Inside Outside

by Andrew Riemer

  Why my parents tolerated all this is beyond my comprehension. They claimed that it was out of pity for the unfortunate wife, but that was clearly an insufficient explanation. I suspect that their decision to keep on seeing this couple, providing them with food and drink, when their restricted circle of acquaintances nevertheless contained much less outrageous, altogether more civilised people, was a result of the deep spiritual disturbance produced by their harsh and in many ways joyless life. These were people you could not envy, despite their comfortable financial circumstances. At least they did not treat my mother, who was mortally ashamed of her poverty-stricken appearance, and of the way in which her fingers were covered with evil sores and scabs, with the woundingly contemptuous civility she encountered on the few occasions that we visited our smart friends in the Eastern Suburbs. (‘What a sweet dress! Who made it for you?’) My parents could even feel superior to the former landowner and his tormented wife. Perhaps they could see themselves, briefly and provisionally, as more fortunate than these emotionally stunted creatures. But the deepest reason for such an odd choice of friends, for their tolerating the intolerable when other much less serious offences were condemned with unforgiving determination, was, I am convinced, that exile, the half-life or living death they were leading, had somehow thrown their emotional and ethical responses entirely out of balance.

  Because the world of Epping seemed to them so alien, because they were adrift in an environment to which they found it very difficult to relate, their attitudes towards their own kind—with whom there were fewer barriers of language or custom—lacked the discrimination, even perhaps finesse, they had exercised in their social relations in the past. The spiritual ills of migration and exile manifested themselves in curious and disturbing ways; the dislocation from familiar patterns of life, the absence of that network of social and family relationships which had sustained them and given substance to their existence, produced eccentricities, curious aberrations of behaviour or judgment which revealed themselves, it seems to me, as much in their odd choice of friends as in their financial miscalculations, or in the fantasies they entertained about the possibilities of life in their new land.

  The spectral life led by people like my parents, who were by no means entirely cut off from Australian society yet were never quite at ease in it, received its most powerful commemoration in the awesome and alarming figure of Patrick White’s Wandering Jew, the tormented Himmelfarb. Neither my parents nor any of their acquaintances approached the intellectual strength of White’s extraordinary creation, nor were they capable of enduring the self-scrunity or self-abnegation with which Himmelfarb lacerates himself. His predicament, illuminated by the intense light of White’s vision, nevertheless reflects the experiences of those who may have suffered less intensely, yet suffered all the same—even if their sufferings had at times the characteristics of farce rather than high tragedy.

  Riders in the Chariot was published in 1961. The date is, to my mind, crucial. This was the time when the confusing and contradictory pressures on people who had come to Australia in the immediate aftermath of the war combined to reveal to them the particular nature of their predicament. They had, by that time, lived in Australia long enough for its critical and disturbing impact to have become somewhat blunted. They had been away from Europe long enough for the irresistible need to escape brutality and horror to be replaced by a tentative nostalgia for a lost world. By that time many had lost the febrile energy that had sustained them through the war years and had allowed them to survive the trials of living in an alien environment. They no longer needed to struggle to learn the basic tools of communication or physical survival. Some had prospered. Many, like my parents, were at least making a living. They could relax their vigilance and the fierce determination to survive that had seen them through the horrors of war and the immediate confusions of migration. Many were exhausted, physically and also spiritually. Consequently, they turned their gaze inwards, restricting their engagement with life, going through the motions of their daily business, but betraying little vitality and no joy. Many held themselves aloof from the largely uncomprehending world in which they were forced to live, while, at the same time, they grew increasingly alienated from their more successful and confident co-exiles—just as Himmelfarb experiences a powerful disgust and nausea as he crosses the Red Sea of the Harbour on his way to the Rosetrees in Paradise East.

  Like Himmelfarb, my parents came at this time to be haunted by the past and by an acute sense of loss. What haunted them was, nevertheless, entirely different from those images of a rich Judaeo-Germanic cultural and theological tradition that enter into a complex counterpoint with the mundane world of Sarsaparilla and Barranugli in the pages of Riders in the Chariot. They, like many postwar migrants, had lost a brittle, materialistic, entirely secular way of life; consequently their torment was tinged less by a metaphysical guilt of the sort Himmelfarb suffers, and more by regret, nostalgia, and a growing tendency to romanticise the good old prewar days. They searched for substitutes for that lost world, imagining that they found them in two curious institutions of migrant culture that began to emerge in the late fifties, and reached their golden age during the following decade.

