We received almost 1,000 entries in this year’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize –by far our biggest field to date. Entries came from twenty-two countries. The judges – Ali Alizadeh, Jill Jones, Felicity Plunkett – have now shortlisted seven poems. (They appear from page 37.) The shortlisted poets are Ronald Dzerigian (USA), Louis Klee (Victoria), Anthony Lawrence (NSW), Damen O’Brien (Queensland), Michael Lee Phillips (USA), Jen Saunders (NSW), and Jessie Tu (NSW).
The winner (who will receive $5,000 plus an Arthur Boyd print) will be named at the Porter Prize ceremony on Thursday, 23 March (6 pm) at the Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne (see below). First, though, a number of friends and admirers of Peter Porter will read some of his poems, and the shortlisted poets will read their poems. These are always great occasions for poetry (and Porter) aficionados, and everyone is welcome. Email: rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au
More Poetry gigs
To celebrate the second edition of States of Poetry (South Australia), state editor Peter Goldsworthy will introduce his new cohort of poets during Adelaide Writers’ Week. The six featured poets this year are Steve Brock, Cath Kenneally, Jules Leigh Koch, Louise Nicholas, Jan Owen, and Dominic Symes. The session will take place on 6 March at 5 pm, at the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, Adelaide. For more information, visit the Adelaide Writers’ Week website. Single poems from each writer appear in our mini-anthology on page 49. The April issue will feature a mini-anthology of poems from the Tasmanian edition of States of Poetry.
Peter Rose and state editor Sarah Day will host a reading from the six poets included in this year’s anthology: Adrienne Eberhard, Graeme Hetherington, Karen Knight, Louise Oxley, Tim Thorne, and Jane Williams. The event will take place at the Hobart Book Shop, 22 Salamanca Square at 5.30 pm on Thursday, 6 April. Email: rsvp@australianbookreview.com.au.
truMPing the Media
‘Journalism is on the back foot,’ writes Diana Bagnall at the start of her review of an anthology of writings about the 1960s from The New Yorker (page 21). Sad to report, it’s an understatement, given recent developments. We all know the fate of countless
journalists around the world in recent years: the arrests, the intimidation, the derision, the assassinations, especially in Russia (so close to Donald Trump’s commercial heart). In his first days as US president, Trump demeaned the office by pursuing his maniacal attacks on the media, beginning with a pathetic and fraudulent attempt
to ‘correct’ attendance figures at his inauguration.
So much was left to the thinking press during the recent ignoble election campaign: one thinks in particular of the New York Times’s exposé about Trump’s startling business incompetence and his record-breaking financial reliance on US taxpayers. Now it seems that the Times and every questioning journalist will pay a high price for their audacity. Trump, puffed up with amour-propre, resembles a drunk at a party who won’t brook any opposition or criticism. Now he – bizarre though it still seems – runs the United States. What price logic, perseverance, intelligent doubt? What future for investigative journalism? Will it be safe or even legal to practise or publish dissent?
And how, to paraphrase Diana Bagnall, did it come to this? The Obama administration, in some respects, paved the way. Barack Obama was no great friend of the fourth estate, despite his cosy relations with admiring editors such as David Remnick of The New Yorker. For some, Obama was the most controlling and secretive president since the paranoiac Richard Nixon. Menacing too. Time and time again reporters were stymied or threatened with prosecution. No other administration has denied so many Freedom of Information requests. Notoriously, the Obama regime threatened New York Times reporter James Risen with jail for his refusal to name a source. Risen has dubbed Obama ‘the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation’.
Jerkish Plot
In our previous issue, Advances wondered, with eerie retrospective presci[Advances continues on page 5]
President Donald Trump being sworn in on 20 January 2017
Australian Book Review
March 2017, no. 389 Since 1961
First series 1961–74
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March 2017 Contents
James Walter
Ross McKibbin
Sujatha Fernandes
Margaret Harris
Danielle Clode
Jay Winter
Miriam Cosic
Michael Lee Phillips et al. Dominic Symes et al.
