We saw ourselves as an élite. Within the walls of an institution some of us still referred to as the Varsity, we imagined that culture and civilisation could be preserved against the forces of ignorance and philistinism. We looked upon the place as a custodian of the finer things of life. There were of course rowdies and vulgarians among us. Engineers were, almost to a man, beyond the pale. Medical students could be trusted to get hopelessly drunk and unruly at rugby games or at the wickedly fashionable rowing-club dance held each year on an island in Middle Harbour. Yet a curious bond of affection tied these elements of university life to most others—even including those social butterflies who methodically failed subject after subject, repeating year after year, without the benefit, it is true, of their Commonwealth Scholarships which they forfeited after chalking up the requisite number of failures. Most of us observed the rituals of the institution with religious dedication. We did not set foot on the lawn of the quadrangle until the day we graduated, and we always invaded the city on Commem Day with pranks we thought were the acme of wit and sophistication. We took part in only one demonstration in those years, to demand traffic lights at the dangerous crossing of Parramatta Road in front of the Union Steps. We were horrified when we found out that a notorious ‘Red’ had tried to turn the demonstration into a political event.
All that was light-years ago. It would be pointless trying to defend those easygoing, naive and self-indulgent days to the politically sophisticated, at times doctrinaire students and academics of the nineties. That world has vanished, perhaps inevitably, under the pressure of a much more complex society which no longer shares the unanimity of goal and aspiration we thought we espoused. Individually it was, nevertheless, a fulfilling time. We grew, we gained intellectual and social skills, and we were, on the whole, at peace with the world. We knew that after we left university there would be jobs for us in a world our parents had sought to make safe for our sake. Few of us had any concerns or alarms about the future; we flourished in that confidence, and, naturally, we also had a whale of a time. We indulged in fantasies of urbanity and sophistication which were often inspired by our immersion in things English and by the English writers we were reading. Some of us mimicked upper-class English speech and manners; an excessively broad Australian accent was to be shunned if at all possible, and even those of us that had attended a certain type of school did our best to avoid saying ‘haitch’. Sometimes we sounded like parodies of a poor imitation of Noël Coward’s plays. In our fantasy-life we transformed the campus on Parramatta Road into an image of what we thought Oxford or Cambridge must be like.
Above all, we were a community; we had the sense of sharing a privileged world which conferred membership on us irrespective of our background, nationality or religion. Given the tenor of much of Australian society in the fifties, universities were remarkably free of bigotry or race-hatred. In the freemasonry of those marvellous days, men and women formed easy and genuine relationships. Some of us experimented with sex in a mostly mild and uncomplicated way, though there was always much boasting—often transparently fallacious—about our exploits at parties and dances. The friendships we formed were remarkably free of those prejudices which marred many aspects of Australian life. At our parties the sexes were not segregated in the way popular mythology depicts the social practices of the time. We tolerated and felt affection for each other irrespective of gender, religion or race. We were, in short, contented, perhaps improperly so, yet we were generally cheerful—few of us displayed the misery and surliness of contemporary undergraduate life.
The allure this world had for me needs no explanation. Gone were the tensions, anxieties and uncertainties of the past, the incomprehension that met me in the days before university, a time that came to seem in retrospect a living death. I began to lose the dull anonymity of my adolescence. I also began to acquire or to manufacture a viable personality. Much of it was a mixture of silliness and precocity, but it was great fun. Within my limited financial means I started to experiment with a type of dandyism. I also adopted the affectation of drinking black coffee without sugar, and discovered to my amazement that it tasted better that way. My friends and I explored ‘unconventional’ food of a kind entirely unknown either in my family or in the traditional cuisine of my friends’ world. We discovered that curry was not necessarily a handful of Vencat thrown into a mince stew at the last moment, thereby turning the whole unsavoury mess a bilious green. We encountered artichokes but weren’t quite sure how they should be eaten. The first time we saw avocados we wondered whether they ought to be cooked.
We attended many balls and dances, mostly at the Trocadero, always carrying, in brown paper bags, the obligatory half-bottle of Pimms for our partners. At the end we always linked hands and performed what we thought was the cancan. Each August we went skiing, staying in a hut above Guthega Dam. The place had no amenities of any sort; we had to walk on skis for the last two or three miles, carrying clothes and provisions for the week. There were no lifts or tows; you climbed laboriously up a small hill, pointed your skis downhill, and fell in a heap at the bottom. Most of the time, we talked endlessly, drank very moderately, listened to long-playing records of Vivaldi, whose music was all the rage, and of Tom Lehrer, which had been smuggled into the country by a few adventurous spirits who had been to America and had dared to run the risk of bringing back wicked banned material.
