Reliable Essays

by Clive James

  In London during the early 1960s, he stayed alive as an actor. Visiting Australians who knew his legend would go to see him improvising his way through Christmas pantomimes. (Bruce Beresford, who saw him as Captain Hook, once told me that his catchphrase was ‘I’m going to take a peep around the poop’ and there were children saying it in the foyer during the interval.) His memory sharpened by absence and new experience, he became more conscious than ever of the all-pervading oddness into which he had been born. On every voyage home his ears were tuned more keenly, his eyes skinned another layer. If he had not had his Europe, he would never have completed his rediscovery of Australia. That is the saving grace to remember when his less sympathetic characters punish their birthplace by representing its pretensions and ignorance to the world, or when Edna shows an unlikely knowledge of minor Belgian pointilliste painters. By bringing his country more understanding than it understands, he is acting out a conflict, living a problem. A thoroughly introspective artist, he is well aware of the anomaly.

  The anomaly is resolved nowhere else but in language. Audiences will always leave the theatre wondering where Humphries stands, because to raise such questions and leave them unanswered is part of his purpose, which is in its turn a complex mixture of the worthy desire to raise consciousness and the incurably Mephistophelean urge to raise Hell. At school, so they say, when forced to attend a rugby match he sat facing away from the field, knitting; and as an army cadet he turned up on parade in immaculately blancoed webbing and polished brass, except that it was all put on over his pyjamas. He would have been a handful in any society. He is a misfit and fully conscious of it. The punctilio of his old-world manners, the dandified scrupulosity of his Savile Row suits, are compelled by an unsleeping awareness that he has no more business among ordinary human beings than a Venusian. But his language, at its best, is the language of unfeigned delight. As all his characters, but especially as Sandy, he makes long nominative lists in the way of those writers who are in on the historic moment of discovering the verbal tradition of their young country. Sandy’s diction, if not his aphasic voice, was heard before in the glossaries and prose poems which H. L. Mencken composed after the First World War. ‘Pale druggists in remote towns of the hog and Christian Endeavour belts, endlessly wrapping up bottles of Peruna . . .’

  The rest of it is in Mencken’s little Book of Burlesques, published by Knopf in 1924. It is a chrestomathy of essays, sketches and wisecracks rather along the lines of the Peter Altenberg scrapbooks popular in the German-speaking countries right through the First World War. A Nice Night’s Entertainment would have been more digestible if it had been compiled in the same way, with a few more of Humphries’s adroit lyrics and some of the captions, usually signed by Aunt Edna, which he throws away in soft-covered photo books – a bad genre because nobody reads them twice, whoever writes them. The tradition of the catch-all cabaret book sorely needs to be revived. But the mention of Mencken is a reminder to get things in proportion. He brought a cutting wit, hard sense and tireless word-collecting diligence to the business of educating a world power. Australia is, and is likely to remain, a less important place.

  One of the most successful representatives of the new energy conferred by an immature country, Humphries has never lost sight of its immaturity. Instead of empty boosting, he has given it a sharp tongue. Australia has allegedly progressed from an inferiority complex to a sense of its own worth. Humphries is inclined by nature to question complacency of any kind but in this instance he has had special reason to be scathing, since so much of the new confidence has proved simple-minded. As a notable contributor to the resurgent Australian film industry he has a right to be sceptical about some aspects of the strong sense of story which is supposed to be its peculiar virtue. Some of the strong stories are simplifications: Gallipoli, for example, contributes seductively to the euphoria of the Australian present but denigrates Britain in a way that disowns the past. Sandy Stone lived and died at Gallipoli Crescent without ever being so cocksure on the subject either way. Humphries has the right idea about that sort of unearned assertiveness.

  Beyond that, he has the right idea about popular culture. His instinct led him away from a respectable literary career and towards the people. Earlier, in the 1930s, Kenneth Slessor had felt and responded to the same compulsion, having realized that high art was a watched pot. Slessor’s popular lyrics for Smith’s Weekly, later collected in Darlinghurst Nights and Backless Betty from Bondi, were an important step in his own work, and in the brief history of Australian poetry should be regarded as one of those moments when an individual talent breaks through to a new set of possibilities that lie so close at hand they are hard to see. Humphries is another such talent, but with him the effort looks set to last a lifetime.

  A difficult lifetime. For someone so clever there are no days off. Being him is obviously not easy. Like many people who know them both, I have always got on better with Edna. I suspect she is happier than he is. But peace of mind could never have produced such a quality of perception. Barry Humphries is original, not just for what he has created, but for how he has attuned himself to what created him. Hence the feeling of community which he arouses in his countrymen even when the night’s entertainment turns out to be not so nice. Bringing out the familiar in its full strangeness, he helps make them proud of their country in the only way that counts – by joining it to the world.

