My Life as a Fake

by Peter Carey

  10

  I have no particular prejudice against middle-aged men, indeed I seem to collect them. However, at moments like this they become so intolerably messy. Chubb and Slater were like two dogs in a fight—deaf as posts, blood in their eyes, beyond my control. A Swissair flight crew who had been seated nearby moved into the fake pub, where presumably they would not have to endure Slater’s booming voice. As they passed us, a very pretty young air hostess raised an eyebrow as if to say, You idiot—get rid of them. It must have been comic to observe, I’m sure, a pair of codgers competing for the attention of a dowdy Englishwoman. Just the same, I had my notebook out. Although where this cheap spiral-bound article would lead us all, no-one could have foretold.

  Slater did not seem to notice the departing lovelies. The very nicest thing we could say about this prank of yours, he said, is that it misfired.

  He then stretched back, his hands behind his head, exposing the entire length of his rather well-preserved body as if he were beyond any possibility of attack. Chubb, by contrast, presumed nothing. He was like a foot soldier, a knife man. He leaned forward with his elbows resting on his shiny, worn-out knees.

  He is right, he said quietly. The hoax misfired. I wished to make a point, but only to a few. Who cares about poetry? Fifty people in Australia? Ten with minds you might respect. Once Weiss had declared my fake was a work of genius, I wished those ten people to know. That was it, Mem. I never wanted the tabloids. Who would expect the Melbourne Argus would ever be interested in poetry. This was not their business, but what a caning-lah, what a public lashing poor old Weiss was given. I could never have foreseen that.

  To be correct, old chap, Slater interrupted, you were responsible for him receiving, actually, two quite separate sets of canings.

  Cheh, cried Chubb. I know, I know. But you must understand—none of this was planned, Mem.

  You see, Mem, said Slater, mauling me ever so affectionately as he spoke, the poor bugger was prosecuted for publishing obscenities.

  Christopher? I asked. Why was he prosecuted?

  No, not him. David Weiss.

  How could I know? Chubb demanded. So boh-doh stupid. It is impossible to conceive.

  Well, old mate, you wrote the bloody poems.

  Yes, and I made damn sure that they were foolish and pretentious, but they were not obscene. You know that, John. Tell her the truth. Listen, Mem, please, let me recite just a little to you. I promise you will suffer no embarrassment. And he did so, quickly, rather plainly, in an uninflected whisper.

  Only a part of me shall triumph in this

  (I am not Pericles)

  Though I have your silken eyes to kiss

  And maiden-knees

  Part of me remains, wench, Boult-upright

  The rest of me drops off into the night.

  And that was all? I asked. Bolt upright?

  B-o-u-l-t.

  Chubb smiled. The bawd’s servant in Pericles. As a pun it makes sense, but not as a prosecution. Nothing is clear until you understand that obscenity was not the issue here.

  Very well. What was?

  He was prosecuted, Chubb said solemnly, for being a Jew.

  Oh, listen to him, Micks. You make rather a big thing about that, old chap. Take the blame yourself.

  Chubb blinked. Yes, listen. You cannot change the fact— Weiss was a Jew. If he had been ugly, it might not have mattered, but he was handsome, tall. High forehead. Thick wavy hair. A little conceited also. Am I allowed to say that? Let me tell you, he had cut a swathe through those clean-limbed girls at Melbourne University. Fresh off the beach at Portsea and Frankston. An Anglo-Saxon would have known to apologise for such extraordinary success. Not David. He was so aiksy, he would not bow and scrape and make himself a humble fellow.

  Micks, Slater told me, just remember this is reported by his enemy.

  No, no, Chubb said, I was not his enemy. Weiss’s great enemy was himself. Also the Chief Magistrate of Victoria. He had not made this opponent in the ordinary way but by having this Magistrate’s daughter fall in love with him—she was a fresher at the university—and then dumping her. Wah—so brutal. You never knew that, yes or not? There are many things you do not know, John Slater. How long in Melbourne? One week? How long in Sydney? One year? The Chief Magistrate was a member of the Melbourne Club. Do you know what that is? Three facts about that club-lah. First: stand in Little Collins Street and stare up at the high brick wall and see, on the other side, the top of a giant palm tree in the middle of a huge garden. Second: you will never be invited to stand on the other side of the wall. Third: you have a thousand times more chance than the wealthiest Jew in Toorak.

