The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  He was the straight and continent man to Woody Guthrie’s tempestuous, tormented – and tormenting – short existence, and the carrier of much of his memory to new generations. He was part of a vast undertaking, a movement as wide as the century, and his name stands for thousands less well known, or not at all. But he was also a leader, a regrouper, someone who pulled people together and sent things in a certain direction.

  In the ’40s, he organised the Almanac Singers, and then the Weavers, groups that took folk into the mainstream. Much of that music, smoothed out for commercial use, seems anodyne today – the Seekers, as the name maybe suggests, were pretty much a mildly rocked-up copy of the Weavers – but it introduced folk into the bloodstream of American culture. The Weavers’ reunion concert at Carnegie Hall in 1955 – after they had been blacklisted from TV and radio for several years – and the album that came from it marks the start of the folk boom that would explode in, and in part shape, the ’60s.

  But Seeger was as much an activist pure and simple as a musician who did benefit gigs. His politics were initially hard-Left. Coming from a prosperous liberal family – he was at that North Carolina square dance because his father was taping the music there, in the manner of many at a time when genuine folk cultures were falling victim to highways, cities and radio – he went into the Communist Party in the late ’30s, at a time when Communism seemed to many to be the only movement capable of resisting Fascism. That he stayed it in through its peregrinations in the ’40s – playing anti-war songs in the period of the Nazi–Soviet pact, and then Leftist patriotic ones after the USSR was invaded – was something he would later be rueful about. His seven years or so with the party will doubtless form the nub of much right-wing commentary. But retrospect is kind. Just as everyone who does past-life regression discovers themselves to be Cleopatra or Caesar, everyone who judges decades past imagines they would have been Orwell. Since there was only one of him, and not many more others like him, it is a rather self-serving delusion.

  Feted in the anti-Fascist ’40s, Seeger rapidly became a target of the blacklist. The process was altogether more brutal than it is often represented to be, since the intent was not merely to bar people from media access, but also to deny them employment and destroy them psychologically. Families were targeted, and even extended families. The numerous resulting suicides were really homicides.

  Yet many at the time bore this and other dangers – beatings, and worse, at civil rights rallies – and stayed upright, and Seeger was one of them. After being jailed for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was banned from TV and many venues until the late 1960s. He began playing at colleges, effectively sparking off the college entertainment circuit, and writing and publishing musical how-to books. In the ’50s, he and his wife, Toshi, who died last year after seventy years of marriage, built a cabin up the Hudson River and began campaigning for the clean-up of what had become an outfall pipe. Their campaign of sailing the river and raising awareness was an early model of a localised, site-specific campaign with a global message. He also created children’s music organisations for ghettoised urban kids to get to sing and play, funded by the royalties that came in from recordings that were adaptations of traditional songs.

  In that respect, as much as being a radical, he was a conserving, conservative figure – a reminder that a section of the Left, over this century, did the work that many conservatives contributed little to, allied as they were with a nihilistic modernising liberalism. We conserved the cities, the buildings, the habitats, the folk culture and the commitment to serious art that the Right were happy to see swept away by market forces. Seeger was an essential part of that, because he and others saw the way in which the disappearance of a folk culture – dying from the late nineteenth century onwards, crowded out by an industrially produced culture – was theft, an alienation of our lives, of the immediate simplicity that such a culture offers. The effort to reintroduce it was part of a great cultural renewal in the 1960s, when we began to push back against the creation of monolithic suburbs, the destruction of living cities, the imposition of a drab and conformist lifestyle.

  Too successful, perhaps; the folk revolution changed, above all, the way we do early schooling, the songs we learnt, the stories we heard, the forms of organised play. It fused itself with a philosophical search for authenticity in a commodified world and became, through a transformed popular music, the voice of that search.

