Reliable Essays

by Clive James

  In the field of arts, letters and the petit bonheur, Horne is well pleased by the giant strides Australia has made away from its erstwhile diffidence and wowserism, but the vaunted energy and imagination of its entrepreneurs leave him unimpressed. In The Lucky Country Revisited his perennial dim view of the Australian managerial élite is brought up to date and reinforced. Horne’s argument will ring a bell for those of us who have always wondered why someone who buys a brewery with money made out of lousy newspapers is called a financial genius. But Horne is not pandering to the highbrow who despises industry. Horne thinks that if the entrepreneurs are living in a dream, the intellectuals are doing too little to dispel it.

  I wish Horne wasn’t right about this, because Australia would be a blissful place in which to inhabit an ivory tower – you could see the beach for miles. Dreaming, however, might do for us in the end, and needs more discouragement than it is getting now. The cure is realism. Australian historians suffer from having too little history to work on. But there is plenty more coming up, and although we can’t be sure what will happen, we can be sure we won’t like it, unless those who take on the task of putting the past in perspective are thoughtful and disciplined enough to give us a reasonably clear account of how we got this far.

  London Review of Books, 18 February, 1988: previously included in

  The Dreaming Swimmer, 1992

  Postscript

  In France, the apparently confident onward march of post-war literary theory was readily identifiable even at the time as the tactical retreat of gauchiste political beliefs to an impregnable redoubt from which they could be defended for ever, whatever happened in the real world. The identifying didn’t have to be done by foreigners: Jean-François Revel was merely the most articulate (and philosophically best equipped) among the local commentators who spotted what was going on right from the start. Slower to emerge was the root cause of the whole aberration. When, at long last, after more than forty years of eloquent coyness, books about what had really happened to French intellectual and creative life under the Occupation began to come out – one of the earliest remains the best, Des écrivains et des artistes sous l’Occupation, by Gilles Ragache and Jean-Robert Ragache, 1988 – it gradually became clear that the Nazi Propagandastaffel, under the agile leadership of Otto Abetz, had worked a trick of corruption in Paris whose long-term results ran too deep for tears. Effectively, any literary figure in whatever field who had been allowed to continue publishing during the Occupation was a collaborator, right up to and including Jean-Paul Sartre himself. Sartre never said anything in support of the Nazis or the Vichy regime, but he wasn’t asked to. Abetz was too smart for that: he wasn’t buying approval, he was buying silence. He got it. The deportation trains left from Drancy without a hitch.

  The collective bad conscience generated by this inadmissible memory gave a powerful impulse to the idea that literature might have principles of organization more interesting than its ostensible meaning. That same brainwave, nudged only a little further in the direction of absurdity, yielded the desirable bonus of removing the author from personal responsibility for anything he might have said or (even better) failed to say. From the political viewpoint, the notion of a ‘text’ was the self-serving product of an intellectual tradition that had been poisonously compromised, first by its passive acceptance of one totalitarian nightmare, second by its enthusiastic advocacy of another. It was an irresistibly seductive all-purpose formula: what hadn’t been said about Hitler could be quietly forgotten, along with everything that had been said about Stalin. In France, the proliferating varieties of post-modern theoretical hocus-pocus thus added up to a get-out clause from the contract of history, which could itself – the penultimate breakthrough – be regarded as a text, a set of arbitrary interpretations imposed on reality. The ultimate breakthrough was the discovery that reality didn’t even exist.

  Recent political history was enough to explain why the heirs of the Enlightenment should abdicate from experience and fall prey to a galloping case of folie raisonnante. But for the fashionable success of literary theory on a world scale the same explanation will scarcely do. Few American-born academics had any real idea of what unlimited state power looks like close up. The younger among them thought they were seeing it in General Westmoreland’s face on the cover of Time. For most of the Western world, totalitarianism was something you could safely accuse your government of allowing to happen elsewhere: you never had to accuse yourself of allowing it to happen here. It was generally true that the young academics who opted for literary theory and its related forms of scientism had been on the Left and were looking for a comfortable bolt-hole where they could either cherish their principles or quietly give them up, but a bad conscience was not the problem. On the contrary, many of them thought they were Noam Chomsky: an illusion on their part which depended on the mistaken idea that his structural linguistics was a form of literary theory too. But linguistics depends on scientific method, which can go wrong, as it did even for Einstein. Literary theorists are always right, like Cagliostro.

  The reasons for literary theory’s world-wide hit-parade status were sociological. The sociology of academia remains a largely unexplored subject which it would take a reborn Max Weber to sort out, but as a rule of thumb it can be said that in any soft option an expanding faculty, when it uses up the pool of talent, will modify the curriculum to make jobs safe for the untalented. In all its traditional forms, with the possible exception of bibliography – and even there you have to know why some books are more important than others – the study of literature requires sensitivity to literature. Literary theory requires no sensitivity to literature whatsoever. Nobody who teaches it can fail. In a country like Australia, which has a powerful egalitarian tradition, this consideration was bound to make literary theory popular, and it got a long way before a sense of the ridiculous set in. One of the nice things about Australia is that it always does, eventually: mainly because a great deal of reading gets done by ordinary citizens, who have keen antennae for the self-intoxicated flimflam of a cultural salariat.