  I don’t know what Sir David Gibbons’s feelings were about the Jews or if he personally blamed Weiss for the death of Jesus Christ. His head-lah, I can’t see in there. But the man was a member of the Melbourne Club. Also—he used all his power to destroy his daughter’s former Jewish boyfriend.

  Slater, affecting boredom, was waving to the waitresses. It was dark now and a percussive sound came from the disco behind the pub, like some creature thumping its great flat tail against the earth. Chubb did not seem to notice. He leaned forward, talking, and one could still see in him the earnest schoolboy from Haberfield who dreamed of a sophisticated city where poets would argue the merits of the Great and the Good.

  How Weiss learned of his ludicrous ill fortune, he said to me, is very well known. May I tell you? Please?

  I nodded.

  Personae had a little office, he said, above a Russian restaurant in Acland Street. This office was a rendezvous— bohemians, theosophists, free-lovers, all dressed the part in corduroys. But when the cops arrived—no members present. Weiss was alone, wearing the Anglo-Saxon uniform, Fair Isle sweater, and big-bowled pipe. He could’ve worn the bloody crown of England and it would not have saved him from these gents. One of the policemen was in uniform. The real frightener was in plain clothes. I am Detective Vogelesang, et cetera, this is my colleague Sergeant Barker.

  Wah! Like the poor beast in Kafka, Weiss had not the least idea of his crime. McCorkle’s poems? Already paid for that offence. Every day he paid, repaid, public, private, without relent.

  Are you the editor of a publication named Personae? Vogelesang asked. I saw him later, Chubb said. Big, powerful blond man. Pugnacious chin and weathered face like a very pissed-off soldier-settler. He wore a pork-pie hat like he was heading to change his fortune at the trots.

  Weiss became the clever boy. Cassius Clay dancing around his enemy. He said he was the editor. He said he was not. He said Personae had a publication committee which was government over the editor. He opened a copy to show Vogelesang the masthead. He succeeded in having this copy confiscated by nifty little Barker.

  Well, are you and the committee responsible for these poems? said Vogelesang.

  Barker leafed through the magazine, fresh from the printer, then licked the lead of his pencil and began to underline certain words.

  I say, goes Weiss. You can’t do that.

  Barker could, no question.

  In the case of this McCorkle chap, said Vogelesang, who made the decision to publish?

  You want me to say I did?

  I don’t want you to say anything, sir.

  Oh, it’s me, said Weiss. What the hell.

  You wrote an introduction to the work, did you not?

  You bloody know I did.

  Did you cause it to be published?

  What is this about?

  It is in reference to the magazine Personae.

  What do you want to know?

  Are we speaking to a person responsible for its publication and distribution?

  Said Weiss, I don’t know whether I ought to answer your questions.

  Said Vogelesang, You can please yourself about that, Tuan. As for us, we have been instructed to make enquiries in connection with the provisions of the Police Act with respect to immoral or indecent publications.

  There are two headlines
that are burned into my brain, said Chubb. The first is WAR WITH GERMANY. The second, seven years later, is ‘BOB MCCORKLE’ to be prosecuted for obscenity. I was still in military hospital in Townsville. A lieutenant in the next bed was reading the Townsville Advocate. Poetry on the front page! Imagine! The photograph I recognised as one I made myself, patched together from three different men. My creature. Over six feet tall. Fantastic head, huge powerful nose and cheekbones, great forehead like the bust of Shakespeare. I had put him together with the help of my friend Tess McMahon. Chopped him up and glued him. I forget where we got the head, but the chest belonged to the famous Aussie Rules footballer Keith Guinnane. What resurrectionists we were-lah. Tess laid a sixty-five-screen stipple over it all, and the papers had to rescreen it. After that, no scars visible.

