The Simplest Words

by Alex Miller

  Ruth and Max Blatt

  The book Max gave me that evening was The God that Failed: Six Studies in Communism (1950). The first three contributors are all ex-Communists and novelists who were once deeply committed to the ideals and aims of the Communist International. The other three—Andre Gide, Louis Fischer and the English poet Stephen Spender—were either briefly members of the party or were at one time deeply sympathetic to its aims. All of them, except the journalist Louis Fischer, also wrote novels. They were people intent on bringing about cultural change of a heroic order against the forces of evil. I don’t remember what my reaction to the book was at the time except that, having read it, I was left with a persisting sense of its importance and it has remained on my shelves ever since. Max also gave me at that time Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation. It was clear to me that these novels represented Max’s idea of the serious novel. I still have them. It wasn’t until I recently decided to write an autobiographical work in order to further explore my friendship with Max Blatt, and hopefully to celebrate something of his life and his enduring influence on my writing, that I took down The God that Failed and reread it.

  Almost at once I was reminded of Max’s conviction that the novelist carries a responsibility to his or her culture and society to seek after the truth of our individual and social existence and to offer critical insight into the moral and ideological dimensions of our lives, and does not owe his or her allegiance to the forces of the marketplace. Max’s idea of the seriousness of the task of the novelist met in me one of my deepest longings and his influence was profound and remains with me to this day. Without his influence I would not have been the novelist I have been. He set the bar high and I have never reached it, but I have aimed for it. Max was convinced that, in order to be properly equipped for his or her task, the novelist must know history, not only to have a sense of the origins of culture but also in order to be in a position to question history’s assumptions and conclusions and the claims of politicians. Rereading The God that Failed I wondered why so many of these committed intellectuals, all of whom had also been activists—even Gide, momentarily—had chosen also to write novels. The answer to this was in Max’s conviction, a conviction of his youth, that the novelist’s work must be a reliable guide to society. By this he meant that we must be able to trust the work of the novelist just as we expect to trust the work of the historian or the biographer. He didn’t say we had to agree with any of them, only that we must be able to trust them. To differ with works and with the opinions of friends without arousing enmity is one of the great gifts of what I think of as true friendship, and is also necessary if productive conversations are to take place between disciplines and individuals. This was one of the wonderful conditions of my friendship with Max Blatt. We disagreed often but always respected each other. Such respect is the medium through which we are enabled to learn from each other, rather than simply try to convince the other of the rightness of our own position.

  The vital connection for me with the idea of the reliability of the novel and of the influence not only of The God that Failed but of Max Blatt’s idea of what it meant to be a novelist became clearer to me once again the moment I reread, after fifty years, this beautiful passage in Ignazio Silone’s untitled essay:

  As for the difficulties and imperfections of self-expression with which I sometimes have to wrestle, they arise, not from lack of observation of the rules of good writing, but rather from a conscience which, while struggling to heal certain hidden and perhaps incurable wounds, continues obstinately to demand that its integrity be respected. For to be sincere is obviously not enough, if one wants to be truthful.

  Silone and Max belonged to the same scattered diaspora of non-aligned ex-Communists. These idealists wrote novels because they believed the form of the novel was a noble thing and could be trusted.

  How do we begin to measure the reliability of a novel? One way, and I believe it is a good way, is whether the people the novel claims to be about recognise themselves in it. If a writer from another country comes to Australia and writes about us and our times, we expect to be able to recognise ourselves and our environment in the work. We might not agree with or like the work, but we should be able to see that its portrait of us is authentic. When the authenticity of our work is celebrated by those we have written about, we know we have been trustworthy at least to that extent. This is one measure of our seriousness. Just as there are no absolute objective values by which to measure the universe, because it is constantly in motion, so there are no absolute objective values by which we can measure the trustworthiness of history or the novel or of biography. But there are a number of soundings we can make, a number of tests we can apply that are not entirely subjective. But we can’t be either proscriptive or prescriptive about these. For in the end, as Silone rightly says, ‘Anyone who has reflected seriously about himself or others knows how profoundly secret are certain decisions and how mysterious and unaccountable are certain vocations.’

  As a boy of fourteen I trusted Fred Hoyle. That trust was important. I’ve published eleven of the fourteen novels I’ve written. The greatest satisfaction for me has been when those whom I have written about have celebrated the novels in which they appear, or when intellectuals and readers in the country whose society and history has come under examination in my work, such as China, Tunisia, France, the country of the Jangga and the Barada Barna or the suburbs of Melbourne, have celebrated the work. This has been poignantly true for me with Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell, which are both books written about dearly loved friends that would not have been published if these friends had not approved of them at the manuscript stage. It is also true in a national sense with the celebration in China of my novel The Ancestor Game. The writer can strive to maintain a level of authenticity for their work, but in the end they can’t be the judge of whether what they have done can be trusted or not, any more than a historian can be the judge of the trustworthiness of his or her work. Despite his enormous ambition to get it right, the critical and popular fate of Manning Clark’s passionately debated six-volume History of Australia is a devastating example of history needing to be written again by the generation that follows.