  London Review of Books, 6–19 October, 1983: previously included in

  Snakecharmers in Texas, 1988

  Postscript

  Underneath the appropriately awe-stricken innocence of this homage there was a cunning purpose. Knowing that the London Review of Books, like the Times Literary Supplement, was read religiously in Australia by those very intellectuals who most loudly deplored the excessive respect given to opinions of colonial literature expressed in the old country, I planned to give the home-grown discussion of Humphries’s achievement a nudge towards a higher plane than the one on which it was currently stuck. Cunning confounded itself and my plan failed. Today, even as then, Humphries is assessed in the proliferating cultural columns of his homeland according to how his creations are seen to square with nationalist pretensions. In the long run it won’t matter: the Australian literati will become as proud of their prodigal son’s creative stature as the common people have always been delighted by his comic inventions. But in the short run it is a piquant farce. Luckily its subject is well qualified to turn the attendant ironies to effect. He doesn’t need help to fight his battles. Any artist, however, can only benefit from being understood. Egon Friedell, who like Humphries laid a direct path to the public stage from his private library, once summed the matter up: even the strongest character needs a magnetic field in which he can work. Humphries has had to conquer the world in order to find his way home, and what that says about home is for him to say.

  To avoid misunderstanding, I should make explicit here what I left implicit at the time: that the Australian ‘immaturity’ I had in mind was cultural immaturity, not political. Australia has come on a lot since I wrote the piece, but even in 1983 I already believed that as a stable, functioning democracy it was in an enviable position, and that its success had a lot to do with its Constitution. The Republican movement was already up and running, and it was predictable that republicanism would become a consensus among the intelligentsia as a whole, but by a process of cultural fashion rather than political enlightenment. Politically, Australian cultural fashions tend to be obscurantist: a truth which Humphries has done much to illuminate, earning himself many vocal enemies along the way. He has always been able to turn their attacks to material, but even he is hard put to give back as good as he gets. Speaking as one who has always found it more comfortable below the parapet, I can only salute the insane bravery of a man who dances on top of it in full drag.

  2001

  GERMAINE GREER: GETTING MARRIED LATER

  Germaine Greer’s first and very considerable book The Female Eunuch drops
into the intelligentsia’s radar accompanied by scores of off-putting decoy noise-sources: a panicky response is virtually guaranteed. Granada Publishing (the command group for MacGibbon and Kee) have done an impressive job with the highbrow press, and weeks before publication date Dr Greer was already well known.

  If this makes it seem that the reviewer is too concerned with media reactions and media values, let it be made clear that there is little chance of any other kind of reactions and values operating in the present instance. Germaine Greer is a storm of images; has already been promoted variously as Germaine de Staël, Fleur Fenton Cowles, Rosa Luxemburg and Beatrice Lillie; and at the time of writing needs only a few more weeks’ exposure in order to reoccupy the corporeally vacant outlines of Lou Andreas-Salomé, George Sand, Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe and Marjorie Jackson (the Lithgow Flash). Media-hype is never sadder than when something decent is at the centre of the fuss. These forebodings might be wrong, and there could just be a slim chance that The Female Eunuch will be appreciated on its merits. But I wouldn’t count on it.

  The book’s merits are of a high order. It possesses a fine, continuous flow of angry power which both engenders and does much to govern the speed-wobble of its logical progression; it sets out an adventurous analysis of social detail which does much to offset the triteness of its theoretical assumptions; and all in all it survives its flaws of style, falsities of assessment and excesses of sentimentality to present an argument of terrific polemical force. ‘Now as before, women must refuse to be meek and guileful, for truth cannot be served by dissimulation. Women who fancy that they manipulate the world by pussy power and gentle cajolery are fools. It is time for the demolition to begin.’ It’s a revolutionary position from first to last, and a lot of people, many of them ladies, are going to be interested in taking the sting out of it, principally by institutionalizing the authoress. A six-foot knock-out freak don with three degrees and half a dozen languages who can sing, dance, act, write and turn men to stone with an epigram – what a target for the full media treatment! Meanwhile the book’s content demands summary and analysis, neither of which is easy to give. The Female Eunuch begins with a lushly overwritten dedication to various female companions in the struggle and ends with twenty pages of dauntingly erudite notes. In between are four main sections of argument and one minor section: ‘Body’, ‘Soul’, ‘Love’, ‘Hate’ and (the minor one) ‘Revolution’, which last I found to be mainly rhetoric. Of the main sections, the first one, ‘Body’, is the most ill-considered, so it’s rather a pity that it sets the terms of the book as well as the tone. She argues very well in the ‘Soul’ section that the supposedly ineluctable differences of emotional and intellectual make-up between the sexes are imposed by stereotype and are consequently alterable, if not eliminable and indeed reversible. There was not the slightest need to peg this argument back to the ‘Body’ section and there pronounce that the differences of physical shape between men and women are likewise metaphysically determined. It makes for a poor start and surely a false one. The anthropological, ethnological, biological and chromosomal evidence adduced is scarcely convincing, and the notes given for this section are relatively thin – relative, that is, to the mass of reading which has been drawn upon to substantiate the arguments of the subsequent sections. The import of this opening section really amounts to the notion that women and men are more similar than they are different, which is unarguable, like its converse: like its converse it is merely a chosen emphasis, providing a preliminary to argument. It is one thing to say that ‘the “normal” sex roles that we learn to play from our infancy are no more natural than the antics of a transvestite’, since that deals with the psychology of the business. It is another thing to say that in order ‘to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes.’ (Shapes? The whole shape? Everybody? All the time?) And it is a hell of a thing to say both those things in two succeeding sentences.