  It took a long time for me to get the Advocate from my mate and only then did I discover it was Weiss who was now to be punished for this so-called obscenity. At that point, Chubb whispered, my lovely joke was truly dead, like some pretty tree snake left smeared across the Ipoh Road.

  I looked to Slater, but he was gone, standing back against the wall joking with the waitresses. The women were in their twenties, he was sixty-two. They did not seem to notice.

  You must remember, said Chubb, how to call long distance just after the war. Trunk calls, that’s what we said at home. Adoi! Painful, you know. Very expensive. Every three minutes the operator is going: Three minutes, are you extending? Every time another two pounds and two shillings. That was the cost of a three-minute call. Two pounds and two shillings, I spent it all. Some thanks I got.

  You shit, Weiss said to me, you’ve got a nerve.

  I told him sorry. I knew why he was angry.

  I bet you do.

  Was there something I could do-lah?

  Go fuck yourself.

  Would he like me as a witness?

  For what?

  I said I should be prosecuted. Put my head right on the chopping block for him.

  Said he, You mean you want to share the glory.

  Typical of him, Mem. That is his character. I laughed out loud.

  He then told me that these poems are far beyond me. That was what he said. Incredible. He said I was incapable of writing what I wrote. What hubris-lah. Takes the breath away. I reminded him that I was the one who made Bob McCorkle, not just the words, but also cut up his head and legs and body. I physically pasted him together.

  Doesn’t matter, he said. I am his publisher.

  Three minutes, are you extending?

  The poems are bloody nonsense, David.

  Oh, really, Chris? Is that so?

  So sarcky but still I did not lose my temper. I told him he did not deserve this prosecution. This is a dreadful, dreadful country. It was, it is. They crush the butterfly upon the wheel. But did he care?

  Yes, he says, I have published this ‘dreadful country’s’ first great poet and you have proven yourself to be a jealous, reactionary little shit.

  Three minutes, are you extending?

  Little shit! I was two inches taller.

  ‘Hurry up please it’s time,’ Weiss said. Quoting Eliot, of course, but the operator cut us off.

  All this was recorded in my notebook. Hotel Merlin, Kuala Lumpur, Saturday, August 10, 1972. Thirteen years later, the pages still smell of ikan bilis.

  11

  Chubb claimed that he did not travel to Melbourne with the intention of attending Weiss’s trial. He said he’d been promised a job at J. Walter Thompson as a copywriter. However there are two thousand miles between Townsville and Melbourne, and by the time he completed the final leg—sitting on the freezing metal floor of an injured Hudson bomber— his friend the copy chief had punched his creative director in the nose and Chubb was left no better connected than any of the thousands of soldiers trying to get on their feet again in peacetime. He began the dispiriting business of finding work but, having no better qualification than a bachelor of arts and a piece of Japanese shrapnel resting against his spine, seems not to have been spectacularly successful. The advertising agencies all relished telling him, You will find no poetry here. He tried for book-reviewing from the papers but got no encouragement from anyone except The Argus, where his role in the McCorkle business was known. Their books editor offered him a freelance assignment covering Weiss’s trial.

  He was desperate for money but could not bring himself to feed on Weiss’s humiliation. Finally, however, he joined that peculiar group which waited each morning for the doors of the Supreme Court of Victoria to open. It was a crowd not unlike the one you might find outside the Melbourne Library at a similar hour. That is, it had a fair representation of bookish individuals and the occasional mad mutterer who—had this been the library—could be expected to head straight for the reading room and go to sleep. Weiss’s parents, grey-haired and elegantly dressed, were also present, though Chubb succeeded in avoiding them. There were also a number of neatly if not fashionably dressed men, members of Catholic Action, and some wide fellows whose distinctive misshapen overcoat pockets marked them as reporters from the tabloid press.

  The month of May, as I have since discovered, is miserable in Melbourne. You get a very melancholy light as a result of all that cold water swelling up in Bass Strait, and even when there is warmth in the sunshine there is something in the light that chills the heart. Chubb leaned against the iron palisades, shivering inside his AIF greatcoat, smoking, waiting for the day to begin.

