People like us find it very difficult to write ‘straight’; our attitude to language, no matter how adept we may be, must remain to a large extent provisional and jesting—it is not ours in the most intimate or fundamental sense, even if we have no other language to call fully our own—which is certainly the case with me and was also with Perec. We are attracted to the structures of that learnt language, we are infatuated with its suppleness, its capacity to be twisted into surprising and unexpected configurations, but we are, to a considerable extent, emotionally isolated from it. It does not speak to our heart so much as it appeals to our intellect, to that part of our personality which revels in games, puzzles and brain-twisters. We are tempted to use it in an irreverent way.
In some respects Perec must have encountered greater difficulties than those of us who learnt English in Australia, or perhaps even those who learnt French in places like Quebec, Tahiti or Noumea. He lived in a metropolitan culture—one, moreover, which regards its language as a treasured historical monument, not to be tampered with or altered lightly. English has never, at least in my experience, been held in such respect in Australia. In Britain—and especially in the Britain of the early sixties—it was otherwise: the common attitude to English was more respectful, conservative and much more sensitive to its traditional associations. It was not merely that the British were more careful with grammar, syntax and spelling, though that was something I noticed very soon after I arrived in London in 1960. Rather, I began to find that many words and expressions—often to do with the world of nature—carried nuances and distinctions which had been largely discarded in Australia. In the English I learnt in Hurlstone Park and Epping there was precious little difference between paddock and field, creek and stream. I noticed, after I returned to Australia some years later, that a long, straight street in the western suburbs of Sydney is called Railway Crescent. Such oddities made me realise that for Australians English is also an alien language, even though most of them have spoken it all their lives. It is, for them, fundamentally foreign because it encodes experiences and natural phenomena to which they have no access in their daily lives. Someone like me, who had to learn English as a matter of conscious choice, is therefore not entirely isolated from the linguistic experience of ‘native’ Australians, thereby providing something of a contrast to the predicament of a person like Perec, who was obliged to make his way in a culture which knows that it is the custodian of its language.
Australians are also mimics and parodists; they too—except for those words and expressions which have emerged directly from the experience of living in this land—are given to twisting and altering the language of a distant and increasingly alien culture. Australian English is, in a way, just as much a mixed language as the Hungarian my parents spoke in the last years of their lives, when they had allowed all sorts of English words and expressions to creep into that language to denote experiences for which it had no equivalents. The mimicry Australians practise is, however, largely unconscious. In the course of my golden years as a student at university, when I was beginning to experiment with the capacities of language—though mostly in the secondary or parasitic field of literary study, not in any serious attempt at writing fiction or verse—I, the outsider, was already conscious of the mimicry or tendency towards parody, which is both liberating and highly perilous, that several of my contemporaries were to discover and to exploit once they arrived in England, the end of their particular rainbows.
As the boat train rattled its way from Southampton to Waterloo through the endless suburbs of South London, I did not imagine that England, the land of heart’s desire, the country that had become a mystic birthright for people of my generation through our sentimental education into things English, would be the place where the question of my identity would be most severely tested, where I would have to ask myself who I was and what I hoped to become. I thought I had come ‘home’, in the way that the people of Epping had dreamt of going ‘home’. I imagined that the facility I had acquired in my years in Australia, my ability to mimic the speech, customs and rituals of the land, would make me welcome in the Mother Country as a worthy representative of my nation. I felt more Australian as the train pulled in at the station than I had ever felt in my life—especially since I knew that there was little danger here of being stopped by someone in the street who would say to me: ‘Andris, how arr you? How’s sings goink wiz your dear mozer and fazer?’
My self-confidence reached a climax as I took my place in the taxi queue outside the station. Here I was, with my suitcases and cabin-trunk, waiting for a London taxi among genuine English people—though as I listened to the conversations around me I became aware that many fellow-queuers spoke with suspiciously Australian and South African intonations. At length my turn came; I gave the driver the address of the bedsit a friend had found for me near Marble Arch—he didn’t call me ‘Guv’, but I let that pass—and off we went. The London that unrolled in front of my eyes through the murk of an October afternoon had the familiarity of an old friend you hadn’t seen for a long time. Now we were on Waterloo Bridge. There was Big Ben, and over there the dome of St Paul’s. Here was Buckingham Palace, with The Mall stretching away towards what must be Trafalgar Square; surely if I craned my neck I could catch sight of Nelson on top of his column. The London of the books we had read, of the games of Monopoly we had played, of the verses about Christopher Robin and Alice my friends had remembered from their childhood, was revealed in its full three-dimensional substance through the window of a London cab. I had come home.
That confidence and elation were to take something of a battering in the weeks that followed. I discovered that living in a bedsit had its curious and nagging miseries. It was difficult to sleep, work, cook and wash in the one room. The gas meter was constantly hungry for shilling pieces in the course of an increasingly cold autumn, at a time when the Royal Mint had somehow managed to underestimate once more the demand for those coins. I missed home—without quite realising what that implied. Yet I was, and remained for the next two and a half years, on the crest of a wave; the joys of living in London far outweighed its irritations and inconveniences.