  2001

  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 elaborat
e 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-a-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.

  The answer to the question is yes: just. Leaving his overall interpretation of them aside, the raw data are of such high interest that they inspire even the author to the occasional passage of pertinent reflection, some of it his own. He names the names of those Australians who came to London when that was still the thing to do. After World War II the tendency for the painters who went away to stay away became ingrained. Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Charles Blackman all made a life in England, even when their imaginative subject matter was drawn either from their memories of Australia or from the visits home they could make more frequently as they prospered. Alomes gives details of which painters resettled in Australia later in their careers, or else merely appeared to while maintaining their British base, and of whether their work was regarded as Australian-based or international. He occupies himself with the questions of domicile and national loyalty as if his subjects thought about these things then as hard as he does now. What seldom strikes him is the possibility that to stop thinking about such matters might have been one of the reasons they took off in the first place.

  If Alomes had widened the scope of his book to include other destinations besides London, he would have had to deal, among the painters, with the problem posed by Jeffrey Smart, who, at the height of his long career, not only remains a resident of Tuscany but rarely paints an Australian subject even from memory. Smart had a clear and simple reason, freely admitted in his autobiography, for leaving Australia half a century ago. As an active homosexual, he had a good chance of being locked up. But his other reasons are of more lasting interest, and one of them was that he had no personal commitment to a national school of painting that depended on Australian subject matter. He knew everything about what the national painters had achieved, but he saw them in an international context. In short, he wasn’t interested in nationalism.

  The same can be applied to the musical luminaries here listed: Richard Bonynge, June Bronhill, Charles Mackerras, Malcolm Williamson, Yvonne Minton, Joan Sutherland and so, gloriously, on. Alomes flirts with the idea that the performing artists – the instrumentalists especially – might have hindered the development of Australian music by leaving, but he doesn’t follow up on the possibility that by raising the prestige of Australian music throughout the world they might have helped more than they hindered, simply by making a musical career seem that much more exciting to a new entrant. Post-war, the arrival of Sir Eugene Goossens raised the level of Australian orchestral music, but the departure of Joan Sutherland made Australia a planetary force in grand opera – like the extra shrimp that Paul Hogan later threw on the barbie, Our Joan’s impact on Covent Garden resonated throughout the world.

  The resonance reached Australia itself: when the winner of the Sun Aria Contest set out for England, she sailed on a ship that launched a thousand sopranos. The effect that the international prestige of our expatriates had on aspiring artists in their homeland is a big subject for our author to pay so little attention to. But he pays no attention at all to an even bigger subject. He notes that the prima donna assoluta got a rapturous reception on her 1965 homecoming tour but neglects to mention that her every record album was received with the same enthusiasm – quietly, in thousands of middle-class households. Throughout the book, he takes it for granted that the expatriate artists ran the risk of being out of touch with an Australian audience: not even once does he consider that they might have been in touch with an Australian audience in the most intimate possible way – through their art. He is keener to treat the whole phenomenon of expatriation as if it had a terminus a quo in the old colonial feelings of inferiority and a terminus ad quem in the now imminent attainment of independent nationhood: because the stage at home was too small, gifted people needed to leave, and now that it isn’t, they needn’t. But the Sydney Opera House was already built when Joan Sutherland repatriated herself as a resident star, and although she was congratulated by music lovers for choosing to spend the last part of her career at home, she also had to cope with the patronizing opinion that her career must have been over, or she wouldn’t have come back. She also faced persistent questioning – of whose impertinence Alomes seems not to be aware – about why she was not in favour of an Australian Republic. Nostalgia for Switzerland must have been hard to quell.

  On the continuing problem of how a successful expatriate can make a return without being thought to have failed, Alomes could have been more searching, but at least he mentions it. The the
atrical expatriates have always suffered from it most. They are all here, starting with Robert Helpmann before the war, and going on through Peter Finch, Bill Kerr, Leo McKern, Diane Cilento, Michael Blakemore, John Bluthal, Barry Humphries and Keith Michell. Michell is usefully quoted as telling a journalist ‘the trouble is, when you go home, everybody says you’re on the skids’. This is a handily short version of a Barry Humphries off-stage routine that he has been known to deliver to anyone except a journalist. Humphries relates that when he stepped off the plane on one of his early trips home, a representative of the local media asked him how long he planned to stay. When Humphries explained that he was back only for a few days, he was asked ‘Why? Aren’t we good enough for you?’ For his next trip, he armed himself with a more diplomatic answer to the same question. When he said that this time he might be back for quite a while, he was asked ‘Why? Couldn’t you make it over there?’