At the same time as I was discovering a tentative and provisional Australianness within myself, quite different from my deliberate programme of assimilation of earlier years, I began to experience a pull in the other direction—towards Europe, towards that part of my heritage which I had attempted strenuously to suppress. Like all but the most English-obsessed of the young Australians living in London at the time, I discovered the joys of Continental Europe, at least as far as it was possible within my limited financial means. That was the beginning of a tentative, evasive and entirely devious journey that was to take me back, thirty years later, to the place where I was born, to the perspective—much as I am reluctant to admit, even now—from which a part of me will always look at the world.
In the early sixties I went to Paris several times with groups of friends. Getting there was a curious adventure in itself. We took a bus from the station at Victoria to one of the wartime airfields near the Channel; then flew in a shuddering and probably entirely unsafe DC-3 to Beauvais; finally another bus dumped us in the Place de la République. We usually stayed in a small and not entirely clean hotel near the Panthéon, where a notice in the dark entrance passage (you could not call it a lobby) respectfully requested patrons to give forty-eight hours’ notice if a bath were required. I looked for that hotel on a recent visit to Paris: it is still there, but its entrance is now surrounded by a facing of marble, and you can just catch sight of a rubber plant through the glass door plastered with recommendations from various tourist organisations and the emblems of credit cards.
We explored the many delights of Paris from that seedy little hotel where Madame poked her head angrily through a contraption (not unlike the servery-hatches in the dining rooms of our parents’ houses) whenever we rang the night-bell after the official and much publicised locking-up time. We sat in the gods of the Opéra and inspected the wigs of the singers and the floorboards of the stage. Dutifully, we shuffled past the Mona Lisa. We watched while a film was being made on the banks of the Seine opposite Notre Dame. Afterwards we climbed one of the towers of the cathedral to marvel at the panorama below us. Like my grandmother years before, I refused to go up the Eiffel Tower—vertigo runs in my family. One evening we ignored the whistles warning us that the gates of the Tuileries Gardens were about to be locked, and were obliged to clamber over the stone balustrade above the Place de la Concorde, under the suspicious gaze of the gendarmerie, much to the amusement of a busload of Algerian tourists. One golden afternoon, as we sat, happy and exhausted, outside a down-at-heels cafe, we noticed the banner headlines announcing the death of Marilyn Monroe.
Two or three times in the course of those years I took longer trips with a friend, nowadays a respected federal politician who, in those days, proved an invaluable guide to the glories and quirks of things English, as well as a patient and sympathetic audience for my many alarms, uncertainties and confusions. He was also the fortunate custodian of a company car. We meandered through France and Italy, crisscrossed Germany and Switzerland, and saw the midnight sun in Norway. But my most significant visits to the Continent were those I took alone: to Italy, sitting up all night in a train, as my father had done decades before, arriving exhausted and red-eyed; to France and to Germany. But I never went anywhere near the geographic (if not spiritual) world that had bred me. Going to Hungary in those years of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis was out of the question. It strikes me as curious and significant, though, that I always avoided Vienna, the city which was home for my mother’s family much more than Budapest—nominally the capital of the nation whose citizens they became after the Great War—had ever been. I thought I had found, instead, a spiritual home in Western Europe. On those solitary visits I could somehow merge into a world that was comfortingly familiar and entirely exhilarating, even though I was seeing these places for the first time in my life.
I responded instinctively to European cities. Their vistas, the way of life their inhabitants led (even if, as in Italy, my understanding of their language was very limited) were strangely familiar and sympathetic to me. I came to think that this life, centred on the great public spaces from which dwellings, shops, offices and theatres fanned out in broad avenues or snaked in crooked lanes, was somehow my true heritage. I had no memories of a peaceful or affluent city of the kind that I found in Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, Munich and Stockholm or even in a delightfully messy and chaotic Rome. My memories of European city-life were entirely those of cities under threat, as Budapest had been before the worst of the bombing, or else cities which had been gutted by the obscenity of war, as we found during the few days we spent in a ruined Vienna in 1946. And yet these sparkling cities, with their traffic jams, their cafés, the glimpses of domestic life you could catch behind the windows of a first-floor flat at dusk, before the owners had thought of drawing the curtains, the Sunday ritual of walking in parks and municipal gardens in one’s best clothes, were familiar, comforting and desirable. My responses during my first hours in cities I had never previously visited were the direct opposite of my parents’ alarmed disorientation as we drove through Sydney on that February day in 1947.
Europe, especially Italy, also gave me living, substantial images of that world of romance which I had experienced most vividly when gazing at the proscenium arch of an opera theatre. Returning to Venice—for, of course, I had been there before, when I sat in a gondola at the funfair—proved a moment of great poignancy. When I first stepped into the great piazza in front of San Marco on a spring afternoon, the golden sunlight slanting across the domes of the basilica, the pigeons clustering around the base of the bell-tower, the well-dressed and sophisticated people crowding the terraces of the famous cafes, I experienced the joy of one of those moments in life that we never forget. From the window of my modest room in a pensione on the Giudecca I could catch a glimpse of San Giorgio rising majestically from the lagoon. I went to a performance at La Fenice, map in one hand as I followed the twisting lanes leading to that jewelled theatre. After the performance I watched elegantly dressed Venetians boarding their waiting gondolas.
