Flying Visits

by Clive James

  Look through the collections of Australian paintings in the Sydney and Melbourne galleries and you quickly see that for Australian artists the price of losing touch with the rest of the world is to be forced into copying the rest of the world, and that this has never been more true than recently, when arrogant self-sufficiency has resulted in the most abject plagiarism of international fashions. The strong periods of Australian painting have always depended on painters recognising the necessity for educating themselves abroad. Any Australian painter could apply European techniques to Australian subjects. What counted was applying European standards.

  The pre-First World War painters did that, and to a certain extent the post-Second World War painters did too, with Sidney Nolan the most famous example. The creative self-confidence of both schools was humble at the core – the ideal order of events in an artistic personality, whatever the medium. But the young artists who received the largesse of the Whitlam regime seem to me to represent a return to insularity.

  The ideology of nationalist self-sufficiency – the Australian ‘renaissance’ – has mainly acted as licence for provincialism, not just in painting but in films, drama and literature as well. The Australian cinema, if it can produce a few more films as good as Picnic at Hanging Rock, will actually be getting somewhere, after years of doing nothing except bombard British film magazines with meaningless advertisements announcing: ‘Suddenly the Australians are taking over.’ But it must be emphasised that Picnic at Hanging Rock is the exception. Scores of feature films have been made in Australia since the Whitlam Government introduced subsidies, but the average among them is unsaleable abroad and unwatchable at home. Bruce Beresford’s Barry McKenzie, the first feature to be made under the new system, was a strong father which has had some weak progeny. Most of them have been showered with critical praise but the accolades are worthless, since they are composed by journalists devoid of standards. (Peter Weir, director of both Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Cars That Ate Paris, is the first to insist that premature canonisation is the biggest threat facing the young Australian film director today.)

  It was the critical journalism which finally got me down, making me realise that my birthplace would probably have no place for me even if I decided to go back. Australia has its equivalents of the weekly magazines and posh papers which I read and write for here both as a way of life and a means to pay for it. But they are equivalents only in their format. There is plenty of good will and vigour and even talent in them but there are no consistent standards. It is not so much a lack of writing as a lack of editing. Punctilious editing is the real secret behind most of the good literary journalism done in London. Even the best of the Australian publications are full of copy which in London would be regarded as unpublishable. The literary journalist who has never been strictly blue-pencilled will never develop. And although it might be said that whether or not its literary journalism is any good is not of much importance to a young and rich country, it is of importance to me.

  So one had had good reasons for sailing away, even though they did not become apparent until years later. But as I got ready to leave again, there was no mistaking the attractiveness of what was being left behind. On the last day of my trip I lunched with my family at Doyle’s, the superb fish restaurant at Watson’s Bay on Sydney Harbour. Sitting shirtless in the bright sun with the ultra-violet eating into my skin which had once never been white and now would never again be really brown, I ate feathery prawn cutlets and succulent whiting fillets while the children played naked amongst the beached boats and under the wharves. The fish – caught on a hand line and iced in the boat – were symphonic. Looking up-harbour towards the Bridge, you could see yachts and hydrofoils racing on the crushed diamond water, while container ships being tugged for the sea were giant cut-outs in the dazzle. Life seemed very close to God.

  Perhaps that’s the real reason for leaving: that Paradise on Earth leaves you nothing to achieve. But it’s possible to make too much of artistic self-exile. Twenty-four hours after leaving Sydney I was back in London. The journey which once took me five weeks and felt irreversible now takes a day and feels like nothing except a bad night’s sleep.

  June 27,1976

  Footnote Eight years later I would have tried to sound more grateful for the hearteningly many high-grade Australian films. But the general point remains true: the average Australian film is not The Getting of Wisdom but Goodbye Paradise.