  The interior of the courts is surprisingly warm in appearance, with a vast amount of cedar, some of it beautifully carved, and the twenty-foot ceilings are very handsome indeed. But there is never enough heating in Australia, particularly in government buildings, and this was doubtless the cause of the rather cruel atmosphere in court number four. Chubb found the cedar benches so deeply, unremittingly cold that they might as well have been forged from iron. This he could tolerate, but the smell of the place—stale bread, cheese, orange peel—provoked in him a deep unease. The Supreme Court of Victoria smelled like the shelter shed in a school playground and evoked a dark, merciless world where you were not wanted and never would belong.

  Here was where the apparatus of the state would decide if the poetry he’d written as a joke would fail the test contrived by a Justice Cockburn in 1868 to determine ‘whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.’

  There was a church-like aspect to the court, and the order of procession reminded Chubb of the church in Haberfield, the scraping of shoes as the clergyman entered, the rising swell of the organ, the distinctive noise of Psalters being returned to their shelves.

  Into this Christian machine David Weiss was brought each day to take his place, either standing in the dock or sitting beside his long-necked, bird-beaked solicitor. The first day was the most shocking, not simply because the defendant appeared so very beautiful and, in comparison to the huge judge and the plank-solid Vogelesang, slender, but because he had chosen—for what reason, who could know—to dress in a long flocked-velvet smoking jacket and a drooping black silk bow tie. Even a brief visit to Melbourne would tell you this was a mistaken strategy, but Weiss nonetheless stood before his accusers as an aesthete, an alien. As Chubb had said, he would not bow down.

  When called to take the oath he declared he could not and there was some confusion about why this was, the court assuming it was because he was a Jew and Weiss finally making it clear that he did not believe in God at all. All this you can read in the transcript of the trial and I have used my own copy to jog my memory here and there.

  The thing that struck the horrified Chubb was not how preposterous it was to convict someone for a culturally pretentious pun like “Boult-upright” but how relentlessly the government brought down all its power on this young man.

  The judge in fact was not Sir David Gibbons but Alfred Cousins, who turns out to have been the
godfather of the girl Weiss had spurned. He displayed a very obvious physical power—a swimmer’s shoulders, large hands, a wide but inexpressive mouth. Vogelesang, the chief witness, was also a sportsman and is nowadays more remembered as a celebrated contestant in that wild, anarchic, rather Gaelic football they play down there. Even the prosecutor, who was red-faced and decidedly out of shape, had a crushed, pugnacious face from which he had managed to exclude any evidence of human sympathy.

  The trial began with Vogelesang being called to the stand and recounting his meeting with Weiss at Acland Street.

  This, of course, must have been a very dreary performance, with the stolid detective reading from his notebook in an uninflected nasal drawl, but Chubb, sitting in the Merlin Hotel years later, played the parts of WEISS and VOGELESANG to considerable comic effect. It was only later, when I read the transcript, that I appreciated the accuracy of his recollection, as if the grotesque inquisition had been burned into his living brain.

  DET. VOGELESANG: Are you acquainted with the poems of Bob McCorkle?

  WEISS: Yes.

  DET. VOGELESANG: There is a poem titled ‘Boult to Marina.’ What is your opinion of that poem?

  WEISS: I don’t know what the author intended by that poem. You’d better ask him what he meant.

  DET. VOGELESANG: What do you think it means?

  WEISS: Ask the author. I am not going to express an opinion.

  DET. VOGELESANG: That means that you have an opinion but you are not prepared to express it.

  WEISS: I would have to give it two or three hours’ consideration before I could determine what it means.

  DET. VOGELESANG: Do you think it is suggestive of indecency?

  WEISS: Do you know anything about the classical characters?

  DET. VOGELESANG: What I want to know is what it means.

  WEISS: Pericles and Boult are both classical characters.

  DET. VOGELESANG: Do you think the poem is suggestive of indecency?

  WEISS: No more than Shakespeare or Chaucer.