  ‘But of 48 chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all 48 are different.’ Only if we are clowns. What we actually do is something far more insidious: realizing that differences based on physique are not seriously worth considering, we keep everything on a mental plane, and attribute to women intellectual virtues we do not possess, in order to palm off a mass of responsibilities we don’t propose to handle. The same trick works in reverse: women flatter men in much the same way. The result, until recently, has been a workable (I don’t say just) division of labour. A good deal of the woman’s share (I don’t say a fair share) of the labour centres on the fact that she has the babies – which is where the physical difference really does come in, or did. After Miss Greer has cleaned up the question of subsidiary physical differences (it appears that women wouldn’t have so much subcutaneous fat if they didn’t leave so much skin exposed on things like, for example, legs) and gets on to the social forms and structures which are governed by this one remaining, glaring physical difference, the book picks up. Because she instantly realizes that if women are to be free, the reproduction of the race is the rap they have to beat.

  All the ensuing major sections of The Female Eunuch really amount to a brilliant attack on marriage and the psychological preparation for it, and on the nuclear family which is the result of it. This attack traces all the correct connections, from Barbara Cartland’s powdered cleavage to the aspirin industry that thrives on frustration, from the doomed cosmetic ritual to the furtive adultery, and from the mother who sacrifices everything to the son who is grateful for nothing. The case has seldom been so well argued. One misses the wit that Dr Greer wields in conversation, but the headlong rush of mordant disenchantment is all there. The book would be worth the price merely to read her anatomizing of the advice columns in the women’s magazines – an effort comparable in approach (and, one hopes, in effect) to Gabriella Parca’s masterly Le Italiane si confessano.

  Passages of sympathetic fury like this constitute the book’s solid worth: there are enough of them to establish Dr Greer as an individual voice in popular social debate for some time to come. But suppose we take her condemnation of the received relationship between the sexes for granted – what alternatives does she offer? On this point, the book runs into trouble.

  On a practical level – the level of likelihoods, of what might conceivably be brought about – Dr Greer recommends little that you will not find equally well put (and put equally passionately) in the prefaces to Man and Superman and Getting Married. If the ideas of female freedom, liberation from the ‘feminine’ stereotype, and the economic key to sexual equality strike the new semi-intelligentsia as revolutionary, it will only be because of the thoroughness with which touch has been lost with the old radical tradition. Here as elsewhere in the wide spectrum of the currently fashionable revolutionary spirit, it’s the theoretical atavism of the practical recommendations which strikes the concerned reader as extraordinary. One gets the sense, after a while, that living philosophical insights curve away from history to re-enter it later on as psychodrama, posturings and myth. Perhaps Pareto’s diagrams on this subject were correct after all, and something like this has to happen before ideas take the form of action: but it is very eerie to be an onlooker. When Dr Greer conjures up a loose-knit, ‘organic’ family, with several footloose fathers for the organic kids, and sets the imagined scene in Italy, we smile for two reasons. Not just because of the ill-judged setting (the courtyard would be stiff with the khaki Alfas of the carabinieri di pronto intervento before you could get the toys unpacked), but because the idea itself has already been and gone – the grass grew over it long ago in some abandoned Owenite phalanx, the kids grew up, moved out and went square.

  But just because ideas like this have been and gone, it doesn’t mean that the wished-for condition couldn’t come again, and this time to stay. The
question is: for how many? So far, only for a few. And for how long? Up to now, usually not long. The problem of substituting individual initiative for received social forms can be solved, but only at the cost of an extraordinary application of energy, and usually only in conditions of privilege.

  The coming generations are obviously going to get many of the privileges that the old socialists fought for, prepared the ground for, but saw distorted, half-realized, and even abandoned. This is one of the reasons why the old radical hands are intolerant of the new bloods: the new bloods lack the intellectual preparation, the realization of continuous difficulty. The main message of the preface to Getting Married was that no matter how much she needed to be free, a woman needed to marry in order to protect herself socioeconomically. Shaw had no illusions about what most marriages were. But equally he had no illusions about the currently feasible alternatives. The main message of The Female Eunuch is that the nuclear family is a menace, that the feminine role is a poisonous sham and that the farce ought to be wound up. If this position now looks tenable, it’s not because Dr Greer has a capacity for analysis superior to Shaw’s, but because the socio-economics of the matter have changed. The opportunities for making a claim to individuality have vastly increased. But one can recognize this fact without being seduced by it – without forgetting that the benefits of living a liberated life are probably not to be measured on the scale of happiness. To do Dr Greer credit in this regard, it is not an easier life she is asking for, but a more difficult, more honourable one.