Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  It expressed the common feeling that conferences are ‘pretentious’ and that intellectual life in Australia is, of course, ‘limited’.

  I often find people in Australia who do not believe that there is such a thing as an intellectual or an intellectual way of life. It is impossible to use the word intelligentsia without explanation. I use it to describe those actively involved in forming public opinion.

  But for some people there are only ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ and trendies. It is the attitude which comes from an oppressive egalitarianism and a refusal to grant credit to anything beyond a person’s own understanding, a refusal by some people to concede limits to their under standing which other people might not have. It is a refusal to recognise the possibility of a tutored sensibility. At best, this attitude is healthy scepticism and is a defence against the ‘bullshit artist’. It is also a correct attitude in so far as it refuses to concede that a person ‘who knows more’ is a superior type of human.

  But at its worst and most common form, it is anti-intellectual and anti-art.

  I am for conferences, however imperfect they are as a human activity.

  Conference-ville was about the imperfections and discomfort of the intellectual life.

  Conference Tactics – Writers at a Conference

  (adapted, from Social Alternatives, November 1978)

  Q. You attend many conferences but I believe you recently attended Writers’ Week in Adelaide – the most important writers’ conference held in Australia. How did it measure up, as a conference?

  A. Outstanding. It included a few collector’s items.

  Q. Did anyone in particular stand out as a conference-goer?

  A. Oh yes – of course, there are many categories in which I award points – but at this conference above all, I rate Michael Wilding, a Sydney novelist and publisher.

  Q. In what way did he stand out?

  A. Michael pulled off two of the most difficult conference manoeuvres I know – only very experienced conference-goers should ever try them.

  Q. I’m intrigued. What are these two manoeuvres?

  A. The two manoeuvres I have in mind are the high Low Profile and the Premature Departure.

  Q. Could you explain?

  A. Well, there are four or five ways to participate in a conference effectively – that is, to be noticed and remembered. They include high Low Profile, High Profile, Premature Departure, Not Turning Up, and so on. One way of achieving High Profile is to make trouble. But what Michael did was to remain uncharacteristically silent and brooding. If you can get people to notice that you are remaining silent, we call that high Low Profile. If you can’t brood well, try remaining silent but write notes furiously. It excites gossip and speculation. A number of people very early in the conference said to me, ‘Michael’s very quiet’ and ‘What’s eating Michael?’ I knew then I was witnessing a perfectly executed high Low Profile manoeuvre. People wonder, for instance, whether the Low Profile is an implied criticism of the other conference-goers: is Michael saying ‘I can’t be bothered with this’? Maybe what we call the level of the conference was below him, and so on. It’s a good manoeuvre if you have nothing to say. But if you make just one contribution it is spoiled.

  Q. What is this about Premature Departure?

  A. Oh yes. Premature Departure is a tricky manoeuvre too but again Michael did it superbly. If this is done properly you get people to talk about you when you are, in fact, not at the conference. Everyone told me Michael had left the conference. He went home midway through. This excites gossip and speculation. Some say, for instance, that he was threatened with violence; some say a bomb threat was made.

  Q. Why is this difficult to do, this Premature Departure?

  A. You must leave just at the right time and you must have been noticed before you leave. If you leave too early people will not notice that you’ve even arrived. You can see that combining high Low Profile with Premature Departure requires great skill. Leaving prematurely can be done quietly in the dead of night, leaving bills unpaid, which excites useful scandal, or it can be done by sitting near a pile of luggage in the conference hotel lobby for a few hours until everyone has seen you departing.

  But if it’s done well it’s as good as the manoeuvre of Not Turning Up.

  Q. What is the manoeuvre of Not Turning Up?

  A. Oh, that is where you agree to come but fail to arrive and have people say ‘So-and-so has not turned up’. By doing this you put across the message that you have been invited but that something Even More Important has kept you away.

