by Clive James
Craven might say that his time for the no-hopers is limited by the abundance of the distinguished. Ably representing the big-name commentators on the wing of what Pearson would like to call the progressivist intellectual middle stratum – I wish he would call it something snappier, but I can’t think of a better name either – Robert Manne is here to spell out the blatant iniquity of the Howard government’s policy towards asylum seekers. Those of us who were puzzled at the time that the iniquity was not quite blatant enough to inspire the Beazley opposition to notably different policies might still be puzzled now, but there can be no doubt about the forcefulness with which Manne puts the case. The bloggers might pounce on his position for what they think to be its reflexive assumptions, but they find it less easy to mock his style. Margo Kingston, not here this time, has always been a softer target in that regard. In the 2000 volume her essay ‘Hansonism Then and Now’ yielded a paragraph that sharply pointed up the dangers she runs by letting her notions of the self-evident rule her syntax. I marked its first two sentences with an exclamation mark in the margin.
Howard’s downgrading of our commitment to United Nations human rights treaties feeds off the widespread feeling in the bush that one-world government is the ruin of us all. It is intellectually dishonest and destructive of our established identity as a tolerant nation and a world leader on promoting international human rights standards.
On first reading, the ‘It’ at the start of the second sentence seems to refer to the one-world government. On second reading, it seems more likely to be connected with Howard’s downgrading of our commitment. But a second reading is a big thing for a writer to ask for, and it should never be asked for on grounds of sense alone. Making sense straight away should be the first aim, and the more so the more your argument aspires to nuance. Paul Sheehan is probably our best example of how to do it properly. Before the Referendum, I thought the best-seller status of his book Among the Barbarians was an important checking move in the rush to republicanism of the progressivist intellectual middle stratum. (What the hell are we going to call it, us on the old social-democratic left who don’t want to be forcibly enlisted on the Darwinian right? And what are we going to call ourselves?) By bringing out in detail Australia’s rich debt to the colonial past, Sheehan made the visions of those who repudiated it look crass. He did this so well that I thought he was against the republican programme himself, and I was quite surprised, when I met him during the Sydney Olympics, to discover that he was for it. Discovering that, I realized on the spot that a republic might indeed be on the way, because when a line of thought achieves the capacity to generate and contain criticism of its own weaknesses, it begins to be strong. In sharp contrast to Margo Kingston’s piece, Sheehan’s ‘The Parties are Over’ in the 2000 volume remains an enduringly effective example of the constructively subversive essay, buttressing a position by taking account of its attendant difficulties. In the latest volume Sheehan is talking about something other than politics: ‘Miracle at Bert’s’ deals with a magic water that sounds as if it might confer eternal life. I would be in the market for a crate of it, if only to buy more time in which to read Sheehan. I don’t agree with him about the course that Australia’s future will necessarily take, but I wouldn’t want an Australian future without writers like him in it. Luckily that prospect is no longer in view.
I have confined this notice to politics because it is the field in which I have most needed instruction, and the Best Australian Essays series has done a lot to provide it. When my generation of expatriates went sailing to adventure, most of us believed that what we were leaving behind was a political backwater. In fact it was one of the most highly developed liberal democracies on earth, a fitting framework for the cultural expansion that has since made it the envy of nations many times its size. Part of the cultural expansion has been the discursive writing devoted to an explanation of how the liberal democracy developed in the first place. The landmark books made an obvious difference. Paul Kelly, for example, wrote a shelf of them, and although I have never been able to agree with the general drift of his opinions, I would have to admit that a good part of the detail in my own contrary opinions I got from him. Behind the books, however, lurks a less obvious determining factor: the proliferation of the essay. Up until World War II, the Australian essay was best exemplified by Walter Murdoch, whose belletrist treatment of a set theme would have been no surprise to Sir Roger de Coverley. The war correspondents, with the omnivorously curious Alan Moorehead to the fore, made the breakthrough that adapted journalism to complex subjects. Post-war, and in a multiplicity of genres, the essay made its exponential advance to the wealth of commentary we enjoy now, and enjoy all the more because the commentators are often commentating on each other. I didn’t have to wait for Watson’s book on Keating before I realized that I had made a bad mistake in belittling Keating’s capacity to improve his mind, if not his language. Essays from various hands convinced me that his sensitivity to culture went far beyond his covetous admiration for an ormolu clock or a teak table. I still think it a pity – and a pity for his beloved country, not just for himself – that he got his vision of Australia’s modern history from people who got theirs from Manning Clarke. But I won’t be guilty again of abetting a view of Keating that leaves out an essential nuance.