I spent far too much of my scholarship money on theatres and concerts, and had to be bailed out by my parents with bank drafts. The British Museum Reading Room, especially that holy of holies, the North Library (recently commemorated by A. S. Byatt in Possession), widened my circle of acquaintances beyond the expatriate community in which anyone like me—without family connections in England or introductions to the sort of people that might ask you to stay for the weekend—was forced to move. It provided, moreover, a passing parade of notabilities: celebrated scholars to whom you were sometimes introduced; an angry-faced Russian count who claimed to have been connected with Ottoline Morrell; and one day I saw a frail figure in an over-large topcoat and homburg hat shepherded into the North Library by respectful officials to inspect a large folio waiting for him on a stand at the back of the room. That mournful figure turned out to be T. S. Eliot. There were many other delights. Walking at weekends on Hampstead Heath was a joy in almost any kind of weather. In summer I used to go for day-trips with my friends affluent enough to own motor cars to Winchester and Salisbury, to Bath and Tintern Abbey. All in all, life was good; my progress towards fulfilment that had begun as soon as I had left the Faculty of Medicine in Sydney (or to put it more accurately after it had decided it wanted no more of me) continued on its apparently predetermined path.
Yet all was not well. I fancied for a while that my life of mimicry would reap considerable rewards. There was no need in London to attempt to refashion myself in the way that I had tried so desperately and unsuccessfully in Epping in earlier years. I had become, I convinced myself, an educated and reasonably cultivated Australian. Part consciously, part subconsciously, I attempted nevertheless to adjust my behaviour—as did most of my Australian friends and acquaintances—to what we imagined would be more acceptable to a British way of life. There were,
in those years, considerable numbers of Australians living more or less permanently in Earl’s Court (known to all as Kangaroo Valley) who seemed intent on giving exaggerated displays of those national characteristics which were soon to be immortalised in Bazza McKenzie. We wanted nothing of that. On the contrary, we tried to model ourselves on those people we knew or knew about in Sydney who seemed to us particularly ‘British’, even under the fierce Australian sun: people like Sir Stephen Roberts, the vice chancellor of the university, who always wore striped trousers with a black jacket and spoke in well-rounded vowels. We, too, tried to adjust our accents, not realising that we fooled no-one, or that our vocabulary gave us away almost instantly, no matter how posh our accents might have sounded to our own ears. I also bought a three-piece suit from a bespoke tailor as well as the first umbrella I had ever owned.
Some of my friends could, after a few months of living in London, give a passable imitation of Englishness, which they managed to sustain for an hour or two before the truth became apparent—‘Oh, you’re from Orstralia, are you?’ I had no such luck. The first words the supervisor of my doctoral thesis spoke to me, after looking at my curriculum vitae, were to ask whether I thought I would be able to manage English. We became close friends in later years, especially after he took up an appointment in an Australian university. But he never lost, I think, his sense of mild surprise that my university should have considered me a proper incumbent of a travelling scholarship to undertake research in English literature, of all things. That was the first warning of difficulties to come, just as it was my first inkling of the essential insularity of English people when it comes to the question of non-English-speakers’ ability to learn the nuances and subtleties of their language. Perhaps they are right to think this; I am in no position to judge. In Australia, nevertheless, I had been able to get away with it more easily than English people were willing to allow me on their home ground.
It was foolish to imagine, of course, that I could pass myself off as an Australian in that society. I learnt very quickly that it was not prudent to say to people ‘I am Australian’ or ‘I come from Australia’. They would invariably look at me with surprise and bewilderment. ‘But you don’t look Australian,’ they would say, quite accurately. ‘And you don’t sound like one,’ many would add. I soon became cautious, and adopted the formula ‘I live in Australia’ as a way of overcoming these difficulties. That, in turn, caused even more problems. People would begin to wonder what I was: Indian? Egyptian? South African?—everything, anything, but never Hungarian, or even Austrian, Czech, Polish or Romanian. The closest anyone ever got to my origins was the woman who was convinced, no matter what I said, that I came from Italy; and from the tone of her voice it was obvious that she had somewhere well south of Rome in mind.
And yet I never felt more acutely, even at times embarrassingly, Australian than in those years in London. The way I walked, the way I wore my clothes (despite the three-piece suit and the furled umbrella), the way my skin had taken colour from the strong Australian sun, all brought Australia to mind, no matter how hard I tried to mimic the life I saw around me in the streets, in the Underground, or in the foyer of the Royal Opera House, where I went whenever I could afford to, and sometimes even when I could not. More curiously still, I began to experience a certain nostalgia for a place that had always seemed to me alien and hostile, despite my feverish attempts in adolescence to become a part of it.