  Q. Could you give an example?

  A. Two years ago three American writers, including Tennessee Williams, used the manoeuvre. They said they were coming, received advance publicity, and then Didn’t Turn Up. It allows you to be a name on people’s lips without having to go to the conference. I learned about Not Turning Up from a conference a couple of years ago. Peter Coleman, then editor of Quadrant, later, for a time, leader of the NSW Opposition, and I didn’t turn up at a conference. I was sick; I don’t know why Peter didn’t turn up, but for some time after that conference people said to me, ‘You and Peter Coleman were the only two who didn’t turn up.’ What happens is that your conference satchel and name tag usually lie on a table in the conference centre for days and people look them over to see who Didn’t Turn Up. The nearest we had this time was the poet Les A. Murray, who was rumoured to have Refused To Come. But that is something else again.

  Q. Does anyone else stand out in performance at this conference?

  A. Yes, but in another category, I’m always interested in Phantom Speakers. Conferences have Hidden Agendas, Secret Themes and Phantom Speakers. A Phantom Speaker sometimes looks like a Question from the Floor but is in fact giving you a paper that he or she was not asked to give. Over five days of a conference a good Phantom Speaker can get across about thirty minutes of material concealed as something else; a few Phantom Speakers in conspiracy can intro duce Hidden Agendas and Secret Themes. One of the chief obstacles to Phantom Speakers is, of course, the relevancy rule. I saw a classic manoeuvre by Vincent Serventy at the Writers’ Week to get around the relevancy rule.

  The discussion was on the mass media and, in particular, the feared demise of the magazine Nation Review and its possible re-birth as a magazine to be called the Ferret. Vincent rose to his feet from the audience and said that the magazine shouldn’t be called the Ferret; it was unnationalistic. The ferret was an imported animal. Vincent said it should be named after an indigenous animal with the same characteristics and he named a few. He then moved on to talk about conservation and wildlife and the discussion never returned to mass media. A remarkable diversion. I nearly rose to my feet and applauded.

  Q. What do you look for when you first arrive at a conference?

  A. The first thing I look for at a conference is Trouble. Where is the Trouble going to come from? I don’t mind Trouble. It usually brings out what the conference is really about. The Hidden Agenda.

  Q. Was there Trouble at Writers’ Week?

  A. I didn’t pick it at first, but yes. I thought the newly formed Poets’ Union might boycott, demonstrate, heckle, but they were quiet. I also kept an eye on the radical women’s movement, the radical lesbians – they can often throw a good spanner into the works. They’re good at Trouble. But because you’ve seen one sort of trouble at another conference doesn’t mean you can pick it the next time. I’ve seen communist trouble, anti-communist trouble, nazis, anti-elitists, the Festival of Light – you name it.

  Q. And this time?

  A. This time the Trouble came from the Oral Poets.

  Q. Oral Poets?

  A. Oral Poets believe that verse should be spoken or read and that it is corrupted by printing it on the page – by separating it from the voice and body language of the poet. I didn’t pick them. You can see that they had much to object to. Any reference to ‘Poetry’ on the printed page or to the ‘problems of being published’ was anathema to them. They b
ooed and hissed. This was very exciting for me; I hadn’t struck this sort of Trouble before.

  Q. What else do you look for at a conference?

  A. Well, closely associated with Trouble is the Assassinating Allegation.

  Q. What is an Assassinating Allegation?

  A. Every conference has its Assassinating Allegation. It is an allegation, usually connected with a prevailing ideological fashion, which is meant to devastate an opponent, to put an opponent off the chess board. This time, being a writers’ conference, the assassinating words belonged to faction-fighting within literature. The words were ‘incestuous’ and ‘masturbatory’. People were accused of writing masturbatory verse or belonging to an incestuous group (Balmain, for instance). The implication was that you didn’t have a bona fide audience for your work, and other things about what is appropriate subject matter, appeal and so on. You only had to utter these words to destroy someone.