  Postcard from Russia

  THE MOST exciting way of getting into Russia is to cross Germany in a sealed train and arrive at the Finland Station in St Petersburg to be greeted by a cheering revolutionary mob who promptly rename the city after you. This approach being no longer possible, the next best method is to book a Sovereign package tour through British Airways, thereby ensuring that there will be none of that humdrum business about stepping on and off aircraft at the appointed time. It was an exciting few days our tiny band had of it, waiting to see which flight we would be rebooked on, if any. Finally it was Aeroflot that assumed the burden of taking us to our week of adventure behind the Iron Curtain.

  Kicked by the 92,000 horses of its four Kuznetsov KN-8-4 turbofans our half-empty Ilyushin II-62 scrambled out of Heathrow like a MiG-21. The cabin smelled of kerosene and was colder than a three-star freezer but not to worry, because in less time than it took to recover from the meal provided (packaged in London, it was to be our last contact with the West) we were on Soviet soil at Sheremetsevo airport, Moscow. Valentina, our Intourist guide, had come to meet us. There were a dozen of us and only one of her, but she was the duck and we were the ducklings. Wherever she cruised, we paddled energetically in her wake.

  Arriving at the Metropole Hotel late in the evening, we paddled straight into the past. The Metropole is bang in the centre of the city and, like every other good-looking building in the Soviet Union, dates from before the Revolution. By Western standards it’s a flea-trap, but at least it’s an atmospheric flea-trap, retaining all its original cherubs, chandeliers and stained glass. To the Muscovites the place is simply Dreamsville. We found the ballroom full of them, all dancing frantically to ‘Heart of my Heart’, played by a six-piece combo in which the clarinet had been heavily influenced by Benny Goodman. Bouncing off each other like dodgems, the dancing couples each consisted of (a) a brutally barbered man doing the steering and (b) a strapping wench providing the power. All dolled up in their Saturday-night best, the girls were culture-shock incarnate. Their clothes were straight from Oxfam and their coiffures seemed to have been created by a blacklisted Hollywood hairstylist who had taken to drink and gone blind.

  At this point I shall give up any attempt at chronological presentation and take refuge in the ‘blur of impressions’ technique, leading off with the blurred impression that women’s hairstyles play a large part in the Soviet economy. There is a hairstyle parlour in every block and a hairstyle under the helmet of every lady construction worker. It might not be much of a hairstyle, but it’s a brave try, and helps distract attention from the clothes, which are amazing.

  It’s not just a matter of few women being able to afford to dress well: there is nothing good to buy even if they save up the money. The trouser suits in the window of GUM, the big Moscow department store beside Red Square, don’t just cost more than £100 at the official exchange rate, they look like Hell. At the more ambitious shops on Kuznetsky Bridge, the once-famous fashion street behind the Bolshoi, the clothes are twice as expensive again but no less hideous. There is a special poignancy about Kuznetsky Bridge, because in Pushkin’s time it was much satirised by the literary men as the place where the fine young ladies who broke their hearts went to buy French fripperies. The shops are as they were, but there is nothing in them.

  In the official logic of Soviet life, essentials come cheap and luxuries come dear. But the facts say that luxuries hardly come at all. The queues you see everywhere are mainly for things that aren’t yet in stock but soon might be. A pair of women’s tights costs £9 p
lus and has to be imported from East Germany, which for the Soviet Union counts as Babylon.

  But the German tights got through. The German tanks didn’t. There are huge memorials outside Moscow and Leningrad to mark the places where the Wehrmacht was stopped cold, literally frozen in its tracks. For any visiting liberal, the central fact of Soviet history very properly remains the war waged by the Soviet Government against the liberty, and in millions of cases the lives, of its own people. But for Russians the central fact is the war waged against Nazi Germany. The 10 million slain by Stalin are at best a subject of rumour, since the flow of information which started during the Thaw has by now frozen up again. But the 20 million lost in the Second World War are a vivid memory. If, as seems likely, steps have been taken to ensure that nobody else will ever be able to assume the unchallenged power wielded by Stalin, it could have less to do with his purges than with his blunders. By weakening the officer corps at a crucial stage and refusing to heed advice, he very nearly lost his people the war.

