by Clive James
A MEMORY CALLED MALOUF
At an advanced point in his already prolific career, the Australian writer David Malouf has produced a book of fresh beginnings. Nominally a collection of nine short stories, Dream Stuff could just as easily be nine different outlines for new novels, each of them remarkably unlike any novel he has turned out before. If that sounds like a polite way of reclassifying his novels as expanded short stories, it’s a stricture that he invites. His novels have always left out much of the framework and furniture that most novelists are careful to put in. On the other hand, what he puts in instead makes them read more like a poetic fermentation than a long short story.
‘Everything spread quickly,’ he says in the title story of Dream Stuff: ‘Germs, butter, rumours.’ He is talking about subtropical Queensland, the stamping ground of his childhood, but he could equally be evoking the luxuriant mental climate of his entire creative life. Fecund is a word that fits him as it fits few other Australian writers. Seen from space, Australia is a thin, wet edge running only halfway around a colossal swathe of hot rock. For Australia, read austere. A celebrated poem by Judith Wright addresses the largest island’s anhydrous vastness in the appropriately desiccated vocative: ‘Your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart.’
Chez Malouf, however, there is scarcely a dry breast to be seen. Propagating itself like honeysuckle on a trellis, his mind exfoliates in the thin wet edge, and everything it dreams up sends out tendrils, starting new, wild gardens that you couldn’t keep down with a flame-thrower. Aridity being decidedly not his thing, he is thus the least characteristic Australian writer yet to have reached world prominence, and therefore one of the surest signs that Australia’s literary culture – cosseted in the long years when it scarcely existed – has by now arrived and is running nicely out of control, the way a culture should.
None of this means that Malouf is an incoherent writer. At his frequent best, and occasionally for a whole book, his prose is as tightly under control as his poetry, and often more so: his poems usually avoid the prosaic with such success that it is hard to figure out what is going on. In his narrative prose he is more likely to evoke before he implies, achieving a clarity that has helped to make obvious the main subject on which he has been reluctant to touch. That subject is sexual love, about which, on the whole, he has had less to say than almost any other serious novelist since Joseph Conrad. In Malouf’s sumptuous corner of a sparse country, there is only one kind of juice that has so far failed to flow. But there are signs in these short stories that it might be finally on the move.
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‘At Schindler’s’, the first story in the new book, evokes a south Queensland childhood with the same enchanting clarity that he achieved in his directly autobiographical 12 Edmondstone Street (1985), named for the house that his miraculous memory has never completely left. ‘I can feel my way in the dark through every room . . .’ he said in the autobiography. ‘First houses are the grounds of our first experience.’ In the new story, he could still be expounding the importance of early experience, with the descriptions uncannily getting sharper instead of duller as the point of view advances ever further from the object:
There was a pool at Schindler’s. In the old days Jack and his father had swum there each morning. Jack would cling to the edge and kick, while his father, high up on the matted board . . .
For any Australian who first went swimming at the end of World War II, the matted board will have the same effect as a truck full of madeleines would have had on Proust. Yes, the diving boards were wrapped with matting: he’s got it exactly.
The child at the centre of the autobiography, the real Malouf, came from Lebanese immigrants on his father’s side and English on his mother’s. The boy in the story has nothing like so interesting a background, but something much more interesting happens in the foreground. In the autobiography he merely grows taller. In the story he grows up. It is wartime, most of the Australian young men are already overseas (too many of them, including the boy’s father, as prisoners of war), and south Queensland is teeming with American service personnel, young men who have only one thing on their minds while they wait to ship out for the fighting in the north – the Australian young women.
A crucial time in modern Australian history and a crucial place are both vividly recreated. After the fall of Singapore, Australia was obliged to sideline its hallowed but fatally outdated military dependence on Britain and go all out in its new partnership with the United States – a shift of alliance, if not of loyalty, so far-reaching that its consequences are still making themselves felt today. One of the immediate consequences was that the strategically placed south Queensland became an occupied zone. It hardly needs saying that if the Japanese had been occupying it instead of the Americans the results would have been dramatic in an even more unsettling way.
Nevertheless the drama was unsettling enough. The jealousies and resentments were intense, and partly because the Americans, on the whole, behaved like gentlemen. Their good manners, added to their high pay and ready access to a PX full of otherwise unavailable consumer goods, made them hard to resist. Hard to resist didn’t mean irresistible: to form a sexual relationship with an American serviceman was by no means common among Australian women already spoken for by one of our absent nationals. But fraternization in the form of friendship was. And of course the boy in the story, when his mother takes up with her charming Yank, suspects nothing more. When he walks in on them while they are making love, he hardly knows what is going on, but the story, written from his viewpoint, registers his shock. The long-term consequences are only hinted at, but clearly there will be some.