  Historiography, however, which we’ve only come to know in its secular form since the mid-nineteenth century, shares with the exact sciences today a quality not shared with the novel. The novel, and art generally—and this is also true of philosophy—does not progress or get better but merely changes. Historiography, however, has become more reliable with new methodologies and new systems for retrieving and examining the record in greater objective detail than was once possible. History is objectively more reliable today than it was, for example, when I was at university in the sixties. The novel, on the other hand, in common with all the arts, changes its content, its style and its focus and the cultural sources of its inspiration, but it does not become more reliable. We don’t get better at novel-writing. The arts don’t progress in quality, but move with their times and reflect cultural change, as in the case of Kim Scott and Alexis Wright. We are not more reliable as novelists today than we were in Tolstoy’s or George Eliot’s time. We are merely different. And, in fact, not all that different, despite the cry to make it new.

  I’ve had great joy from writing novels. But now I need to obey the rule of the necessity for change and have taken on a new challenge. This need to take a critical look at what I’ve been doing with my life possibly has something to do with Socrates’s remark that an unexamined life has not been worth living. I have begun to write what I hope can become a celebration of the tragic beauty of Max Blatt’s life and of our friendship. The ocean of my ignorance, I soon found, is far deeper and broader than the island of my knowing. In reflecting on my own history I am aware of the paradox that I am going into a largely unknown landscape along a road I have never travelled before. It has also become clear to me that recollection is itself fiction. It was Derrida
who warned us to be aware that the scandalous infidelity of memory makes no distinction between fact and fiction but endorses both equally as unlimited categories of the human imagination. In making these remarks about cultural change and the novel I’m happy to give the last word to a beautiful phrase of that much-maligned thinker Georg Lukacs: ‘… everything that falls from our weary and despairing hands must always be incomplete’. It is a sentiment both the astronomer Fred Hoyle and the cultural leader Frank Budby agreed with.

  Frank Budby

  2014

  Prophets of the Imagination

  In the beginning was space, this mysterious, intellectually incomprehensible invention.

  Max Beckmann

  ‘… we like to be among strangers.’ She looked out the window. ‘To be anonymous is what we most want, not to be known. Secretly we want to be solitary. We can’t stand having people know who we are. It terrifies us.’ She turned from contemplating the street. ‘I love feeling lost and alone in the city. The city is our natural place. We need it. I fear more than anything being lost and alone in the bush. Out there we’re confronted with ourselves. In the bush there’s no escape from who we are or from each other. We pretend to love the wilderness, but we hate the thought of it really.’

  So says Marina Golding, a contemporary non-Indigenous Melbourne artist and one of the principal characters in my new novel, Prochownik’s Dream. In real life Marina is intense, honest, a gifted artist and an intellectual. The evidence for the truth of Marina’s opinion is overwhelming. Australia is the most urbanised country in the world, and except for a handful of notable tourist destinations the hinterland of the continent remains unvisited and unknown to most people who live here.

  The idea of the outback has been largely replaced for this generation of educated Australians by the less specifically Australian and more global idea of wilderness. In the old view of the hinterland as outback it was the survival of the human individual that was challenged. But in landscape as wilderness this perception has been reversed, and it is the landscape itself that is seen to be fragile and at risk from human intervention. The landscape itself, the space that is being referred to, has not changed. Whether we find ourselves in the outback or in the wilderness these days depends on our style of thinking. But undoubtedly for the great majority of Australians, for those millions who live and work in the great coastal cities such as Sydney and Melbourne, the outback is little more than a marketing term of the travel industry.

  It was unequivocally the Australian outback in its former sense, however, that notion of a vast frontier hinterland where a heroic striving of the human spirit was required from the individual, that took me to Australia from England half a century ago. I was sixteen when I set out alone from a farm in the West Country of England to travel to the Australian outback. I did not think of myself then as a migrant but as an adventurer. In my heart I knew myself to be on a quest. My decision to go to Australia was not governed by the desire to better myself. I was not going to the land of opportunity. The usual reasons in those days why people of my kind went from England to Australia did not interest me. The benefits I hoped for from my journey to the outback were not tangible. I went because I longed to find a culture in which the values of the fabled heroic age of my own ancestors still possessed some currency. The Australian outback seemed to me to be the one place left in the world where I might fulfil this romantic dream of my youth. My good friend, the biographer Hazel Rowley, said to me when she first heard my story: ‘You seem to be tremendously haunted by landscape. Space,’ she said, ‘is clearly tremendously important for you.’