  Q. Could you give examples from other conferences?

  A. Yes. ‘Elitist’ has had a good run. You had only to shout ‘that’s elitist’ for a while to kill off a line of argument. The word ‘sexist’ is still strong. At my first conference, in 1959, a Communist Party peace conference, the assassinating allegation was to call something ‘divisive’ – certain proposals or lines of debate were stopped because they were, in the chairperson’s opinion, ‘divisive’, likely to create disagreement. This contrasts absolutely with those who feel that a good conference is one where there is ‘blood on the floor’.

  Q. What about speakers? What showed up there?

  A. Oh the usual manoeuvres. Speakers who begin by saying ‘I haven’t had much time to prepare’. Those who say they finished their paper on the plane or last night in the motel. These sorts of remarks are in fact apologetic boasts. They say a number of things to an audience: I am a talented person who can work anywhere, under any conditions, on aircraft, in motel rooms; or, please don’t judge this paper too critically because it was finished under difficult conditions (this can be a way of lowering expectations) – but most of all, it has what the Italians call sprezzatura – the suggestion of effortless skill – the suggestion that you can dash off masterpieces. This suits some Australians who have a suspicion of swots, ‘conchies’, people who work hard for their effect.

  Q. Of course, guest speakers can be irrelevant too …

  A. Yes, they especially like to jettison the given title of a paper so that they can talk about something else. The English playwright Tom Stoppard says that you can determine who comes to hear a paper by carefully wording the title. ‘Give a paper a classy title,’ he says, ‘and you’ll get a classy audience.’ Stephen Knight from the University of Sydney, on the other hand, told me that he once wrote a paper on film criticism simply to use a title he’d thought up – ‘The Ealing Power of Humour’.

  There are speakers who come along to a conference to bury a word. This happened at Writers’ Week. Melbourne poet Vincent Buckley came to bury a word or two. The speaker will usually say ‘I think it’s about time we stopped using such-and-such a word’. Or that such-and-such a word is over-used. They’re always tidying the language. Vincent said it was time we stopped using the words ‘confessional’ and ‘persona’ in literary criticism. I don’t know where they bury them. Some people, on the other hand, introduce new words to a conference. Or the conference will seize on a word and befriend it. At one conference the word ‘holistic’ was seized on and appeared in discussion and conversation over and over again.

  Q. What about social issues? At Writers’ Week?

  A. The poets still hate psychiatry, take-away food, muzak, the hours that bank clerks work, anything connected with cars like expressways or parking lots, and they hate hypocrisy.

  They still love herons, most birds, unicorns, river rocks, ivory, islands, grains of sand, jetties, tinkers and gypsies.

  Q. To end up, do you have any advice for the humble conference-goer, the simple participant?

  A. Conference-going is something one learns, but yet I think there is one thing to remember.

  One of the serious conference anxieties for a new conference-goer is the fear of being seen eating alone in public. This risk is obvious, you will be considered unimportant; you could be thought to not know anyone and therefore useless for introductions to important people; you could be accused of not mixing, or give the impression that you are thoroughly bad company. If you must eat alone, never read a book. If you are alone, write, but do not read. Write, even if it is only a letter to your mother. If you are alone and writing, your fellow conference goers will think that you are either working on a paper, meeting a publisher’s deadline, or perhaps drafting a key motion. Best of all, take a small portable typewriter to the restaurant. That’s a good way to start a high Low Profile. Also if you want to be alone, this stops people joining you.

  Q. We must finish up now.

  A. I was going to tell you about how to avoid admitting you haven’t read a certain book. Academics hate admitting they haven’t read something. If someone gives a paper and another academic gets up in discussion and says ‘You don’t mention the work of X’, the person who gave the paper will usually say ‘Naturally I had to restrict my reading’, or ‘That falls outside the scope of this paper’, or ‘Yes, I’m familiar with his work’. Being familiar with someone’s work means that somehow you know all about it without having read it, maybe by putting it under your pillow at night. Academics are never ‘reading’ a book; they are always ‘re-reading’ it.