The word ‘nuance’ is worth repeating because it is not just an attribute of the essay, it is the essay’s reason for being: the essential characteristic that separates a mere performance from a real contribution. In this volume, the essays on culture tout court are mostly as subtle and illuminating as we have come to expect, spoiled for choice as we now are. To take one for the many, Helen Garner’s piece on journal-writing, called simply ‘I’, demonstrates all over again why her presence among the essayists so precisely echoes the presence of the late Gwen Harwood among the poets: the responsible intellectual instrument of a feminist who has loved men, her scrupulous reasoning is always looking for the weak point in her own position and accepting it as a further opportunity. Peter Porter’s memories of his reading when young in Queensland add up to a valuable example of what is becoming a characteristic expatriate theme: the mental journey home into the old Australian school system that taught its pupils to parse a sentence. That prescriptive training was the real secret behind the Australian expatriate wave of world conquest, and is the real secret behind Peter Conrad’s inclusion in this volume, even though he is only writing about Britney Spears, and dwells on the subject of the pop diva’s all-American boobs without a single mention of Kylie’s all-Aussie behind. Craven wasn’t going to miss out on a piece as well written as that.
*
The same poser will probably emerge in the next volume, when the editor will have to choose between a home-grown piece about Charles Conder – there was a fine one, by Angus Trumble, in the March issue of this magazine – and the stunning tour de force Barry Humphries turned in for the TLS. As a prosateur, it should hardly need saying, Humphries is talented to the point of genius, but he would be less able to prove it if he had not once, long ago, been obliged to sit still at a scarred desk and prove that he knew how a relative clause worked before he was given an early mark. Just as a living culture will attach itself only to a functional democratic structure, so the nuances will attach themselves only to a grammatical framework. There can be no real freedom without its underlying discipline. These volumes – and what an elegantly hefty set they make, all lined up – are encouraging evidence that the real freedom has somehow been preserved, despite the enthusiastically misdirected egalitarianism of the (wait for it) progressivist intellectual middle stratum. Strangely dedicated to assaulting the very idea of elitism in a nation of which to be a citizen is already to be a member of an elite, it is a stratum whose members, as I have already grown sick of saying, need a more portable name. In his book L’Imparfait du présent, Alain Finkielkraut thought of one. He called them the negligent vigilantes. I might pinch that for my next essay, if Noel Pearson doesn’t pinch it
first.
Australian Book Review, May 2003
Postscript
Patriotically thrilled, I permitted myself to go overboard – not about the book, which really was full of good things, but in my tacit suggestion that there was a wealth of other good things that had been left out. The truth about the Australian essay as a form of expression is that the general standard could go a lot higher yet and still be unremarkable. Apart from a widely shared inability to detect a counterfeit phrase before it is committed to paper, the main fault is conformity, especially among non-conformists. There is a massed choir of lone voices who draw inspiration from, instead of being put on the alert by, their ability to sing in unison. The result is a confident reliance on orthodoxy, as if it were a body of proven fact. Sadly, this is more likely to happen on the Left than on the Right, because the Right can still be relied on to produce the greater number of dedicated cranks willing to spoil one another’s party, whereas the Left regards its shared opinions as simply the normal configuration of rational thought. In newspaper think-pieces about grand politics, this normalization of ideological opinion is carried to such a degree that no authorities need be referred to except phantoms. Writing in the weekend edition of the Sydney Morning Herald for 8–9 September 2001, the respected political analyst Louise Williams wrote the following paragraph.
While local opinion polls show the Prime Minister’s tough posturing over the Tampa played fabulously at home, the same is not true overseas. Instead, the stand-off has raised serious questions about Australia’s place in the world and the immediate and future pitfalls of a Howard-led foreign policy that has turned Australia inwards.
In the less symmetrical world of recalcitrant fact, Howard’s handling of the Tampa incident raised no serious questions ‘overseas’ except among people who shared the views of Louise Williams. The only serious question raised anywhere was why Kim Beazley, at that time leading the Federal opposition, had no policies about illegal immigration that were notably different from Howard’s. But here comes another paragraph, leading on from the phantom overseas scrutineers of serious questions to another set of ghosts, the ‘experts’ and ‘insiders’ who seem to have no precise location, but are evenly distributed throughout the universe, connected through time and space by a strangely intense telepathic concern with Australian politics.
Under the two Howard governments, experts say, Australia’s international prestige has declined, in terms of Canberra’s capacity to influence international events and of our ability to win international support. ‘You could say that Australia currently does not have much coin,’ one insider said.
But after the Tampa incident Australia had enough coin among people-smugglers to make their trade look a lot less profitable, which could be said to have been the first and most important international event that an Australian government at the time should have been interested in. There is charm however in Ms Williams’s confidence that she can cite the opinion of ‘one insider’ without making us wonder what all the other insiders might be saying to the contrary. The ‘one insider’ kept on cropping up in different contexts throughout her piece. Presumably he or she was not always the same person, but invariably the same central view was propagated, namely that Howard was ruling the country by a confidence trick aimed at the gullible population, who either didn’t know or didn’t care that their once proud nation was sinking into disrepute overseas. Finally the views of the protean ‘one insider’ were summed up by Ms Williams’s most imposingly qualified consultant, the ‘one expert’.