Rome enchanted me. Its layers of history piled indiscriminately on top of each other appealed to a long-dormant love of romance. I thought for the first time in years of that novel about Leonardo that had sustained me through some of my darkest childhood days. The sight of the Castel Sant’ Angelo against a stormy sky, or the gloomy interior of a baroque church, smelling of mould and incense, reminded me of that night long ago when I sat in our box at the opera hypnotised by the scene-painter’s attempts to reproduce these places on the stage. I fell in love with the soft round names of Roman streets, churches and palaces. Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, San Pietro in Vincoli, San Clemente (with its three levels, one a Mithraic shrine), Sant’ Agnese, all the churches of Rome, the beautiful as well as the hideous, provoked emotions that I could not have experienced anywhere else. To walk down the Via Giulia, lined by mighty Renaissance palaces with laundries, motorbike repair shops and ice-cream parlours in their ground floor premises, or to wander through the narrow streets and alleys of the old ghetto near the river were sensuously romantic experiences. I was strolling through a vast and brilliant theatrical illusion where people seemed to live more intensely than I had ever thought possible.
The elegant nonchalance of Paris did not make the same impression on me as the flamboyant theatricality of Venice and Rome. But I responded to its imperial vistas, to the reminders of the grand siècle scattered around the Marais, to the life of the smart boulevards of the right bank and to the less stylish but equally fascinating heterodoxy of those on the left. It was in Paris, and to an extent in Italian cities, that I began to recognise images of a former life—which I had enjoyed only vicariously—that were dimly reflected by the espresso-bars of Sydney. I would sit for hours in Parisian cafés, both great establishments like the Flore and the Deux Magots and small unpretentious neighbourhood bars and brasseries, observing the public social life that Europeans, usually confined to small a
nd inconvenient flats, lead in cafés, bars and restaurants. I realised that the people surrounding me, who talked with animation, even perhaps passion, without however losing a palpable though essentially indefinable urbanity, were more attractive, much less bizarre than the patrons of Quittner’s and the Twenty-One. Was this the difference, I wondered, between Western and Eastern Europe? Was this a society which that other world, mirrored by those antipodean establishments whose patrons, lacking entirely the style and sophistication of these people, merely aped and parodied? Was I at heart a Western European, even though I was born in the despised east, and had spent more than half my life at the other end of the earth?
I could not solve these conundrums, for something had held me back from exploring again the world I had left, making me invent all sorts of excuses—it was too far, it would be too expensive, it might be a bit boring—for not going in those years at least as far as Vienna, where I could have seen at first hand some remnants of the heritage I had lost. I suspect that I avoided the east of Europe because I still carried too much of a residue of that irrational guilt I had experienced throughout those grim years in Epping, when I felt a deep shame for having been born in a place that spawned refs, balts and wogs.
Yet I also knew that I had to keep the allure of Western Europe at arm’s length, that this world was not for me. No matter how beguiling I found the life of the great cities of France and Italy, I realised that by inclination and education, by the very fact of having spent so many years in Australia, my spiritual home lay, if anywhere, in England. I was also coming to understand that in England I would always be living a lie; that perhaps in Australia, precisely because I lived there day after day, year after year, I might gain greater acceptance and toleration in a society lacking deeply ingrained traditions or rituals. I realised that no matter how long I might live in England, no matter how well I might learn to mimic its ways and customs, I would remain forever the outsider, the person whose account of his origins (‘I live in Australia’, ‘I lived in Australia for many years’, ‘I spent much of my childhood in Australia’) would come to sound more and more shady and suspicious. And yet, several violent changes of mood suggested to me, it need not be like that. Others like me had found England a warm and welcoming society. When I tried very hard to think who they might be, I could only come up with Arthur Koestler—and he was exceptional.
These problems came to a head in the late autumn of 1962, when a great smog descended on London ahead of a winter of exceptional severity. A Study of the Life and Works of James Shirley was duly submitted, examined and its author was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of London. I had, a month or two earlier, applied for a lectureship in Sydney. Now I was told that there would be a position falling vacant at University College, where I had done my doctoral work, which would be mine for the asking. In that sulphurous November, when I spent many hours in air-conditioned cinemas to get relief from the poisoned atmosphere, at a time when even the toothpaste had taken on the taste of pollution, I grappled with a dilemma that several of my contemporaries also had to face in those years: should I live abroad, or should I return to what I had to call, for lack of a better term, home?
