The Meaning of Recognition
Page 27
The main concern of fundamentalist Islam is with moderate Islam, and especially with those Islamic states which, if they have not precisely embraced democracy, have nevertheless tried to banish theocracy from the business of government. That fundamentalism loathes the Western democracies goes without saying: or rather, it goes with a lot of saying, at the top of the voice. But the real horror, for the diehard theocrats, is the country with a large number of Muslims that has been infiltrated by the liberal ideas of the West. As a rule of thumb, you can say that the terrorists would like to wreak edifying vengeance on any predominantly Islamic country where you can see even a small part of a woman’s face. Starting with Pakistan, you can see more and more of a woman’s face as you move East. It was therefore predictable, after September 11th, that the terrorists would bend their efforts in the same direction. I only wish that I had predicted it straight away: we would all like to be blessed with as much foresight as hindsight. As things happened, it took me a few days.
A few days after the towers collapsed in New York, I flew East myself, from London to Sydney, thence to keep a speaking engagement in Adelaide. I flew by Malaysia Air, on a flight in which the crew outnumbered the passengers. The transit lounge in Kuala Lumpur was where I had my revelation. There was a prayer room for the faithful and an open bar for the rest of us. The two schools of thought were getting along fine, but it wasn’t hard to imagine another breed of traveller who wouldn’t stand for it. Here was an obvious target, and there were plenty more on the way to Australia, including the whole of Indonesia, where the fundamentalists were getting a lot better hearing than they were in Malaysia, but only because the Indonesian government was even more scared of what they might do.
My speech in Adelaide was supposed to entertain several hundred Australian businessmen, but I threw in a few sentences designed to register on a different kind of laugh meter. Making jokes about the Australian intellectuals is a dangerous business when your audience is anti-intellectual anyway, which, I think it fair to say, my audience was: there is too good a chance of flattering a prejudice. I had to make it clear that I was joking about my fellow professionals, not my enemies. But compelled by the memory of my revelation in Kuala Lumpur, I couldn’t resist caning the Australian gauchiste commentators for their persistence in representing Australia as racist, exclusionist, illiberal and immature. I did my best to make my message funny, but I also tried hard to make it clear. Australia, though it certainly had the tragedy of the Aboriginals to haunt its conscience, was one of the most mature, generous and genuinely multicultural democracies on earth. For that reason alone, Australia would be in the firing line.
Well, now it is, and sadly our best hope will be that some of our neighbouring countries to the North and West will draw most of the fire. Next month I have to be in Australia again, to deliver a speech in Sydney and Melbourne: a speech about libraries. In the speech, which I am composing now and have put aside to write this, I will propose, among other things, the founding in Australia of an Islamic library to which all the world’s genuine Islamic scholars who are free to travel might come, there to continue the work of bringing a critical scrutiny to the sacred texts – the very work that was forcibly interrupted by the theocrats in the nineteenth century, an interruption that led directly to the disasters of today. But to get there in time I will have to fly there, and I can’t say I’m looking forward to the trip. I will be an old man soon, and the fact that I will be flying home through a long war-zone will bother me less than it would once have done, because I have had a life. But nobody wants his certainty of death pre-empted by a bunch of maniacs impelled by their certainty of Heaven, and the thought of all those slain or maimed young Australians, so full of life because they were too young even to realize what it means to be born and raised in a free country, will bring me home in despair.
Guardian, 16 November 2002
Postscript
The above words were not easy to find at the time, but something needed to be said. Later on, at the ceremony in St Paul’s Cathedral, I had only to read out the short lesson set down for me, and that should have been easier. But some of the bereaved parents were present. It was hard to look them in the eye. The Guardian gave my article a title I would not have chosen myself: ‘The Day My Country Lost its Innocence’. I didn’t believe that modern Australia had ever been innocent in the sense that was obviously meant. In that sense, Australia hadn’t been innocent since Gallipoli; and there were plenty of bereaved loved ones after World War II who were well aware of what had been at stake; and the European immigrants who helped to enrich Australian culture post-war brought hard knowledge with them. But in the legal sense Australia was certainly innocent of the Bali bombing, although the attempt to pronounce it guilty began almost straight away. Australia was an ally of the United States; and the United States backed Israel; and Israel oppressed the Palestinians; and the terrorists were consequently doing their bit for justice. Thus went the line of reasoning. Perhaps there was something to it – a lot of intelligent people believed it – but it was notable that the terrorists themselves, when apprehended, said little in its support. They smiled a lot, as if they had even bigger things in mind.