  When I set out on my journey, my knowledge of the Australian outback was limited to one small black-and-white photograph that I had seen by the light of an oil lamp in the kitchen of the Exmoor farm labourer with whom I lived. One of the photographs in the book, the details of which have remained vivid to me, was of a group of stockmen lounging in the shade of a low verandah and gazing out at the landscape. Except for the silhouette of a dead tree in the middle distance, the flat landscape the stockmen are contemplating is featureless space. It is as if they are waiting for a sign or a sound, a signal of some kind that will relieve the tension of their expectation.

  When I got off the boat in Sydney I walked north along the highway carrying my suitcase. A truck driver took me to Queensland and got me a job with a mate of his at Gympie. Although there were stockmen and cattle among the dairy cows, the lush coastal district was not the outback. So the Gympie farmer, who wished to help me in my quest, introduced me to another mate at the Australian Estates office in town and they found a job for me as a stockman on a cattle station in the Central Highlands of Queensland. ‘That’s the outback, mate,’ they assured me confidently. But in the Central Highlands there were mountains and flowing rivers and well-grassed forests of great ironbarks, and there were frosts in the morning and wildflowers and ferns and towering escarpments and ravines that glowed with an ochre light in the setting sun. And when I mentioned the outback the locals shook their heads and pointed to the west and the north and told me, ‘This is not the outback, mate. She’s way out there.’ I was beginning to learn that the outback was not so much an actual place as an idea in people’s minds. I stayed in the Central Highlands for two years. They were generous, kindly, emotional people and their country was spectacular and exotic. But I still dreamed of the stockmen in the photograph and the austere solitude of their heroic persistence in that remote, expectant landscape of the outback. And I knew that sooner or later I would be resuming my journey. In my dream the stockmen still lounged on the verandah, gazing at the empty horizon, waiting for a sign. Their appeal for me was irresistible. They had already become the tragic heroes of my own personal mythmaking.

  The station owner for whom I worked on the Central Highlands cattle station understood my yearning and he contacted his old mate, the manager of a vast cattle run on the Leichhardt River in the remote Gulf of Carpentaria. ‘That’s the fair dinkum outback, Alex,’ he assured me. ‘You won’t see any fences up there.’ So I said goodbye to this family who had treated me like a son and I took the train east from Springsure to Rockhampton on the coast—the beef cattle capital of Australia, where the train still steamed down the main street—and from Rockhampton I took another train north along the coast to Townsville. From Townsville a slow train carried me west at last across the mysterious landscape of the anthill plains to Cloncurry, the last town on the line. I had come a long way from the farm on Exmoor. But had I reached the outback?

  In the dusty main street of Cloncurry I caught a ride with the mail coach and rode the load the three hundred miles north through the bulldust to Augustus Downs Station. There was no road and for the most part the driver picked his way along the dry bed of the Leichhardt River. At the station the manager drove me thirty miles or more out to the ringers’ camp and left me there. The camp was on a bare claypan in the lancewood scrub on the bank of a long waterhole. A settlement consisting of a canvas fly and various items of kitchen equipment. I thought the place deserted until I found a man sleeping under a mosquito net on a bunk in the shade of the fly, a radio faintly playing country and western music close beside his ear. I did not disturb him but hung about until evening was coming on.

  Thirty horsemen rode into the camp, appearing out of the long shadows of the timber and forming a semi-circle around me almost before I had detected their approach. I stood alone out in the clearing, and they looked down at me from the backs of their horses as if I were a curiosity. They wore wide-brimmed hats and spurs, their long hair flowing around their shoulders and their clothes and horses powdered with dust. No one spoke. I recognised them at once as belonging to the same caste as those stockmen on the verandah in Nolan’s photograph. These were the legendary stockmen of the great northern cattle runs, men of the local Aboriginal tribe still dwelling in their own country.

  Once again I stayed two years, living and working with these men in their tribal country. Then, to satisfy
another urge, I left the Gulf and went south to Melbourne and enrolled at the university. I believed I had known the heroic comradeship of the outback with these black Queensland ringers during those two seasons in the cattle camps, and I cherished the memory as something to be understood by only a few. Forty years later I visited a friend in Townsville, Liz Hatte, and met her partner, Col McLennan. Col might have been one of the Queensland ringers I had known forty years earlier. He was a Jangga elder now, a consultant on the culture and lore of his clan. We reminisced about the old days of the great itinerant cattle camps that had roamed the vast grasslands out west in the days before the granting of equal pay.1 Col said to me, ‘You’ll write a book about all this one day, old mate.’ I said I had no plan to do that, but he seemed to know better, and a year later when I told him I was going to write the book he had spoken of, he offered to show me his country.