  It was inevitable that that would come to be the thing we would flee from, whether through Bob Dylan’s turn to electric music or the punk rendering in which the authentic was necessarily the pessimistic – or now, through our simple distancing from it, via a movie like Inside Llewyn Davis, which treats the era that Seeger helped create as one as distant as the Pharaohs. But by now, the historical work of its content has been done. We regained a dimension of life we had lost, even if endless primary school singalongs or Sesame Street rejigs make it impossible to now hear the rawness and exuberance that ‘If I Had a Hammer’ or ‘Guantanamera’ had on first hearing, among the lush and overproduced lounge music of the’50s.

  Seeger was dubbed ‘Mr Saint’ by those around him. Unquestionably, it was not a simple compliment, but neither was it purely sarcastic. He left the Weavers when they decided to do a cigarette commercial; he donated his fees on ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ back to the composer, Solomon Linda, when he found out it was not a traditional song (the song’s US publishers stole the fees back again). Like many who live long and are famous in this game, he was quite possibly impossible and imperious at times, and may well have got credit due to someone else.

  The dust-bowl aesthetic he took on – never as stagily as Guthrie – was no doubt as irritating to his contemporaries as Bruce Springsteen’s born-again fauxletarianism was in the’70s. Time has elided the fact that he was the private school–educated son of a New England, New Deal family. Black-and-white film has done its work, rendering the past authentic in a way that we feel we have lost. But of course that is a little true: Seeger and Guthrie and others were not trying on a new image, they were committing to a movement and a world; that world took them on and changed them, and Seeger at least lived long enough to be part of the years when everything turned, turned. That may be an occasion for nostalgia, but it can also be one for self-renewal.

  In an era when the gains are small and the scope for change has become modest, it is easy to take refuge in a pessimism, a paranoia, an idea of permanent dissidence that aims for no more than to make known its refusal of consent. Pete Seeger’s long life reminds us to think otherwise. When he began, at the tail-end of the Depression and the beginning of a total war, black people were being hanged from trees on a harsh word, on mistaken identity, on a whim; the world was carved up into a number of European and American empires; a casual and near universal anti-Semitism girded and protected its violent and vicious expression in Germany and Eastern Europe; a woman could be sacked from her half-pay job for getting married, for kicking back against a sexual shakedown; a child could die because no one could afford the price of a doctor. In whole areas of the world now, these things do not happen, not as a matter of course, and when they do it is an exception, not a rule, and the word goes out worldwide. When a gay man is killed in Idaho or a woman pack-raped in India, a synagogue attacked or a footballer abused, there is outcry.

  Some of it, maybe much of it, is self-serving and hypocritical, or silly, or feeds a sense of self-satisfaction. Some of it is used to obscure other acts that it is inconvenient to note: the burning and bombing of mosques, for example. Some things go backwards at a rapid clip. But the world where such things could get no more than a shrug of the shoulders is fading fast to sepia. If it feels sometimes that a radical spirit has departed the place, that is because we live after a great surge towards that new time, the period from World War II to the end of the’60s, to be seen properly as a single unified period, a great social revolution.

  If it often see
ms like we missed the best of it, well, we missed the worst of it, too, both the delusional pursuits of utopia – as such things are often portrayed – and the grim choice between armed camps, as they more often were. And if it looks like the one thing we did not achieve was a greater economic equality, some sort of democratic control over the means of how we live, then it’s worth remembering how poor poverty was for many, and how threadbare of opportunity was even prosperity; if it feels like we have exchanged those limits for a plenty that is immersing us in a culture of glut, surplus, waste, atomisation and spiritual damage, well, that is the next battle to be won, the next thing to make visible. If the struggle to stop lunatics from torching the planet feels like playing on defence, it isn’t – this battle was always going to come, not simply to restrain a bunch of criminals and psychopaths, but to reassert the global ownership of the shared resources of a finite existence.