Three people I had known in my student days in Sydney had to face in those years choices very similar to mine. One had no doubts at all, it seems to me, about what choice he should make. I ran into Clive James, fresh off the boat from Sydney, on the night of my viva voce examination in 1962. He was standing at the back of the old Sadler’s Wells Theatre where the Hamburg Opera was performing Lohengrin. We exchanged a few words, promising to meet soon. I did not see him again after that night until some years ago when we spoke briefly at a party during one of his visits to Sydney. James obviously made the correct decision. It would have been entirely impossible in the sixties, or at any other time for that matter, to achieve in Australia a career of the kind he carved out for himself through the combination of great talent, skill and a determination to succeed. England offered him the stage on which he might exploit his considerable but perhaps unusual gifts—part intellectual, part academic, part poetic, part literary, with a large dose of the farçeur thrown in for good measure.
It was obvious also, during the late fifties, when I knew him well, better indeed than I knew James, that Australia would not satisfy Robert Hughes’s ambitions. Almost from the first day I met him, when he fetched up at the office of the university newspaper to offer his services as a cartoonist, he spoke of the need to get away, to find some place—England? America?—where his talents might be better appreciated. We were not inclined to believe him: not because he lacked talent—on the contrary, he is one of the most talented people I have ever run across—but because so many of us entertained fantasies about how we would one day conquer the world that it was by no means unusual to meet yet another young man (ostentatiously sporting a black beret) who was about to conquer the world. Hughes, in those days, was much more sophisticated than James. Unlike the boy from Kogarah, he came from a patrician family (of somewhat reduced circumstances, it is true) which gave him the social confidence to continue in his chosen role of an enfant terrible after he left youth and Australia behind.
Hughes and James found a world in which they were able to grow and prosper. Both are familiar names to people throughout the English-speaking world, and beyond. They have been able to influence opinion, attitudes and ways of looking at the world in a manner that would have been impossible had they stayed at home.
And yet, is it sour grapes, I often ask myself, that makes me suspect that James had greater potential, could have achieved finer, more lasting things, could perhaps have discovered more grace and dignity than the James I see on television cracking endless series of one-liner gags, winking, even leering at his devoted studio audience (and at the global village), living to the full that carefully nurtured image of a balding larrikin in an expensive suit? Has he sold himself short by carving out a brilliant career for himself through a trick of inverse mimicry and parody, hiding his bright light under a vulgar bushel to give his British audiences the image of Australia they require, mixed with considerable intellectual dash?
In the same way, I wonder what would have become of Hughes had he not found an international stage on which to enact his ceremonies of the now ageing enfant terrible. Would he have become the painter he always said, in those Sydney days, he wanted to be? Should he have chosen a life of greater obscurity in Sydney or even in the bush where he might have been able to paint those canvases which, he said, were clamouring to be given life? Would that, moreover, have satisfied the need he demonstrated, from the time you first laid eyes on him, to be noticed, to be admired and, best of all perhaps, to be considered a trifle shocking? These can only remain questions. James and Hughes could not have returned to Australia; they were driven by imperatives which made no other choice possible for them.
The third of these people represents a very different phenomenon. Until the success of The Road from Coorain, Jill Ker Conway was not widely known outside academic circles, despite her inclusion some years ago in Time magazine’s cover-story of eminent women. I knew her as Jill Ker. She was probably the most brilliant of my contemporaries at university, a woman of great beauty, charm and poise who carried her academic accomplishments with an easy grace. She was very good company, great fun to talk to, lively, amusing but never relaxing the elegance of personality or the intellectual rigour she has always retained. In our student days, I used to think of her as one of the lucky people. She was well-to-do, and could therefore indulge herself in those civilised pleasures of life many of us yearned for but could not afford. She had already been abroad; she was on intimate terms with people of influence we admired from afar—her teachers at university obviously held out great hope of a brilliant academic career for her. And she achieved that in America, rising not merely to the heights of her profession, but to a position of considerable influence in political and business circles as well.
When I se
e her nowadays, on one of her brief, often hectic visits to Sydney, I can glimpse in the confident and sophisticated woman, whose speech betrays the soft, civilised accents of Ivy League America, something of the shining person we knew at university many years ago. Instead of compromising her integrity, as a somewhat later refugee, Germaine Greer, has in her headline-grabbing outbursts of stridency, Ker Conway has grown, developed and found herself to an extent that would have been impossible in Australia—if she had not been driven out by the appalling prejudices against intellectual women among the public institutions of the day. And yet occasionally and fleetingly I catch in her something that might be regret, perhaps a moment of wistfulness. Suddenly she seems a trifle vulnerable, or lonely. I ask myself whether her life suffers from the effects of uprooting, just as my life has also suffered from the inevitable consequences of exile. The instant always passes. Jill Ker Conway, the respected historian, university administrator and public personality, pulls herself together and takes up the threads of the conversation with her customary wit and sophistication.
For these people, despite the minor disadvantages of exile that each might suffer, the decision not to return to Australia was obviously the correct choice. In Britain or the United States they had come home to their true inheritance, and there they flourished in a way that would have been impossible in their nominal homes. I do not think any of them, not even Ker Conway, will ever return to live in Australia. In my case the decision was not so simple. I lacked their confidence. But above all, at the end of 1962 when I had to choose between the prospect of a position in London and the offer of a post in Sydney, I finally chose the latter for a number of complicated reasons.
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