Surprisingly, given my dismal record in the Faculty of Medicine, I discovered a measure of academic success, despite skipped lectures, despite hastily flung-together essays, despite the other familiar sins of student life. English turned out to be my strongest subject. When friends expressed well-meaning surprise at this, I shrugged it off with a sense of considerable inner pride. Buried somewhere within my consciousness, however, were the first anarchic suspicions about the reason for this success: here was another manifestation of those arts of mimicry which I had acquired in the playground of Canterbury Public School or in the dusty streets of Epping. I found that I could assume a literary or academic personality more easily than I had been able, in the past, to assume the personality of a sports-lover or an expert philistine. Literary and academic matters probably lay closer to my real interests. Yet I was growing conscious during those years that the whole academic business was little more than a game—you played with this notion and that, you assumed a particular set of criteria in one essay and a completely different set in another. In short, I realised that literary criticism is the art of the plausible, not necessarily the pursuit of truth. Nothing in the thirty years I have spent as a teacher and critic of literature has made me substantially revise that point of view.
Playing games with literary and academic concepts could not have taken place, of course, if I had not discovered a genuine love of reading. I had returned to books in my last years at school, after a long drought during which I read as little as possible, resenting the texts we were required to study at school, much preferring comic books or the occasional copy that came my way of a ‘dirty’ magazine like Man. Just as I had thrown myself into the magic world of opera during our last year in Budapest, and as I used to lose myself in those Hungarian romances that provided my only source of fantasy and consolation during our first year in Sydney, and again, as I had become obsessed with music a few years earlier, I spent every moment I could find reading—anything, everything, indiscriminately but voraciously, to the detriment of my studies, my health (or at least so my parents thought) and possibly my sight, for I had to start wearing glasses at this time.
Books were not easy to come by, but the City of Sydney Public Library in the bowels of the Queen Victoria Building (a crumbling pile that housed, besides the library, the offices of the electricity authority and several seedy shops) provided a rich source of treasures. Obtaining books was not merely a ceremony—writing your name and address on borrower’s cards, waiting for your turn for certain sought-after books, making sure that the books were returned by the due date—but a strongly sensuous exp
erience as well. I can still smell the characteristic odour of the books that came from that establishment, entirely different from the smell of books from other institutions I was to come to know—Fisher Library at the university, the Reading Room of the British Museum, and the very Gallic perfume of the books in the Bibliothèque Nationale. I would go to the library at least once a week after school, my Globite schoolcase filled with unread Algebra and Chemistry texts, to stock up on yet more books to read into the small hours of the morning with that avidity and enthusiasm which is ours to enjoy for a few years only.
At university this mania for books was channelled into the formal structures of the study of English Literature and Language. It was in that context that I discovered an ability to mimic, to imitate and to parody the world of scholarship and learning. My essays became rhetorical exercises, explorations of how far you could get away with pursuing a line of inquiry or argument which you weren’t sure whether you believed to be true or suspected might be nonsense. I became aware of the distinction between reading literature and studying it in a formal context. I was not at all sure that I enjoyed certain great works—the plays of Shakespeare, Paradise Lost, Eliot’s poetry—for the reason that their greatness and significance were urged on us. This is no doubt the dilemma faced by many students of literature and by practitioners of the craft of criticism as well. In my case it was exacerbated by the strong sense of make-believe that surrounded many aspects of my life, including my essay-writing endeavours.
I enjoyed hugely parodying now this, now another, type of criticism and scholarship. I would twist and contort the contents of an essay just to introduce a phrase I was intent on including at all costs, or to indulge in word games which I alone could recognise. At the same time I found another outlet for these mimic gifts in the student newspaper and in the annual revue staged under the gloomy rafters of the Union Hall. The newspaper was a very flippant affair, not at all concerned with saving the world. The revues were probably more fun for actors and writers than for their audiences, though they were always well attended and even managed at times to make a modest profit. Between them, they provided me with the most telling, and perhaps the most lasting, influences of my student days.
I have not kept any of the stuff I wrote for the paper or for those revues. It was all, I am sure, entirely jejune and pretentious, but I recall two bits of nonsense which revealed, I think, the nature of my obsessions in those years. One was a crossword puzzle I concocted with a friend in which the answer to every clue was LEVEL. The other was a revue sketch, a Chekhovian fantasia for five characters who delivered melancholy monologues of yearning for spring, for the blossoming of the cherry orchard, and recalled how during a great frost many years before the Czarina ordered her portable organ to be wheeled to the middle of the frozen Neva, where she played Bach preludes and fugues in the gathering dusk. The audience, quite understandably, found this farrago almost entirely incomprehensible; they would have walked out in despair, no doubt, had not one of the directors, nowadays a respected librarian and book-reviewer, come up with the idea of having the five characters deliver their monologues as they were attempting to take turns in occupying the four chairs placed on stage.