  Both of these institutions—espresso-bars and holidays in the mountains—proved difficult to transplant into Australian soil. The espresso-bars were a faint echo of that cafe-culture which reached its zenith in the first thirty years of the century in the fabled institutions of Vienna, Berlin, Prague and Budapest. Those vaulted, gilded, pillared and coffered palaces could not, of course, be replicated in Sydney—though that bastion of ‘native’ culture, which migrant society rarely if ever patronised, the Cahill’s chain of coffee houses, provided, architecturally at least, antipodean versions of such establishments. The espresso-bars of Sydney were much more functional affairs of plate-glass, laminex and plastic, generously endowed with the favoured kidney-shaped furniture of the late fifties. Nor was there any of the heady intellectual talk, the ferment of ideas—at times radical, at times alarmingly reactionary—that distinguished those hives of Central European political and cultural life. The denizens of the Sydney espresso-bars were bereft of ideas; they were beyond politics. Being generally contemptuous of the world in which they had chosen to live, Australian political life rarely engaged their interests, except on those occasions when they could voice their fears that the country would be taken over by the Communists. Like the rest of the nation, they remained generally ignorant of groups of former Nazis and other European right-wing extremists who were attempting at that time to penetrate the fabric of Australian political life.

  The earliest espresso-bars were to be found in the Eastern Suburbs, but one eventually opened in North Sydney, and it was there that my parents found a milieu where they could achieve some sort of a communal life, the likes of which they lacked in their humdrum daily existence. The clientele of these establishments was solidy Austro-Hungarian with a sprinkling of other nationalities. They sat on rickety chairs at flimsy tables, drinking glutinous coffee and consuming large quantities of whipped cream, rich custard trapped between sheets of puff pastry, or strudels oozing with sour cherries. The women had a characteristic look that immediately identified them as members of this society. They wore too much jewellery—a legacy of the days when you had to put all your wealth into gold. One lady, notorious among her compatriots, kept on ‘losing’ valuable rings and bracelets—in planes, on the street, at the cinema—until the insurance companies declared her to be a decidedly bad risk. Their hair, often fiercely tinted, was fashioned into hard shapes resembling crash helmets. Their clothes were made of expensive but excessively colourful stuff. They looked hard and calculating, and many of them were precisely that.

  The women were often the driving forces behind their husbands’ financial affairs. They were able to strike harder bargains, were generally ruthless and unflinching in their determination to succeed in their business ventures—usually in the rag trade, though frequently
branching out into more sophisticated forms of speculation, especially in real estate: blocks of flats, groups of shops for rental, and occasionally development projects of a more ambitious sort. Their husbands gave, on the whole, a gentler, more flabby impression. They favoured suits made of soft, light-grey material, often worn with white shoes at a time when no public significance was attached to such footwear. They would spend hours sitting on those spindly-legged chairs, tieless, their shirts unbuttoned at the top to reveal tufts of greying fur, their jackets slung casually over their shoulders.

  In their own eyes they were men of affairs; they boasted about their many successes, their cleverness in outwitting rivals and competitors; they claimed to be utterly contemptuous of anyone who failed to succeed in a dog-eat-dog world. But their wives—keeping alive the pretence of a woman’s proper role in life, talking of clothes and scandals, of their children’s startling achievements at school, university or in their professions—knew better. They hid behind the mask of Central European femininity, yet their determination to succeed yielded to none. They courted success with a steely-eyed dedication; they realised, as I think their husbands did not, that the accumulation of wealth—the more substantial the better—was the only avenue of satisfaction open to them in a world where they would always be isolated by barriers of language, social habits and race.

  The urge to succeed, to gain and to preserve wealth—all that they valued in life—prompted many of them to embark on very questionable courses of action. Some attempted to continue several common practices of their former way of life, not realising that the world had changed, that they were now living in a very different social climate. Seated around the laminex-topped tables of their favourite cafes, they indulged in the age-old sport of matchmaking, arranging irresistibly suitable marriages for their sons and daughters, for their nieces and nephews, or indeed for any other young people they happened to know. In my twenties I fell victim to one of these campaigns with embarrassing results.

  One day an acquaintance of my parents telephoned, asking me to make up a table for bridge. The invitation surprised me. I did not know these people very well and did not care for them in the least, but they were so insistent that I accepted, probably with bad grace. The evening, which I had been dreading throughout the week, proved interminable. I was trapped in an overfurnished living room, constantly urged to taste all manner of costly delicacies, while several groups of middle-aged Hungarians argued vociferously over the best way of making three-no-trumps. Weeks later, after I had mentioned to my parents (probably for the hundredth time) what a crashingly boring evening it had been, the truth came out. That roomful of bridge players was to contain three special guests: an elderly couple and their daughter, who was (unbeknown to my hosts) the sister of one of my good friends from university days. When my parents had pointed out—after a number of coy hints had been dropped—the folly of this attempt at matchmaking, the unfortunate young woman and her parents were quickly warned off, to be replaced by three obliging bridge players culled from the society of the espresso-bars. For many weeks after that disastrous evening, my hostess kept on reminding my mother what a golden opportunity I (a poorly-paid academic without prospects) had thrown away.