OUR FIRST BOOK
This year we celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of the first book to be printed and published in Australia. Though our first book was snappily entitled New South Wales General Standing Orders Selected from the General Orders Issued by Former Governors, it is unlikely that very many people were madly excited even at the time, and today the anniversary of its first appearance is scarcely front-page news, although the book contains at least one permanently newsworthy item of information, which I will get to later on. For now we need merely note that an all-Australian book is no longer a novelty. Today we are quite accustomed to buying books that were written, printed and published in Australia. If we wished to, we could build a personal library of Australian books and if we wanted to own them all we would need a house as big as all of Kerry Packer’s houses put together. In my own personal library in London I started an Australian section about twenty years ago. Every time I make a visit home to Australia I bring an extra, empty holdall. By the end of the visit it is full of Australian books, some of them dating back to beyond the time I left for Europe in late 1961. They were the Australian books I wasn’t reading when I was a student because I was too busy reading British and American ones. I didn’t find Australian books so interesting then. Now I do. So back they go to London to be added to my Australian section, which by now is crowding out a whole wall of its own. My apartment is on the sixth floor of a warehouse conversion in the Butler’s Wharf area south of Tower Bridge, and I have already been advised by the mortgage surveyors that if I add many more books to my library the day must inevitably come when the beams under the floor will give way and my whole apartment will collapse into the apartment below, which will in turn collapse into the apartment below that, and so on until about fifty people are wedged into the underground car-park with plenty to read while they await rescue.
The book that tips the balance could well be the Collected Poems of Les Murray, which our splendidly independent publisher Duffy and Snellgrove brought out this year. It is a big book, just as its author is a big man. I already have one copy that the publishers kindly sent to me, but I have bought another while I am here. I want to keep the first copy clean and use this second copy to make notes. This second copy, when I squeeze it into the Australian poetry shelves in my apartment, might be just enough to crack the creaking beams. It would be a fitting way to go. My dying thought as I descend, however, might well be the opposite. In the days when I was young and healthy, I never saw myself as a bookish person, just as Australia didn’t see itself as a bookish nation. In fact it already was, but the fact had not yet become clear, and even today it has still not become as clear as it ought to be. If I have a single aim in this address, it is to try to bring that fact further into the light. But I would not have the aim if I had not begun in dark
ness, at a time when I saw myself as an athlete, in a nation of athletes.
There are good reasons for our being more immediately excited by physical prowess than by spiritual refinement. Our children want to play in the sun or run to the surf more than they want to sit down to study, and we want them to want that. When we say ‘He’s always got his nose in a book’ we might say it proudly, but even today we are usually a bit worried about the ‘always’. When I was young, ‘He’s always got his nose in a book’ was a confession of desperation about one’s own son’s physical constitution and an accusation of weirdness about someone else’s. ‘She’s always got her nose in a book’ was less troublesome. Reading was, after all, women’s business. Heroes were men and men did things. If occasionally they wrote things, it was because they had done them first. The excitement was in the doing: the excitement was in the action. There was, there always had been, and there still is, something to that emphasis. Finally it’s the life of the mind that counts, and all other forms of life must lead to that: after all, the mind is the last thing we will have, if we are lucky. But I would be the last to deny that in the sentence mens sana in corpore sano it’s the corpore sano that has the first appeal. Certainly it was the way I felt when I was still in fighting trim, and I want you to know, as I stand here before you – you bursting with sun-drenched vigour and I visibly the wreck of a human being – that it was only by an accident of fate that I did not become an Australian sporting hero, a successor to Murray Rose or Lew Hoad, a precursor of Ian Thorpe or Lleyton Hewitt.
The accident of fate was lack of sporting talent, but it took a while for that to become manifest. Growing up in Kogarah, on Botany Bay, I was within easy cycling distance of Ramsgate baths. I would spend the whole weekend at the baths, telling my mother that I had no time to mow the lawn because I was training for the 110 yards freestyle. In those days the races were still measured in yards instead of metres, Australia not yet having separated itself from all the other English-speaking nations including America by converting its measurement system in order to make it easier for the Japanese and Germans to sell us cars. Unbeknownst to my mother, when I was at Ramsgate baths I rarely completed the full 110 yards freestyle. What I completed was the ten yards freestyle. I was among the first of my generation to perfect the tumble turn. I mean among the first of my generation of amphibian dabblers, the boys who hung around the pool and occasionally dived in, but didn’t do much of all that swimming from one end to the other over and over for hours at a stretch that the serious swimmers did. But my tumble turn was almost as convincing as theirs. Unfortunately, instead of employing my tumble turn to increase my speed over a given number of laps, I employed it to impress girls. For this, ten yards of freestyle was all that I deemed necessary. Starting five yards from the end of the pool, I would execute a tumble turn, swim another five yards in the opposite direction, and stop, trying to look as if I had been engaged in polishing a minor technical point in my otherwise impeccable tumble turn.
