area even by comparison with the United States but is short of people. Crucially, Canada is right next to the US, and speaks the same language. Everyone knows that Mexicans are Mexicans but few of us can tell a Canadian from an American unless the Canadian is speaking French. The Canadians are forever bothered by a sense of being dominated by their famous neighbour to the south.
The Canadians try to laugh, however. There was a Canadian best-selling book recently called Coping with Back Pain. It did so well that the Americans printed their own edition. But the Americans called it Conquering Back Pain because America is a can-do nation that conquers, it doesn’t cope. A friend of mine who told me about this had already worked out her own jokes, which I gladly borrow. The Canadian version of Julius Caesar’s memoirs? I Came, I Saw, I Coped. Get ready for She Stoops to Cope and Hail the Coping Hero Comes. But the nice thing about the Canadians is that they can come up with jokes like that at the drop of a Mountie’s hat. They know they’re stuck and they’ve learned to enjoy it.
Long-time commander of the Starship Enterprise, the Canadian-born William Shatner, one of the funniest men I ever met, is full of jokes about Canadian star-fleet admirals. Canada has been supplying stars to Hollywood for a century but everyone thinks they’re American. The best the Canadians can do is laugh about it and they always have. Finally the national sense of humour is a vital factor. National identity and a sense of humour: there are two themes trying to get together here.
I should say at this point that for all I know the Lapps are as funny as a circus on the subject of their minimal international standing. Perhaps they are even now rolling around in the snow, yelling with laughter at the reports of how the lavishly appointed Lapland New Forest theme park project went belly-up. But we don’t know, because we never hear from them on the subject. This seems to me a wise attitude, for reasons I will discuss.
But not, alas, until I have discussed the national identity of Australia. It’s a duty that there’s no getting out of. As an Australian who lives in Britain, I spend a lot of time fielding calls from the media in my homeland wanting to know what Britain is thinking. These calls have been coming in every few hours in recent weeks, because the film Australia will soon open here and perhaps I might have seen it at a press screening. As it happens, I have seen it at a press screening, so I’m in a position to say that although I have no idea what the British will think when it goes on general release, I have an exact idea of what I think.
About the film’s merits I prefer to be silent at this stage, except to say that it seemed quite long, in the same sense that the Thirty Years War probably seemed quite long to anyone who had been expecting it to be over sooner. But I have a definite opinion about what the film Australia will do for Australia’s national identity. It will
do nothing, because nothing needs to be done.
Unlike Lapland, Australia is world famous. Australian actors and film makers and writers and arts people have been colonizing the planet for years and all the jokes about Australia’s deficiency of culture are old hat, like all the jokes about Australians knowing nothing about wine. Australia killed the wine jokes by producing supertankers full of wine that the whole world wanted to drink and it killed the culture jokes by flooding the world with an outburst of quality remarkable for a country that looks big on the map but has fewer people in it than Mexico City.
Most important, Australia has even more great stuff at home than it sends abroad. Unfortunately it also has a whole army of commentators who are permanently anxious that the world hasn’t heard of them. Well, there’s a reason for that. It’s because they are talking nonsense. There is no Australian national identity crisis and never has been. Indeed Australia after World War II was a desirable destination for people from countries that really did have an identity crisis: Poland, for example. When Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have ruined your country from two different directions, that’s an identity crisis.
Australia’s only problem was that it felt itself to be a bit of a backwater, and that is obviously no longer true. But it isn’t obvious to the people who draw a salary for saying Australia must do something to put itself on the map of the world. Just such anxious minds are behind the notion that the film Australia will make all the world’s tourists aware of Australia. They hope the film will work like the Paul Hogan commercial in which he threw another shrimp on the barbie. They think an epic film like Australia can act like an advertisement.
If these tireless promoters think that people will come to visit Australia after they have seen the film Australia, I can only say that those people will be very old when they arrive. But I also have to say, with reluctance, that the movie has plainly also been made in order to impress the Yanks. Australia, says the film Australia, is even bigger than Texas. Any Americans who make the trans-Pacific trip on the strength of this movie are going to be disappointed not to find Hugh Jackman, who plays the drover, droving a herd of cattle down one of the main streets of Sydney. They stand a better chance of bumping into Nicole Kidman, who is now once again living in her home town, and probably for two main reasons. One reason could be that she finds the relative obscurity a nice change after all the Hollywood hoo-hah: rarely, in Sydney, is she trailed by more than two car-loads of paparazzi at once.