And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?

by Richard Flanagan

  I stumbled on a history of Sir John Franklin’s final folly. After abandoning Mathinna and returning to England, he was appointed to lead the most expensive expedition in British naval history to find the North-West Passage. He and his expedition sailed into the Arctic and promptly vanished. Their fate was the great mystery of the age.

  About this I already knew a little. What I didn’t know was that nine years later, a polar explorer named Dr Rae returned from the Arctic to London with shocking news gathered from Inuit people he had met. The Franklin expedition were all dead. Worse, at the end, they had taken to eating each other.

  The news rocked Britain, Europe and the Empire. Eating people was, after all, what savages did, not great English explorers. Lady Jane Franklin, determined to salvage her husband’s name, persuaded no less a figure than Charles Dickens to help.

  This led me to reread some of Dickens’ work. It became evident to me how strongly Dickens believed that the distance between savagery and civilisation was the capacity to control wanting. He had succeeded in achieving with himself what the Franklins had failed to with Mathinna: disciplining an undisciplined heart. And it was therefore unsurprising that after meeting with Lady Jane, Dickens wrote an article attacking Dr Rae’s account, arguing that no civilised man would stoop so low as to resort to cannibalism. For Dickens, the answer was obvious: the Esquimeaux, true savages, had eaten Franklin’s men. History was to prove Dr Rae right, but too late to save him from Dickens’ attack.

  Having triumphed with his article, however, a strange thing happened. Seeing in the image of ice-bound men a mirror image of his own increasingly miserable life, Dickens became obsessed by the story of Franklin. He staged a play about Arctic explorers, which starred his family and friends in supporting parts and him as an Arctic explorer who conquers his passion for a woman in love with another man. It was an unexpected sensation, Dickens’ performance stunning. Everyone from Queen Victoria down wanted to see the play, and Dickens reprised it for some charity performances in Manchester.

  Because he was now playing a very large theatre he got in a family of professional actresses, the Ternans, to help him. In front of two thousand weeping spectators, the forty-five-year-old Dickens would nobly die each night in front of the eighteen-year-old Ellen Ternan as he declaimed his undying love. His performance was now almost unearthly. Even Ellen Ternan would be overcome and cry uncontrollably.

  And at that point Dickens’ life changed irrevocably. Caught in the limelight and cradled in the arms of an actress, Charles Dickens fell in love. It was as if the play was a metamorphosis, the role a cocoon out of which a different man emerged.

  Within a year he would be separated from his wife, and he and Ellen Ternan would become a couple until his death. The year after his separation, he would reprise the plot of the play—of a man who sacrifices the love of his life for a principle—in a new novel, beginning it with one of the most famous openings in English literature:

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way . . .

  A Tale of Two Cities, as he called the novel, has as its heroine Lucie Mannette, who some critics regard as modelled on Ellen Ternan. It has also been suggested that the novel’s two heroes—the base, undisciplined Sydney Carton and virtuous, disciplined Charles Darnay—whose physical similarity is almost perfect, represent two opposing aspects of Dickens’ own character. The novel is much concerned with the idea of resurrection.

  I saw that the story of Dickens and the story of Mathinna were in some indefinable sense really one: two poles of the same globe. They were joined both by an odd series of events and by the way in which, as human beings, we so often damage ourselves by being untrue to our nature, and yet how being true to our nature is also no guarantee of happiness.

  I wished to write about how we try to control our souls, about our terrible need for love, and the cost to our souls when we deny that need. I began the book with an unknown Aboriginal girl running barefoot through the wet kangaroo grass of an island at the edge of the world, and ended it twenty years later, with the most famous man of his time at the centre of the world, feeling tears raining down on him, a man who believed wanting could be controlled by reason, finally realising that reason is a fine thing, but wanting is the very essence of life.

  And writing these words, I wonder if the history of love is this: a terrible war waged between bare feet and wooden frames that never ends.