  On this subject if on no other, a modicum of sincere feeling infuses the official propaganda. Certainly the regime is lying when it blames the war, rather than its own rigidity, for the continued bleakness of Soviet life. But both powerful and powerless are of one mind in their determination never to be invaded again. On the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior outside the Kremlin wall the inscription reads: ‘Your name is unknown but your death is immortal.’ Touchingly, it is in the familiar form, as if addressed to a son. Old ladies leave flowers and cry.

  The same old ladies queue for Lenin’s tomb, but that’s another issue. Even older ladies linger outside the few remaining active churches. It’s a matter of faith, the Leninist faith having the merit that its propagation receives a whopping slice of the State budget, while Christianity is left to die of neglect. Since a visit to Lenin’s waxwork was not on our schedule, I contented myself with paddling away from Valentina and taking a hinge at the Lenin Museum, just at the entrance to Red Square. This I can recommend, even though all the inscriptions are in Russian. Brilliantly laid out, the place is bung full of Leninalia – including his black Rolls-Royce – and helps give you an idea of what happens when a man is worshipped as a God. Hagiolatry turns to halitosis.

  There are two main advantages in learning a few words of Russian before you make the trip. The first advantage is that the Russians, like the Italians (and unlike the French), respond warmly to the merest attempt at saying some little thing in their language. When, after consulting my pocket dictionary, I told the floor superintendent that the light bulb in my bathroom was burned out (actually I said, ‘The bath illumination have been destroyed,’ but let that pass), she and her assistant burst into applause, whereupon a team of ladies in blue overalls sprinted down the corridor and fixed the thing in nothing flat.

  The second advantage is that you will not be so easily fooled by the suggestion that the Soviet Union is Arcadia made actual. What has been made actual in the Soviet Union is boredom. Having discovered that boring the people works better than killing them, the State has gone on being boring for so long that it has ended up by boring even itself. It is true that the people do not litter the streets or write graffiti on the walls. They don’t need to: the Government does it for them. There are posters and banners absolutely everywhere. Chesterton said that Times Square in New York would look like paradise to anyone who couldn’t read. The Russian alphabet looks very decorative to anyone who can’t understand it. But if you can puzzle out what all those gigantic inscriptions are saying, you gradually realise that every major building in Moscow and Leningrad is engaged fulltime in boring the public witless.

  It was reasonably jolly to discover that the huge words on top of the power station in Moscow were a famous quotation from Lenin: COMMUNISM IS SOVIET POWER PLUS THE ELECTRIFICATION OF THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. But the slogan on top of the Metropole was less digestible: RAISE HIGH THE BANNER OF PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM! Nine out of every ten slogans finish with an exclamation mark. Since the Soviet Union is currently in the throes of assimilating the directives handed down by the XXVth Party Congress, the same general invitation is repeated every few yards: LET US FULFIL THE DECISIONS OF THE XXVth PARTY CONGRESS! The decisions filled the whole front page of Pravda. There were hundreds of them. Without exception they finished with an exclamation mark.

  While we were there, Lenin’s 107th birthday fell due. The paper Soviet Russia, mouthpiece of the Central Committee, carried the full text of a heroically tedious speech made to the Praesidium by ideologist M.B. Zumyanin, marking the occasion. Marking it flat. Under a half-page photo of the Praesidium, sitting beneath the inevitable portrait of Lenin, the caption informs us that we are looking at ‘a triumphant meeting of the Praesidium, dedicated to the 107th anniversary of the birthday of V.I. Lenin’. There follows the headline: LENINISM – REVOLUTIONARY BANNER OF OUR EPOCH. A sub-heading informs us that we are about to read a speech given ‘in a triumphant meeting in Moscow, dedicated to the 107th anniversary of the birthday of V.I. Lenin’. This introduces the speech proper, running from page one to page three in small print. It begins: ‘Comrades! One hundred and seven years after the birthday of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin . . .’ You get the drift. Actually this was the speech the Chinese delegate walked out of, but surely not because of its veiled criticisms of China. He just saw his chance and split.