  Q. Thank you, but we must finish up now, time’s up.

  Teddy Bears’ Picnic – Political Economists at a Conference

  Frank Campbell

  (abridged, from Arena, 43/1976)

  My attendance at barely ten of the forty-odd papers of a conference isn’t the best guarantee of a well-based commentary on such a compressed binge of words, there being six or eight papers per session, but generalisations can be made with degrees of confidence.

  Numerically, the conference was an embarrassing success, with over 1500 persons not only paying up, but turning up over the three days. The organisation held up well, in spite of such Left conscience-crises as diffident doormen struggling with the morals and politics of asking to see tickets. By the time these conflicts resolved themselves, the potential gatecrashers were seated.

  Faced with a barrage of names, I opted to hear the big ones – the quaintly termed ‘internationals’ – Bowles, Gintis, Gough and Nell, and the non-internationals Wheelwright and Connell.

  Wheelwright’s address was an amiable ramble through the nodding heads of the physiocrats, neoclassicists, etc., interspersed with heavy jibes at his oppressors in the Economics Department. Though it was about introductory lecture level, it wouldn’t have mattered if Teddy had gargled for half an hour, as the audience was completely his.

  But Ted at least had his Whitlamesque flair, which the dull and finally repetitive pedagogues Gough and Bowles lacked; the former inaudible, the latter mechanical. Gintis was voluble in a Mick Jaggerish way, while Connell, whose polite manner belied his threatening Rockerish appearance (the suppressed menace of the long cocked leg, embossed two-tone calf-length leather boots and ethnic belt, black stove-pipe pants …), looked like the Professor from the Olympic Village or as one Macquarie wit said, ‘O’Toole playing Jack Kerouac’. Against the odds the soft voice won over the nervous audience; they even became restive at his unwillingness to sink in the cortical bovver boot when asked, for example:

  Q. ‘Why are so many workers apparently middle class?’

  A. ‘Uuummmm, I don’t know … (walks away)… there are a lot of angles on that.’

  For all these points of style, Connell was one of the few speakers who at least attempted a synthesis of the (mainly political) simplicities and the (mainly economic) unassimilable abstractions.

  This criticism was the reaction not merely of sociologists, but students, Labor Party officials, academics and the one or two unionists that I found. It se
ems that they wanted comprehensible accounts of the relations between super-structural and economic elements in society. Gintis, Bowles and Connell gave it a whirl, but most others fell heavily on either side.

  Many of the simplicities were banalities. D. Bhattacharya’s final remark after his paper on the ‘Economic Development of India and China’ was: ‘In Russia, China and Cuba it is impossible for the masses to suffer, because they control the means of production.’ His 300 listeners gave him a warm round of applause. Come to think of it, his account of China’s economic superiority over India omitted most available evidence in spite of the (now mandatory) opening statement ‘I am not a Maoist’.

  The audiences were occasionally prone to similar effervescences. One quivering anarchist shrieked into the microphone that the masses were heinously oppressed ‘everywhere, in China, Russia, Poland, England, the United States, Nigeria …’ People around added Paddington and Tasmania.

  That piece of rebellion was atypical. The audiences were uncritical, showed a rather humourless lack of discrimination, applauding the simplicities because everyone’s heart was in the right place and the abstractions because they must be right.

  A feature of every reasonably stationary Left gathering is the Left sects who have more trestles than the CWA. A thin coating of books and pamphlets, with a brooding cadre sitting in a camp chair – the image is of a failing Lebanese stallholder. The ‘organisers’ of these groups wandered uncommunicatively among the academics and students, the latter seeming to regard them rather as Anglicans view Fundamentalists, with a mixture of guilt and hollow praise. The groups, on the other hand, as far as one could discover, thought of the academics and students as soft and evasive. Questions to stallholders or paper-sellers were likely to become conversations of dogged pursuit; one bearded face I recognised from a beaming electoral poster (in Dixon Street of all places) was asked: ‘What do you stand for?’ and replied: ‘Russia is a degenerate workers’ state but nevertheless should be defended …’