  Afterword, Richard Flanagan, Wanting (2008)

  I FIRST MET Vlado Kreslin in the late European summer of ’99, in a hot back street in the old town of Ljubljana. In the late summer there can be few lovelier cities in Europe, and we walked to a café through its ochre-coloured Hapsburg streets, along its somnolent river, past the smell of its teeming cafés and bars, so many serene images at odds with those normally presented of this troubled part of the world.

  I had heard Vlado Kreslin’s music, a magic fusion of so many Mitteleuropean motifs, that put me in mind of everything from the films of Emir Kusturica to the novels of Bohumil Hrabal. I was conscious of his reputation as Slovenia’s most feted musician, a singer-songwriter whose hits over two decades have spanned everything from traditional tunes to a recent song for the Slovene soccer team; a musician of such standing that everyone who comes to central Europe—from Dylan to REM—plays with him, and which saw our every conversation punctuated by requests for his autograph.

  His dress that day, if somewhat curious, managed to be both impeccably traditional and entirely unconventional, a sleight of hand he pulled off in his music as well. In a city highly conscious of how it looked, where everyone wore tasteful tonal shades of blue and grey, he wore green, an outfit that to my alien eyes looked like that of an Austro–Hapsburg gamekeeper, circa 1914.

  He was tall, but seemed taller, and was ebullient and outgoing, exuberant and warm. He slapped me on the back with vigour repeatedly, told stories incessantly: amusing, droll and punctuated with a great braying laugh.

  But every now and then he would lean low and interrupt the river of his talk with a single sentence that was direct and pointed, a conspiratorial aside, practised, one felt, through a life growing up in a less than free society. His songs were not dissimilar—exotic and delightful, yet hidden away in them the unexpected kernel of some greater meaning.

  I had that day returned from Belgrade, still reeling from the war that had concluded only a few short weeks earlier, and with Vlado was going to a concert in the industrial town of Celje.

  Along with a great deal of poverty, distress and fear, I met in Belgrade a Serbian Orthodox priest in a bar who, it transpired, was a mad keen Celtic supporter. He drank black beer, and every second or third glass would reach into his bag, pull out and don the famous green and white striped jersey, then sing the Celtic team song. Though with his long raven black hair and beard he looked for all the world like an archetypal Serb, his mother was Croatian and he had recently been beaten up by some local Serbs.

  Over the next few days, he introduced me to fellow members of his band, the Belgrade Craic, an Irish folk band of the Pogues type. They all had assumed names such as Danny O’Leary and Brigid O’Donohue, though their real names were of the order of Bogdan Bogdanovic. Their ambition was to become an internationally successful Irish folk band. In Belgrade in the late summer of ’99, there were worse imaginable futures.

  Through Danny and Brigid I discovered the bizarre Celtic sub-culture of Belgrade, where bands such as Orthodox Celts reigned supreme, and people took Irish trips to Prague, which, I was assured, had the best Irish pubs in central Europe. On a visit to London t
he Serbian Orthodox priest had even spat on Cromwell’s statue, only to be hit by his girlfriend and told not to behave like a peasant. When I asked why they identified with the Irish, I was told that the Serbs, like the Irish, were victims.

  One night in a Belgrade bar, after several rounds of ‘Dirty Old Town’, the Belgrade Craic launched into some singing in their own tongue. Upon asking what these songs were, I was told that they were traditional Serbian Kosovar songs. And then, as one, the Belgrade Craic cracked glasses together and roared in English, ‘Serbia is Kosovo! Kosovo is Serbia!’

  I left on the train for Slovenia the following morning. In the same distance it would take to travel between Sydney and Melbourne, I passed through three countries and an unceasing rhythm of white buildings broken and blackened by war.

  That evening, as I drove with Vlado Kreslin along narrow alpine roads to Celje, I thought how, for all its extreme horror, Belgrade seemed only the new Europe in extreme, ever more nationalistic, its borders closing down all difference, its remnant people lost. Vlado Kreslin’s music seemed to be about something else.