  All this is encompassed by Pete Seeger’s long life – all that, and the thousands, less well known or not at all, who worked with him, influenced him, taught him. There are times when the image of someone like Pete Seeger – standing ramrod-tall, singing defiance, before a crowd over six decades, all over YouTube – seems impossible to live up to. But the example is there, not to allow us to reproach ourselves for the time when the strength or the vision fails; it is there to encourage us to stand back up again when we have fallen or been knocked down, with as much spine as we can muster. No one can ask more of us or themselves than that; we cannot give more than that because that is all that is in our power to give.

  That is what I take from Pete Seeger’s life, and we shall overcome, someday.

  True Detective

  ‘Someone once said to me, “Time is a flat circle.”’ Leaning back in the plastic chair in the untidy interview room, the interrogatee, scrawny, mustachioed, wild-haired, is waxing philosophical to two bemused cops questioning him. ‘So Death invented time to grow the things it wanted to kill.’ ‘You boys ever heard of the M-brane universe?’

  What else could this be but True Detective, the latest greatest-ever television series from HBO, eight one-hour episodes ostensibly centred around a single crime, focused on a detective duo, Marty and Rust (Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey), one a family man, apparently uncomplicated, the other single, driven, dark. Based in the hinterland of Louisiana, a mid-range American no-space, swampy land, boxy towns, car parks, low-slung houses, trailers, broken-down gas stations, TD starts with the discovery of a murdered girl’s body, ritually arranged, antlers attached to her body, in some form of ritual killing.

  Twenty years ago, it’s the sort of murder no one would put in a TV show; now, thanks to fourteen seasons of Law and Order: SVU, it’s a commonplace, almost a little below par. What, only a ritual satanic murder in the Bayou? Will this really sustain eight hours? But TD quickly moves into a more complex mode, split across past and present – and then more than that. The story itself is coming out of the recent past, recounted by both Marty and Rust separately, in long police interviews. Maybe a decade, maybe fifteen years separates the two times.

  Marty wears a better suit, has grown chunky, having clearly ridden up the chain of command; Rust is the wildman, with the frontier hair and the powerful thirst. Something, in the interim, happened, and not just to him. What, we don’t know. We don’t know why they are being questioned, whether it relates to the case that unfolds through their recounting, or something that happened between those two events, how past/present/future connect. Soon we have more dimensions to deal with. Rust, it transpires, has joined the Louisiana PD after years undercover in Texas, an extended ‘mission’ as a drifting minor drug dealer, elements of which come roaring back into the ‘present’ of the core story. Yet at episode five, after the pair triumphantly bust a neo-Nazi meth outfit with a sideline in child rape, the story lurches forwards, six years, to the early 2000s.

  The partnership, having had years of coexistence, has started to collapse inwardly. Marty is content to work cases as they come, and maintain a fragile relationship with the wife he had humiliated by serial infidelity six years earlier; Rust has continued to pursue a line of inquiry that takes in lost children, fundamentalist preachers, swamp people, the police department and much else. But it all comes apart when Marty’s wife fucks Rust, out for revenge after Marty’s lapse into infidelity – with a woman he had tried to rescue when she was a child prostitute. They half kill each other, Rust departs, is gone for a decade, and the questioning occurs after he has returned. The story closes up, and the present becomes an excavation of the past.

  To thus summarise, and oversimplify, and omit crucial facts for the sake of those yet to see it, is, it all but goes without saying, entirely to miss the incantatory feel of the series. True Detective grows out of the Louisiana swamp like sweetgrass, a place that is in the South, but not of it, an outpost of France’s Caribbean empire, full of pirates and vodou, old, old families and long, long decline. New Orleans – the Big Easy, margaritas and cast-iron balconies – never makes an appearance. But nor do we see ever see a Starbucks or a McDonald’s. Corporate America – the wholly branded environment – never makes an appearance.