One of the girls actually was impressed. Her name was Alison and she looked very beautiful in a Speedo. Eventually I found that it was easier to go on impressing Alison by escorting her to the sandpit for a long discussion of my future as a swimming star, a discussion in which, you will not be surprised to hear, I did most of the talking. But her eyes shone, and that was all that counted, even if they shone with the porcelain glaze of boredom. The full story of what happened in the sandpit can be read in my book Unreliable Memoirs and I won’t bother you with a précis of it now. The book is still available in most good bookshops and some bad ones, and if you want to consult the original manuscript you can find it in the archives of my kind host for this address, the State Library of New South Wales. Turn to the paragraph about what happened in the sandpit and you can see that the page is stained with tears of happiness. Sufficient to say now that almost nothing happened in the water, and that the results of my intensive training were finally revealed to my mother at the Boys’ Brigade swimming carnival at Drummoyne in which I did indeed complete the 110 yards freestyle, but only after all the other competitors had left the pool. Let me assure you however that, hard though it might be to believe, I had the physique, I had the strength, and I even had the ambition. What I did not have was the true desire, except the desire for Alison, which was a different matter. Sitting beside my mother, Alison was at the Boys’ Brigade swimming carnival too and I never saw her again.
It was a similar story with my tennis. In the private schools of Australia, and the so-called public schools of England, there has always been a certain type of boy who, when he says ‘my cricket’ or ‘my rugby’, really means it. He is in possession of his manly sport: you can tell by the thickness of his neck and the cinema credits embroidered on his blazer pocket. When I referred to ‘my tennis’ it was with less justification, but it can’t be denied that until the age of about eleven I was a hot prospect. My ability to sustain a long rally was already attracting attention. Every day of the school holidays I sustained the rally against the back wall of our house, my only available opponent, and the attention I attracted was that of Mrs Thorpe, who lived next door. Of delicate sensibility, she had been advised by her physicians to get plenty of sleep during the day. While I was sustaining a long rally, her head would appear suddenly over the back fence, teeth bared in a snarl and her eyeballs resembling little pink windmills. When she pointed out to my mother that sleep was made impossible by my ability to sustain a long rally, I was forbidden to practise. But when my mother was out, the lure of Wimbledon was too strong, and once again I was out in the yard hitting my tennis ball against the back wall a few thousand times while I dreamed of beating Pancho Gonzalez and Mrs Thorpe dreamed of beating me to death. I knew I was behaving badly but I couldn’t stop. Fame beckoned. I had seen Lew Hoad in the newsreels and I wanted to be him.
Incidentally, when Thomas Mann was writing his last book in California, the expanded version of that marvellous novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, he had a photograph on his desk to provide inspiration for the portrait he was creating of an irresistibly attractive young adolescent male. Remember you heard this here first, because no reputable scholar or commentator has yet spotted it: that photograph was of Lew Hoad. I offer this item of information for any PhD student who might be contemplating a thesis about the influence of Australian tennis-players on the modern German novel. Anyway, I knew how Thomas Mann must have felt, although in my case the longings aroused by Lew Hoad’s freckled, jug-eared and shyly smiling dial were rather different. I merely wanted to be an Aussie tennis player victorious at Wimbledon. The back wall was my gateway to glory. But I later found that the skills acquired did not necessarily transfer to an actual tennis court, where the opponent was more mobile than a brick wall. The dream, however, has never died, and even today I can’t resist giving Lleyton Hewitt my advice. Since the advice is delivered to the television set, he probably doesn’t hear it directly, but thought-waves can be powerful. I’m fairly sure that my advice was the reason he eventually abandoned his habit of wearing his peaked cap backwards at all times, even in bed. As science has now established, wearing a peaked cap backwards is the universal sign of the international idiot. No matter how handsome, no young male tennis player looks good that way and Lleyton looked worse than most, especially when seen in close-up with his fist in the air pulling the intestines out of an imaginary opponent while he yelled silent abuse at his girlfriend in the grandstand, a tirade which apparently meant that he was doing well instead of badly. More recently he has still been yelling the silent abuse but the cap is no longer always in evidence. When it is, it still tends to go on backwards, and I still tend to shout at the television set, my face contorted in a way, I am told, that bears a disturbing resemblance to the way Lleyton looks while disputing a line call. The best way of putting it is that he and I have a problem and we are both working on it. But the problem would not be there if I were not still, in my secret heart, an Australian sporting hero and man of action.