The crossword puzzle and, more significantly, the Chekhovian extravaganza revealed, it seems to me in retrospect, the almost entirely unrecognised pressures and longings governing my life in those days—pressures and longings that manifested themselves in my infatuation with parodies, word games and mimicry. I was searching for some sort of cultural identity and tradition of my own, closer to the identity I had inherited from the world I had tried so hard in my teens to disown, rather than one assumed in the way my friends and I used to assume disguises for those fancy dress balls that we attended from time to time. I was drawn to a romantic fantasy-Europe—it did not matter that it was nominally Imperial Russia—in which people could display an emotional intensity I could not permit myself in my brittle, parodic ‘real’ life. I was in fact, though of course I would have been shocked if anyone had suggested it to me, establishing some tentative, hypothetical and entirely provisional bonds with those people who lamented the old life under the clear skies of Charlotte Pass, Perisher and Thredbo, their voices throbbing with emotion as they recalled the pleasures and experiences of a dead world. As my five characters repeated the formula ‘Do you remember? Do you remember?…’ (and this long before Last Year at Marienbad) I was both celebrating and savagely punishing that world. I could approach such experiences only obliquely, just as my genuine and committed devotion to English literature and to the language in which it is written found its fullest outlet in parodies and mimicry, a fascination with word games, palindromes, anagrams, acrostics and other ‘mechanical’ devices like the crossword puzzle with only one word for its solution.
This, I am convinced, is the common condition of people who are obliged to practise a language which they had to learn, rather than one they acquired within the natural rhythms of learning to speak. For us, in a manner easy to identify but difficult precisely to describe, that language, despite the confidence with which we exploit its forms and possibilities, remains external, or merely cerebral, consistently delighting us with its suppleness, the surprising transformations it is capable of undergoing, but rarely, if ever, becoming fully personal in a way that only experiences acquired from the time of early childhood may become deeply personal. This provisional, I am tempted to say almost flirtatious, relationship with language distinguishes several celebrated writers for whom English was a learnt language—Conrad, Nabokov, but most interestingly perhaps Tom Stoppard, with his wild fantasies that cut across the proprieties of language and culture, a writer who is irreverent enough to turn Hamlet into someone who is constantly talking to himself. Something of this cavalier attitude may also be detected in the work of the Polish-born, Melbourne-based writer Ania Walwicz who fractures English into patterns entirely lacking in punctuation, following no conventions of grammar or syntax, producing structures devoid of logical meaning but fraught with suggestion and insinuation, texts which are closer to music than to ‘normal’ writing.
A writer whose work I discovered only recently, which made me recognise very clearly these potentialities and dangers, and also the implicit freedom in such uses of language, did not write in English but in French. I find disturbing and curious analogies between my life and that of Georges Perec, the author of the highly-esteemed Life A User’s Manual, who died in 1982. Perec and I were born within a few days of each other. Like me, he was a remnant of the polyglot Habsburg world, though his forbears had lived a thousand kilometres or so to the east of mine, on the borders of Poland and Russia. Like my family, Perec’s was uprooted by the threats and alarms of the thirties—though unlike my parents, his had the good sense to get out in time. They did not, it is true, go far enough. Perec’s parents settled in France; his father died defending it against the Boche, but that act of patriotism didn’t prevent his mother from being put to death at Auschwitz.
Perec was born in France. Nominally, therefore, French was his native language, though he was no doubt obliged to learn it in a way entirely different from that of ‘native-born’ French people. It was probably easier for him to learn French than it was for me to learn English, but he had to acquire it as an alien, foreign tongue. His great novel, as well as his other writings (for instance an extraordinary novel, La Disparition, written entirely without use of the letter ‘e’) are notorious for the outrageous liberties they take with the French language, that revered institution seemingly enshrined by the decrees of holy writ. Life A User’s Manual, his masterpiece, is a dazzling display of the most elaborate word games; its structure is based on an abstruse mathematical formula; it is, in essence, a layered series of puns, or conceits within conceits, which dazzle, disconcert and violate, but they also celebrate the language with which Perec plays in the manner of a true virtuoso. Everything was grist to his mill. When he spent a few weeks in Australia in 1981 he jotted down the names of se
veral Sydney railway stations—Redfern, Tempe, Rockdale, Sutherland, Jannali—and appropriated them for the names of characters in a novel he was writing at the time. Brilliance and virtuosity there are in plenty in Perec’s work, but to the unsympathetic, his high-handed manipulation of language seems altogether lacking in respect. It is an outrage, perhaps, against an instrument that should be treated with courtesy and ceremony.
I was attracted to Perec’s work as soon as I began reading the English translation of Life A User’s Manual in 1988. Only gradually did I come to learn, though, the curious ways in which our lives paralleled each other. I kept on discovering odd bits of information well beyond the time I thought I knew the major facts of Perec’s life. I was astonished to learn, for instance, that a small hotel in Paris, in a quiet street near the Botanic Gardens, where I recently stayed for a few days on the recommendation of an accommodation guidebook, was situated next door but one to the house where Perec had lived for several years, the place where the bulk of Life A User’s Manual was written. I am not much given to thinking about the supernatural; I have never seen ghosts or received visitations. But I am disturbed and fascinated by the way I have been drawn, quite fortuitously at times—or so it seems to me—to a writer whose predicament I am able perhaps to understand a little better, certainly more poignantly, than many other people. I feel a particular kinship with a man I never met, whose life was lived in an entirely different part of the world; a man whose intellectual capacity and literary gifts far outweighed mine, and made him one of the most significant figures of my generation.
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