  If Vlado Kreslin wasn’t what one expected of central Europe, nor was Slovenia, a small, mostly snowcapped alpine land of beauty that sits like a pearl between the great shells of Italy and Austria to one side, and Hungary and Croatia to the other. It is, writes Claudio Magris, the great chronicler of Mitteleuropa and its decline, the last genuine Austro–Hapsburg landscape.

  It is also a fascinating country that has improbably emerged from the fall of Communism as one of the more successful new nations of Europe. With a population of fewer than two million, its traditions have long been liberal, and its national heroes are not warriors but the poets whose images adorn their numerous brands of spirits. Yet Slovenia can sometimes seem hopelessly confused culturally.

  Desperate to free itself from what it sees as the terrible shame of the Balkans, its high culture often seems intent upon complete identification with the West. So much that is fascinating about Slovenia, however, arises from it belonging to both East and West, neither alone defining or explaining this fecund country’s riches.

  In such a world, torn between the East and the West, the past and the future, Vlado Kreslin’s lively melodies and moody lyrics about the natural world of the Pannonian flatlands, the storks and the bees and the Mura River; his Bosnian songs and Gypsy influences, sung in a strong dialect obscure even to his own countrymen, are resented by some of the cultural elite as not truly Slovenian. In a Europe where Gypsies remain despised and oppressed, his very first hit song, ‘Old Black Guitar’, was about how as a child Gypsies would visit their home and play music with his father.

  I had heard criticism of Vlado Kreslin, and perhaps less than surprisingly it came from Slovenian high artists who saw his work as not ‘pure’ Slovene, and who felt his decision to sing Bosnian songs (which they described as Turkish), to include Gypsy elements in his music, was a betrayal of the artist’s mission to create a true and pure national art.

  But then Vlado Kreslin was born an outsider, in the remote region of Prekmurje. Until 1919, when it was formally hived off from the old Empire as part of the Versailles settlement and given to the new nation of Yugoslavia, Prekmurje was part of Hungary.

  Though the majority of its people were Slovene, Prekmurje was the antithesis of Slovenia. Instead of great alps and verdant green valleys, it was a part of the great muddy plain of Pannonia. Its Slovenes were Protestant, rather than Catholic; its population diverse, not homogenous, with Hungarian, Gypsy, German and, until the Holocaust, a substantial Jewish population. Even its cuisine is different; and to this day, its dialect remains difficult for other Slovenes to follow.

  When in the late 1980s Slovenia’s path began to diverge from that of Yugoslavia’s, so too did Vlado Kreslin’s from that of the more conventional singer-songwriter that he had up until that point been. As Milosevic rose to power in Belgrade on a platform of Greater Serbia, beginning with a campaign against Albanian Kosovars, the Slovenes led the fight for a more democratic, freer Yugoslavia. The Slovene Spring, as it was known, was a ferment that found manifold expression, including the rise of the Slovenian Green movement founded and led by Vlado Kreslin’s best friend, Stefan Smej, until his untimely death of cancer.

  It was Smej who at this time encouraged Vlado Kreslin to form a new band with some of the oldest inhabitants of his home village of Beltinska, playing a blend of traditional and contemporary music.

  The Beltinska Banda, as they became known, were a Mitteleuropean Buena Vista Social Club. As Yugoslavia fell apart in a series of bloody wars, these dozen or sometimes more traditional musicians (including Vlado’s own mother and father) aged from their late sixties to their early nineties took to the stage in black suits and black homburgs, playing everything from traditional tunes to Vlado Kreslin’s own songs through to standards as diverse as ‘Summertime’ and Iggy Pop’s ‘Passenger’, and became a national institution.

  At Celje, at the soccer field where the concert was to be played, I met the Beltinska Banda—including Vlado’s mother and father—behind the stage, and was shown the venerable, battered instruments they played.

  Later, watching the concert, I found their music by turns wistful, melancholic and moving, and running through the songs that night so much of Kreslin himself: a certain joyousness coupled to an ache that seemed autumnal, through which swirled the gypsy sounds of the dulcimer and fiddle and accordion.