For the reader of Malouf’s work, this is an uncustomary use for the word ‘clearly’. The only previous instance I can think of for a potentially formative sexual event was in another short story, included in the 1985 collection Antipodes, In that story, called ‘Southern Skies’, a first-person narrator, brought up in a refugee family, recalls how when he was a boy at high school a friend of the family called the Professor took the opportunity to grope him while showing him the stars through a telescope. Since the boy has already declined the advances of his mother’s mature and attractive female friend, yet does nothing to stop the Professor jacking him off while he melts with awe at the revelation of the heavens, it would be legitimate to infer that a future course is being charted. No celestial music is heard, but the favorable auspices of the heavenly bodies are hard to miss.
*
In the fictional world of Malouf’s novels – a world in which childhood is a time rarely touched by sexuality and in which the same, on the whole, can be said for adulthood – the emotional relationships among men are even more fascinating for their lack of specificity than the heterosexual relationships. Apart from that one middle-period short story, there have been no instances of males sharing an explicitly sexual moment while the cosmos sparkles in approval. The heterosexual coupling in ‘At Schindler’s’ (‘nothing he had been told or imagined was a preparation for the extent to which, in their utter absorption in one another, they had freed themselves of all restraint’) has a few harbingers, if only sketchily established. In his biggest novel, The Great World (1990), the character nicknamed Digger, a returned prisoner of war, has a years-long and quite believable Thursdays-only relationship with a widow similarly reluctant to give up her solitude. Nothing explicit is said, but at least you can assume there is a mutual sexual attraction, in the same way you can assume that the male and female protagonists in Jane Austen, upon achieving marriage, will at some time get into the same bed.
But the main relationship in The Great World is between man and man, and the interesting thing about it is that nothing emotional is even implied. Vic and Digger are prisoners of war together on the Thailand railway. The hellish conditions are thoroughly evoked, but one is all too aware that the source-point lies in research. The classic treatment of the subject was written by an eyewitness: Russell Braddon’s The Naked Island (1952)
. Malouf, marvelous with his own memories, is never quite as good with other people’s. Still, the backdrop is sharply painted. Suffering in front of it, however, Vic and Digger are wavy outlines. Vic is unbearably insensitive, yet Digger is drawn to him. There are heavy hints that their personalities are complementary: Vic has the sense of possibility, Digger the solidity. After the war, Vic gets married and goes on to be a headlong, headline-grabbing entrepreneur, while Digger lives out a quiet life with the woman who is Thursday. Yet we are given to understand that the true relationship is between Vic and Digger. They don’t get on, yet they can’t do without each other. But in what way?
There doesn’t have to be sex: there is such a thing as chaste love between men. But if this is love, why can’t it be explored? Beyond a reciprocal irritability, the thing going on between them is all implied intensity and no expressed feeling. A vacuum is not the same thing as ambiguity, which requires at least two different meanings. For the long scenes between the main men in The Great World it is sometimes hard to find even one meaning, and the general effect of Malouf’s most ambitious novel is of being empty in the middle, a doughnut as big as the Ritz. The fault is compounded by the richness around the periphery. Malouf is touchingly right about how Australia’s unemployed men during the Depression insisted on being given work to do for their handout. And among those same men there was always a tradition of self-improvement: indigent autodidacts would swallow their pride to borrow knowledge.
This tradition reached a sad apotheosis in the prison camps, whose informal oral universities Malouf conjures up with tender, admiring accuracy. He has a real feeling for the kind of friendship between males that Australians are encouraged by their nationalist cheerleaders to call ‘mateship’. But Vic and Digger, never able to relax with each other or say what is on their minds, are pretty strange mates. They barely even like each other. So what gives?
*
The same question mark-shaped cloud has hung over Malouf’s novels since the beginning, although it should be remembered that a dark enough cloud, as well as blocking out the sun, can provide much-needed rain. Seductively forecasting what his autobiography was going to be like, the novel Johnno was published in 1975. At the exact time when Brisbane was changing irrevocably into a skyscraper-studded modern metropolis, Johnno recreated the single-story small-town city of its author’s youth, thereby providing Brisbane’s current and future citizens with a vocabulary and a map by which to cherish its remnants. Malouf was already a wizard for nostalgic detail, conjuring up such ephemeral treasures as the album-cum-catalogue, celebrating the career and products of the confectioner James MacRobertson, whose colour plates ‘seemed as beautiful to me then as anything I had ever seen or could imagine, a sort of colonial Book of Hours’.
But this is a fictional narrator talking, not Malouf. His name is Dante and he has a friend whose nickname is Johnno. Dante is slated for a life of order, Johnno is a maudit, a wild man, and . . . that’s it. Really they should drive each other mad, but they are involved with each other and you wonder why. Coming closer to now but sticking with the same theme, in Jay McInerney’s The Last of the Savages we find out why the square narrator can’t let go of a friend whose erratic nature scares him to death: it’s love. But the ties binding Dante and Johnno are hard to trace. One thinks naturally of other books about the same sort of relationship because Johnno is such a literary performance. Though Johnno has artistic interests, he has no real talent to justify his chaotic behaviour, but boy, is he literary: he quotes the first line of the first Duino elegy in the original German without feeling the need to say that Rilke wrote it.