  In part that is simple verisimilitude – the rural South is so poor that whole stretches of it are devoid of the big brands that we have come to think of as the ubiquitous texture of American life (helped by product-placement funding of TV and films, which appears to be absent here). But it is also a way of creating an America that is not so much mythical – this is no story of a lost ‘real’ place – but interstitial. TD America hangs somewhere between the’70s,’80s,’90s, 2000s and now. The bars are deliciously scummy, the houses are cookie-cutter exurbia, the popular culture is the sort of stuff – Juice Newton’s hit ‘Angel of the Morning’ – that hangs around for ever on FM radio, that all but seems to have no beginning at all.

  That it is a wrecked America goes without saying. America has been wrecked for so long that the portrayal of a hopelessly fallen world, a place of fragments, is now simply the default setting. The Wire (and The Shield) spent a hundred or so hours describing an America which was a rotting shell of a once vibrant body politic – their worlds only made sense as dysfunctional successors of a once whole-world, places where cities were not ruins, and work and neighbourhood were the centre of life, crime the margins of it. SVU became a vast catalogue of big-city life as a charnel house of paedophilia, incest and rape, domesticating those crimes in the same way as crime fiction of the’20s domesticated conscienceless murder as something routine rather than a shocking measure of degeneration in a world after the death of God. Each of these series found a way to mark that decline in its storytelling – such as the moving closing scenes of the fifth season of The Wire, a long, wordless montage of a dying city waking up, its depleted docks starting work, its once-great newspaper shredded, and Breaking Bad in which the decline is the story.

  In True Detective, this wreckage is simply assumed. We never – until right at the end – see any of old Louisiana (of which there is plenty); no French Quarters, seaside towns, restored wooden mansions. The place is simply what it has been for decades: one of the poorest worst states of the US; bad housing, cracking freeways and poisoned waterways. This is how it has always been, how it will always be, the flat circle of southern decline. True Detective joins its particular field of decline – the slow winnowing of the US, through four decades following the end of the post-war boom – with the longer decline, that of a defeated slave-civilisation, dying these hundred and more years.

  TD, though by its name it appeals to the pulp tradition, is in the mainline of southern gothic, something of an understatement. With Rust, its death-driven wall-eyed obsessive sprouting Nietzsche, its erotomaniac women, its swamp people, its black mamas wit’ de vodou secrets – if it were any more Faulkner, it would have its own station on the Upfield Line. Its creator and sole author, Nick Pizzolatto, has a prize-winning volume of short stories to his name – impressive but arty, somewhere in the po
st-MFA hinterland between McCullers and McCarthy – and a neo-pulp novel Galveston, a mark of transition from high to genre fiction, i.e. from one genre to another. That makes him the first real high-culture writer to create a full TV series, and it shows.

  David Simon of Homicide and The Wire, Paul Attanasio of House, Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad – they are all first-class writers and producers, but they’re coming from pop-culture or journalistic traditions. True Detective is a repository of high-culture technique, especially in the rendering of Rust, a character who will not settle into a space on the standard grid of mass-culture character differentiation. He’s a man who has done a lot of thinking, too much, of a type that sets him apart from the people he sees around him (‘You people – you let your young be eaten as long as you got something to salute,’ he says, as he leaves the force, in 2002), but none of which has brought him a wisdom that might bring a sort of peace. His meditations fuse police procedural with a serial monologue of batty speculation about the circular nature of time, the irreducible solipsism of existence (the ‘locked room’, police slang for an interview, becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of escaping your own consciousness to a ‘real’) and how this relates to new theories of the cyclic universe, of endless Big Bangs creating and collapsing the same world over and over. Rust’s musings come with an explicit death wish – his marriage gone after their infant daughter died – and he regards a potential bullet in the head from infiltrating a bikie gang as a ‘zero risk’ option. His musings on death, suffering and life are hardly unique to mass cultural style – SVU is a psychodynamics casebook, weekly – but what makes them distinctive is their particular mix: cosmic speculations drawing in the mind-boggling world of physics with older early-twentieth-century vitalist speculations about life and death forces, eternity and time.