  The cult of Brezhnev is low-temperature compared with what used to be turned on for Stalin. Brezhnev’s thoughts are everywhere, but the letters are seldom more than six feet high. In Pravda there are always scores of references to his latest speech, in which he always declares himself to be against Imperialism and for Peace. His name is invariably given as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Comrade Brezhnev. But there aren’t many shrines to him that can’t be easily dismantled: Brezhnev could be made to vanish from the landscape as completely as Khrushchev, who is not even buried with all the other Party heroes in the Kremlin wall. (He’s over in the Nunnery, in a part of the graveyard we couldn’t visit.) Stalin is still in the wall, but he’ll never get back into Lenin’s tomb, where he lay for the short period of his immortality. Lenin is the only deity allowed at the moment.

  And one’s enough. Any building he isn’t on, he’s in. There is a hulking bust of him inside Moscow’s Leningrad Station, and when you get off the train at the other end you find an equally hulking bust inside Leningrad’s Moscow Station. But from the outside the stations look exactly the same as they did when Anna Karenina fell under her train. On the whole the Soviet Union has done a good job of preserving the pre-revolutionary artistic heritage. Since there is hardly any such thing as a post-revolutionary artistic heritage you might say that it was the least they could do, but considering the aristocratic and/or bourgeois provenance of what they inherited, they have been remarkably tolerant in looking after it. (For anything untoward produced after 1917, I need hardly point out, there is no tolerance available at all.)

  The Tsars’ summer palaces outside Leningrad were severely damaged by the occupying Wehrmacht but they have been painstakingly reassembled. The Russian rococo is the most human of all grand styles, never getting out of scale with the people inside it. It went on exuding the formative intelligence of Peter the Great long after the Russian royal family had declined into mediocrity. The supreme example, in Leningrad itself, is, of course, the Winter Palace, now merely the largest of the several buildings which form the Hermitage.

  The paintings in the Hermitage would alone constitute sufficient reason for visiting the USSR. Nina, our Intourist guide in Leningrad, knew a lot about painting, but she was allowed to conduct only one official tour of the Hermitage. You need three or four visits to get to grips with the place, so I recommend paddling off. The Imperial collections drip with masterpieces – Leonardos, Giorgiones, Rembrandts, a Michelangelo statue, etc. – but more remarkable still are the rooms full of French paintings bought at the turn of this century more or less straight off the easel. A wall of Bonnar
ds, a room full of Cézannes, another room full of Rose, Blue and early Cubist Picassos – it’s unbelievable. (The equivalent rooms in Moscow’s Pushkin Museum are unbelievable too.) Such purchasing was only one aspect of the rich, bourgeois culture which otherwise gave rise to Diaghilev, and which the Revolution cut down in full flower.

  There is a room entirely devoted to a staggering collection of Gauguins. Looking down from a window of this room into the square below – the square to which the people once came asking for bread and got bullets in reply – I could see the flagstones being torn up to make way for a mosaic hailing the sixtieth anniversary of the Revolution, which will be celebrated next November (i.e., October, old-style) and will be a very big deal. There are no prizes for guessing whose face will feature in the mosaic.

  As we now know, the artistic euphoria of the decade after the Revolution was a false dawn. Night descended in 1917 and the sun has never really re-arisen. Only in music – and barely even in that, when you compare the fruitfulness of the nineteenth century – has creativity been allowed to continue. In a way this is lucky for us, because there can’t be much doubt that Russian culture would have overwhelmed the world. It took the Revolution to stop it.

  Our package tour included a good seat in Moscow’s Congress Palace (the very place from which the Chinese delegate sloped out a few days later) for the Siberian Folk Dance Ensemble. It was a big kick to be sitting in the Kremlin surrounded by Mongolian generals covered with decorations, but the folk dancing itself was tedium epitomised. The packed house of 5,000 people all pretended to be having a marvellous time but there was no avoiding the conclusion that here was culture less ethnic than embalmed – the whole deal was as stiff as Lenin’s corpse.