  Up the front were Bosnian and Serbian teenagers in Metallica T-shirts, while down the back were people who may well have been their grandparents. Dark clouds gathered around the cooling towers of the Celje power plant and it began to rain, but the singing of the crowd only grew louder, their dancing that encompassed the front third of the crowd only more determined.

  I thought how so much of great modern art and writing had arisen out of the old polyglot world of central Europe, with its Jewish and Islamic influences, with its wash of so many different peoples. I thought of how growing up in the shadow of White Australia, Europe and its ceaseless diversity had been so attractive, yet how now it was we who had become diverse and Europe that had become so many little white Australias, enclaves of pure ethnicity of one variety or another.

  As I looked around Vlado Kreslin’s audience—the Serbian workers and their families, the young Bosnians, as well as the Slovenes—I realised that Vlado Kreslin’s music was at once entirely of his world and yet enlarged that world to include anyone else who wished to be part of it.

  His music spoke to a notion of a better, more generous world than that coming into being in the charred ruins of Vukovar and Srebrenica and Pristina, that cracked horror seeking identity with spurious notions of victimhood and Pogues songs that I had met with in Belgrade. In an era of ever narrower nationalisms, it suggested a broader humanity, a more generous idea both of culture and of people, and it did it with an exquisite music rooted in the polyglot traditions of a world that is elsewhere being forcibly dismantled.

  And, in a soccer field that evening in the late summer of Europe, such things seemed not unimportant. At the front of the audience, Vlado’s father had got down from the stage and was dancing in the rain and mud of the mosh pit with the teenagers. At the back of the concert, seeking refuge with me in a team shelter, was a woman holding a baby who had begun singing along with Vlado on stage.

  ‘We remember a song which once belonged to us all,’ she sang softly in a Serbian accent, mouth close to her baby’s ear, ‘when our laughter was louder than the roar of the storm.’

  The Age

  30 December 2000

  IT WAS A LAND of fear and uncertainty and gas masks selling out in the Blue Mountains and anthrax scares in Darwin. It was an election no one cared less about because no one any longer felt any connection to either party and its apparatchik parroting focus group polling parroting doorstops and five second grabs parroting shock jock de
nunciations. It was a vortex of meaningless nonsense, occasionally seasoned with a racist overtone to give it the semblance if not the reality of veracity. It was the season for charlatans, a time of lies and hate sold as a righteous fear. It was the Australian Federal Election of 2001.

  Yet in the end the most haunting image the election threw up was not that of a presidential Howard embracing world leaders or an avuncular Beazley embracing punters. Rather, it was a picture of three smiling young girls, three girls who looked radiant, beautiful children, who drowned along with some 350 other refugees falsely hopeful of becoming Australians after their boat sank.

  In the end it was a vile time to live through and a vile place to be, this nation that once seemed so generous and open, and it happened because finally it was once more all right to do and say such things because the people who were going to suffer were wogs, and wogs were what we once more no longer wanted with their diseases and their violence and their closet horrors.

  Because in the end, of course, it wasn’t so much a national election as a national disgrace, in which our two major parties did not so much play the race card, as back it to the hilt with cracked rhetoric about the integrity and defence of borders that sounded eerily reminiscent of the arguments that built in Weimar Germany of threatened living space.

  The ALP had long ago established that its venality and chicanery were beyond doubt, but this callousness without care for the consequences was new and horrifying.

  Labor tried to pretend it was about domestic issues. But the only job they were after was a job for the big puffy boy who, with his one great ironical gift, that of diminishment, managed to make a national election sound like a botched pitch for the job of assistant manager of a bottle shop. He was qualified all right, he and his mates, conceited bastards all born to rule as much as those they derided on the government benches; the only health they cared for, that of their pirates’ fortunes depicted in the polling charts; the only education they knew, the re-education of any who dissented with a line that now so resembled the Liberals that only girth and eyebrows could be used to distinguish foe from friend.