The biggest folly, however, may be taking foreign affairs leads from opinion polls conducted in Australia’s suburbs, said one expert, noting that international issues are inherently complex and do not lend themselves to popular political solutions.
Three years later, this cherished central tenet of the ‘one expert’ helped lead the Australian Labor Party to clamorous defeat, after which – but not, disastrously, before which – it was at last realized by some of those in charge of the party machine that an opinion poll conducted in Australia’s suburbs is exactly what a Federal election is. Those of us who would like to see the ALP restored to some of its former glory and fighting strength had better realize that a recovery will be slow to happen if the progressive intelligentsia goes on writing bad essays. They are often written from genuine compassion – some of the immediate consequences of the Tampa incident were hard to be proud of – but high feelings turn loose expression into low comedy, and the result is a growing subliterature of personal statements that express nothing substantial except the author’s impatience. There could have been a book of them ten times as big as the one I reviewed. I would have had a lot of fun reviewing it, but beyond a certain point there is no reward in blasting away at a sitting duck.
SLOUCHING TOWARDS YEATS
Yeats was a great poet who was also the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy. Do we have to absorb the philosophy before we can appreciate the poetry? If we are lucky enough to be in a state of ignorance, the question won’t come up. The poetry will get to us first. Suppose you’ve heard this much: that Yeats’s best stuff came late. So you pick up the 1950 edition of the Collected Poems and start from the back. The last few lines in the book are the first you see.
And now my utmost mystery is out:
A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner:
Under it wisdom stands, and I alone –
Of all Arabia’s lovers I alone –
Nor dazzled by the embroidery, nor lost
In the confusion of its night-dark folds,
Can hear the armed man speak.
Forty years ago, when I first read those lines, I had to remind myself to start breathing again. They still hit me with the same force, and I still can’t fully understand them. But I began to understand them when I realized that putting together a phrase like ‘dazzled by the embroidery’ was something hardly anybody could do. ‘A woman’s beauty is a storm-tossed banner’ is something an averagely gifted poet might fluke, although not often. To write ‘dazzled by the embroidery’, however, you have to possess the means to put ordinary-sounding words together in an extraordinarily resonant way.
That was what Yeats really meant by his seemingly twee talk of ‘articulating sweet sounds together’. In his earlier poetry, that richly combinative capacity was always operating, if only intermittently condensing to full force, and in his later poetry – say from Responsibilities onwards – it attained incandescent fusion more and more often, until, with The Tower and all the poetry that followed, far into his old age, he was tremendous all the time. Except for Professor Ricks, who finds the later Yeats less a poet than a rhetorician, nobody sensitive to poetry doubts the magnificence of Yeats’s steadily maturing achievement, his wresting of complexity out of mere fluency; and the otherwise acute professor could have reached his contrary opinion only after a small asteroid had passed through his brain, perhaps while he was listening to Bob Dylan.
Apart from such cosmic interference, nothing can get between Yeats’s mature poetry and the reader except the magnitude of the attendant scholarship. Unfortunately that magnitude has now received a massive augmentation. The second and final volume of R.F. Foster’s whopping biography of Yeats is Pelion, just as the first volume was Ossa, and now both mountains are piled on top of what was already a great dividing range, with Yeats’s unassisted voice squeaking thinly on the other side of it, hard to hear even in its valleys. Many learned reviewers will be grateful for Foster’s thoroughness. Let’s try not being grateful.
The defiant lines spoken by the Arabian lover (ah, how I did, how I do now more than ever, fancy myself as that Arabian lover, poised on a racing dromedary) put a rousing end to ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, which was pinned to the tail of the 1950 Collected Poems only as a result of a posthumous round-up, and is actually not a very late poem at all. Barely latish, it was first published in 1923. Alas, it was not published in The Tower, Yeats’s mightily confident 1928 book of po
ems that contained ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘Among School Children’, ‘All Souls’ Night’ and other knockouts in such profusion that even Professor Ricks must sometimes wonder whether Blonde on Blonde quite survives the comparison. But ‘Desert Geometry, or The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, to give it its full title, made its debut as the introduction to Book II in the first, 1923 edition of A Vision, Yeats’s prose summa of all things mystically deep. This gives Foster the chance – nay, the mandate – to explain a living poem in terms of a stone-dead rigmarole. Here is a sample of Foster:
The alternative title, ‘Desert Geometry’, hints that against the phases of astrologically determined personality a diagrammatic version of historical process is to be sketched out. This replicates a spiral movement, for which WBY found authority in philosophers back to Heraclitus, and which also expresses the form of each person’s journey into consciousness, in constant tension with his ‘daimon’.
Clearer now? Foster himself follows up with a sample from A Vision. Risking our sanity, let us do the same.