  A few of the people who began to congregate in these espresso-bars in the late fifties were to achieve spectacular successes which brought them, at times, notoriety well beyond their restricted circle, thereby doing much harm to the esteem in which Australian society held this group. Some, like my parents, were to reel from crisis to financial crisis, always contriving to keep their heads above water, but never finding the security they longed for. By far the greatest number, however, became people of considerable substance—not the fabulous wealth amassed by their notorious compatriots, whom they criticised vehemently while secretly respecting them, yet much greater wealth than many of them had ever known. They had large incomes and a surplus of means that could be spent on luxuries and indulgences. Collectively and individually they formed a not-insignificant force within the economy, yet they had little ambition to engage with any facet of public life.

  They directed their economic power inwards, towards various forms of self-indulgence, often to impress their compatriots and fellow exiles. Many lived in spectacularly stylish houses and apartments. They drove expensive cars. They invested considerable sums in furs and jewellery, even though they knew that in Australia these items were not the negotiable commodities they had been in the financially chaotic world from which they came. They began to travel abroad at a time when it was prohibitively expensive, even by sea. Since they trusted none of their employees, being at times pathologically suspicious of even the most obviously honest of people, they preferred to take trips of short duration, travelling by air in those days before the cut-price world of the 747 cattle-trucks. They spent large amounts of money on fares; at their destinations they stayed in the best hotels. In their earlier life a week’s holiday in a modest boarding house in Vienna, Rome or Paris represented the usual limit of their ambitions; now they travelled vast distances to stay at the Crillon, the Dorchester and the Waldorf Astoria.

  Despite their affluence and readiness to spend, they seemed to experience little satisfaction or stimulation from their enviable way of life. Though they travelled widely, they showed little interest in the places they visited. In Paris their ambition did not extend beyond shopping, strolling along the Champs Elysées and the obligatory visit to the Lido or the Folies Bergères. Some acquaintances of my parents got in touch with me one day when I was living in London in the early sixties. They said that they would like to take me out somewhere; what was there to do in London? They were not interested in any of the suggestions I made—a play, a concert perhaps, or a musical? We ended up at a Hungarian restaurant in Soho which served vile chicken paprika. They complained that London was filthy, boring, that the people were drab and lacking in style. The shops were not much better than at Double Bay, and certainly not a patch on Düsseldorf. How could anyone live in such a hole? Yet back in Sydney, seated around kidney-shaped tables, they and people like them lamented endlessly about the cultural desert in which they were forced to live. In sharp contrast to the much smaller number of prewar migrants from Central Europe, many of whom made a remarkable contribution to the appreciation of the arts, especially music, in this country, these people made almost no attempt to foster cultural life in their new home—apart perhaps from taking out a subscription to the orchestral concerts (where one of the series was nicknamed ‘goulash night’ by members of the orchestra), which they would usually endure until interval.

  They were too much stunned by their wartime experiences, it seems to me, to engage with life in any positive or satisfying way. They were passive even in their greed and acquisitiveness. Though they hungered after success, they had neither the spiritual nor the cultural equipment to channel that success into life-sustaining directions. They were, many of them, empty shells as they sat around tables in espresso-bars chattering, matchmaking, boasting and strutting in their finery. The world outside looked on them with a mixture of amazement and curiosity—it was in the early sixties that wealthy Hungarian Jews entered into the sarcastic mythology of urban Australia.

  Only behind the plate-glass windows of their favourite cafes could they find a modicum of solace and a social structure, artificial though it was, to keep at bay the despair many of them experienced and tried to brave with rich clothes and noisy ways. Their plight was to be pitied, though it was easy to ridicule them, because they were suffering the worst afflictions of dislocation. They could not sufficiently master the language or the customs of their new home to dare to move out of their cosy and comfortable ghettoes. They felt trapped. Their old world had ceased to exist. At that time there were considerable dangers in their undertaking even a brief visit to Budapest, Australian passports clutched tightly to indicate that they were, or so they hoped, beyond the reach of the secret police and other potential instruments of terror. Their new world remained hos
tile and perplexing.

  The living death they were obliged to endure was much exacerbated by the absence of a spiritual or at least a satisfyingly cultural dimension to their lives. The espresso-bars were as close as they could approach to an involvement in a community or a traditional way of life. In this their predicament was very different from that depicted by White in the figure of Himmelfarb. He, at least, feels the acute torment of the loss of a rich communal and spiritual life. His sense of guilt and betrayal, while imposing on him far greater suffering than that experienced by the frequently plangent denizens of the espresso-bars, at least confers a necessary humility on him. People of my parents’ acquaintance were also, in a way, much less fortunate than members of several other migrant groups who had come to Australia in the years after the war. Those people had brought with them strong traditions of social life, religious practice, and even of ethnic or tribal loyalties. They were, it is true, frequently locked even more securely into their ghettoes than the more cosmopolitan society among which my parents moved, and many kept alive ugly regional or ethnic enmities (of a kind entirely alien to the culture of the espresso-bars) which still erupt from time to time in public violence.