Unfortunately the narrator doesn’t feel the need either. If it weren’t my profession to spot these things, I would have been in the dark. But I spent most of the book in the dark anyway. Is the narrator called Dante because he needs a Virgil to lead him on a spiritual journey? But what kind of Virgil is Johnno, karmically predestined for a beatified self-destruction on no clear evidence of superiority? Even for J.D. Salinger’s Seymour Glass it wasn’t enough to read Rilke: he had to have his own poetic powers that needed Japanese forms to contain their unheard-of intensity. Johnno just haunts the downtown bars in a dozen or so of the world’s capital cities while Dante checks out his performance from a distance, apparently with no particular disapproval. A mental connection between them is difficult to see, and an emotional one emphatically not in question.
*
A love between men surpassing all understanding: this theme was repeated in Malouf’s bewitching short novel of 1982, Fly Away Peter, still the most convincing thing he has done when reaching back beyond his own time. Before World War I, an enlightened scion of the Queensland landed gentry called Ashley takes on a proletarian called Jim to help him run a bird sanctuary. The class difference between the two of them is well brought out. Though they are both living in Australia, they are from two different worlds. It takes birdwatching to unite them: that and the war, in which they both die on the Western Front. One an officer, and the other definitely not, they take separate routes to the same death, and you would think that Malouf might make something more of their last meetings in France before they get wiped out in the trenches. But he plays it down. Indeed, he throws it away. One suspects that he finds the whole idea of structure artificial, but he would have a more consistent chance of justifying such casualness if the mental connections between his main characters were perceptibly articulated. Whatever joins Jim and Ashley never fully emerges from the wetlands where they watch the birds, so there is not enough to regret when it gets lost in the mud. But, almost exceptionally in Malouf’s work, you can see why they liked each other, and by no coincidence Fly Away Peter is sufficiently focused at the center to make the way it goes blurry at the edges seem deliberate.
If the same could have been said of The Conversations at Curlew Creek (1966), it would have been what the Australians call a bobby-dazzler. As it is, it is a work condemned to mere distinction. Transferred backward through time to the bad old colonial days of the 1820s, Malouf’s standard two-man relationship might have had real power if it had been spelled out, but it remains a matter of suggestion. Adair and Fergus were once close friends in Ireland, where Adair was the homeless waif received into a grand family and Fergus was its scapegrace golden boy. Since Fergus will inherit everything by right, Adair lights out for New South Wales to make his own way as an officer of the law. Fergus, going all the way to the bad, ends up there too, and turns bushranger. Adair is a man of order and Fergus is a creature of impulse: Digger and Vic, Dante and Johnno, we have been here before.
Balancing two complementary halves of a single personality isn’t a bad way for a novelist to search his own soul, but it helps the novel if both characters are at least present. Fergus, however, spends most of the book absent without leave. Adair isn’t even sure if Fergus is in Australia. Just why Adair isn’t sure is a bigger mystery than the author allows: there weren’t very many people in Australia at the time, and someone billed as a 6'6" blond Irish aristocrat would have been talked about. But Malouf prefers another kind of mystery. In the end, if it is the end, Fergus turns out to have been, or possibly been,
a figure created half out of legend to fulfil the demands of some for a breakaway hero, of others for the embodiment of that spirit of obduracy or malign intent that sets some men defiantly above the law, and wearing so many rags of lurid romanticism that every aspect of the man himself has been lost.
In real life, legends undoubtedly do grow out of events. But this sounds like an inadvertent acknowledgment that the urge to create a legend came first, and then the events were made up to fit.
*
Banishing one of the mysteriously entwined partners to the wings can be seen as a Maloufian device for ensuring that they don’t have to strike up a conversation. From the reader’s viewpoint, a less frustrating stratagem is to deprive one of them of the powers of speech, thus leaving the way open for a visione amorosa pure and simple, as the man of order
is transfigured by the contemplation of feral beauty. Malouf tried this in his early novel An Imaginary Life (1978). The poet Ovid is in exile in a rough country, where he takes a consuming interest in a wild boy known as the Child. The reader can’t fail to be reminded of Death in Venice, in which the aged Aschenbach is convulsed in spirit and prepared for death by his vision of the beautiful boy Tadzio paddling on the Lido. Ovid’s Child paddles in less gentrified waters, but to the same effect:
The fulness is in the Child’s moving away from me, in his stepping so lightly, so joyfully, naked, into his own distance at last as he fades in and out of the dazzle of light off the water . . .