My first Christmas in England, despite the illuminations in Regent Street, despite the brief flurry of snow that fell decorously on Christmas Eve, made me yearn for the long days and intense heat of those Australian Christmases when my parents and I used to swelter in our Epping flat or enjoyed the bright sunshine and cool breezes of Mt Kosciusko. Whenever I caught sight of an Australian scene in a film or on television, I would experience something of the sensation my parents used to feel on the rare occasions (apart from a couple of notorious weeks in 1956) when photographs of Budapest appeared in a newspaper or magazine. The day the afternoon papers featured a large picture of the Harbour Bridge, to accompany a story about a severe earth-tremor that, according to them, caused widespread panic in Sydney, I felt a curious satisfaction that my little corner of the world had at last gained the recognition it deserved.
Even more curiously, I began to read and to develop an interest in Australian writing during those London years. Back in Sydney I had confined my reading, curricular and extracurricular, to English and European writers, with a very small sprinkling of Americans. I was, after all, a British Subject for whom only the best would do—and the best in matters literary did not include a few bushwhackers, which was more or less my notion of Australian writers. At school, it is true, I had read The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, which made a tremendous impression on me—I wrote a gushing essay on it, only to be reproved for not tempering my enthusiasm with judgment. Since I knew that Henry Handel Richardson had spent the greater part of her life in Germany and England, the trilogy seemed to me the exception that proved the rule I had invented about the inferiority of ‘home-grown’ literature.
I came to Australian writing quite fortuitously by way of Riders in the Chariot. I saw a copy modestly displayed in Foyle’s window in 1961. On impulse I bought it and found myself, as did so many others, both enthralled and profoundly disturbed by White’s vision. Here was something I had not experienced before: a book that spoke about a world I knew, and even more significantly a book which articulated my doubts and misgivings about that world. I knew Barranugli and Sarsaparilla—those dusty semi-rural suburbs around Baulkham Hills and Castle Hill which we passed every time we drove to the Blue Mountains by what was known in Epping as the back road. I fancied that the model for Xanadu must have been that crumbling baronial estate (later to become the new site for the King’s School) on Pennant Hills Road which we passed every time we went to Parramatta. Beyond the piquancy of these moments of recognition—when literature no longer dealt with the distant and the unknown, but with the immediate and the familiar—lay the thrill of finding an assessment of life in Australia which was very far removed from the smug self-satisfaction of the citizens of Epping (and also in a way of the more sophisticated denizens of Wahroonga) and much closer to the anguish and dismay that my parents and I had experienced. As the novel laid bare the hypocrisy and pretentiousness of the Mrs Flacks and Mrs Jolleys of that society, as it tore to shreds their suburban proprieties and snobberies, I felt that White was speaking to me, in the soft English light, about a world where I had experienced much of the distaste he seemed to be expressing towards such a life and towards such people.
Within the rich texture of the novel I found something else that surprised and delighted me as much as its bleak vision of the awfulness of Australian suburbia. I was not ready yet to consider sympathetically the plight of the dispossessed as it is reflected in the terrible figure of Himmelfarb. But I was more than ready to respond to White’s venomous portrait of people I thought I knew only too well: the Rosetrees of Paradise East. The dreadful irony of this escaped me entirely at the time. I recognised the gesticulating world of the espresso-bars in Harry and Shirl; but I did not realise that White was also describing people like myself, people who thought that they could refashion themselves, in the same way that Harry and Shirl had tried to transform themselves from Rosenbaum to Rosetree.
Riders in the Chariot kindled an interest in White. Instead of attending to A Study of the Life and Works of James Shirley, the verbose doctoral thesis I was writing, I read as much White as was available in England in those years before the Nobel Prize. His appeal was intimately connected with the fact that he seemed to me to be looking at Australian life from the perspective of a European. The ubiquitous sense of alienation—which I later learnt was perhaps more immediately the product of White’s personal difficulties in what he saw as a bigoted and unrelenting world—appealed to my sense of alienation from Australia, despite the fact that I was beginning to experience in my London life a certain
nostalgia for things Australian. White, like Richardson before him, seemed, once more, an exception. I did not recognise, or was not willing to concede, that despite his jaundiced and despairing view of Australian life, he represented something fundamental to the Australian psyche, not merely the point of view of someone as alien as myself.
For many years I read few other Australian writers, at least until 1967 when I published an essay on The Tree of Man in which I played language games with the text of that novel, trying to cram as many analogies with European ‘high culture’ (Jung, Shakespeare, the medieval mystics, Wagner) as that ‘bucolic’ Australian book would bear. To my surprise I found that the novel could bear quite a lot, and that people took note of what I had to say, even if they disagreed with it wildly—as White did, in his characteristic way. After that I began to develop a genuine interest in a number of other contemporary novelists and poets. To this day, however, the literature of urban Australia speaks to me much more eloquently than what is, arguably, the literature of the ‘real’ Australia. Despite my admiration for the skill and wit of Les A. Murray, I have to admit that his verse celebrates a world that I do not understand or like very much. Such Is Life interests me as a curious development of the chivalric and pastoral romances of the sixteenth century—it has, after all, both horses and sheep in it—yet as a document of human life, the reason why so many people whose judgment I respect are drawn to it, Furphy’s book remains, unfortunately, closed to me.
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