Biography
Judith Armstrong: Dymphna Brian Matthews
Anthology
Henry Finder (ed.): The New Yorker Book of the 60s
Diana Bagnall
Geordie Williamson (ed.): The Best Australian Essays 2016 Glyn Davis
Memoir
Mark Colvin: Light and Shadow Morag Fraser
Brentley Frazer: Scoundrel Days Duncan Fardon
Caroline Baum: Only Gillian Dooley
Paula Keogh: The Green Bell Gig Ryan
Valerie Murray: Flight from the Brothers Grimm
Elisabeth Holdsworth
Fiction
George Saunders: Lincoln in the Bardo Beejay Silcox
Sue Woolfe: Do You Love Me Or What? Jane Sullivan
Goldie Goldbloom: Gwen Suzanne Falkiner
Kathryn Heyman: Storm and Grace Anna MacDonald
David Francis: Wedding Bush Road Fiona Gruber
Fiona Capp: To Know My Crime Gretchen Shirm
Rebekah Clarkson: Barking Dogs Tali Lavi
Food
Catherine Donnelly (ed.): The Oxford Companion to Cheese
Paul Keating’s latest biography
The Chilcot Report
A new biography of Karl Marx
An enthralling study of Queen Victoria
Australia as poor cousin
Inga Clendinnen – an appreciation
Bernhard Schlink’s new novel
Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlist
States of Poetry – South Australia
Poetry
Martin Langford et al. (eds): Contemporary Australian Poetry
Sarah Holland-Batt (ed.): The Best Australian Poems 2016
John Hawke
John Kinsella: Graphology Poems 1995–2015
David McCooey
Poet of the Month
Bronwyn Lea
Gay Studies
Duncan McNab: Getting Away with Murder
Robert Reynolds
Jewish Studies
Leonard Barkan: Berlin for Jews Andrea Goldsmith
Russia
Tony Kevin: Return to Moscow Nick Hordern
Language
John Simpson: The Word Detective Bruce Moore
Society
Leah Kaminsky: We’re All Going to Die
John Funder
Publisher of the Month
Galassi
Bernadette Brennan
Christopher Menz
Andrew Fuhrmann
Varun Ghosh
Tim Byrne
Andrew Nette
David Larkin
James McNamara
The Testament of Mary On the Origin of Art
Shakespeare: The complete works
Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run
Lion
Jasper Jones
King Roger
David Thomson: Television
THANKING OUR PARTNERS
Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Arts NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.
We also acknowledge the generous support of our sponsor, Flinders University, our partner, Monash University; and we are grateful for the support of Copyright Agency; The Ian Potter Foundation; Eucalypt Australia; RAFT; Sydney Ideas, The University of Sydney; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.
Sydney Ideas
ence (to coin a phrase to rival ‘alternative facts’), if Philip Roth – that rara avis, a retired novelist – would emerge from literary exile to update his ahistorical novel The Plot Against America (2004), in which Charles Lindbergh, the isolationist and Nazi-inspired aviator, defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and introduces anti-Semitic measures against young ‘Philip Roth’ and other Jewish characters in the novel. Other publications have followed suit, including The New Yorker, which interviewed the author for its January 30 edition.
Philip Roth, retired though he is and responding via email, still gave them good copy. ‘Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities … had character and he had substance … Trump is just a con artist,’ he wrote. ‘I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But … neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventyseven words that is better called Jerkish than English’.
MoMa takes a stand
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has responded impressively to Trump’s obnoxious executive order banning travel to the United States for citizens of seven Muslim nations. MoMA promptly removed some of the jewels in its crown (including Picasso’s Card player) to make way for contemporary art from Iran, Iraq, and Sudan. Each work is accompanied by a statement: ‘This is one of several such artworks ... installed ... to affirm the ideas of welcome and freedom as vital to this Museum, as they are to the United States.’ Jason Farago in the New York Times writes: ‘This welcome new voice ... is not how MoMA has spoken in the past – but, then again, this is not how presidents have spoken in the past, either.’
It will be interesting to see if any Australian galleries follow MoMA’s example and send a similarly ringing message to our super-ally.
story tiMe!
Since it began in 2010, the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize has attracted thousands of new entries and grown in stature both here and overseas. Now international, the Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500 (thanks to the remarkable generosity of Ian Dickson, our Acmeist Patron – see page 6). Earlier this year, The Writers’ Academy from Penguin Random House in the United Kingdom listed it as one of the world’s ‘Best Writing Competitions’.
ABR’s commitment to short fiction doesn’t end with the Jolley Prize. We publish new short stories on our website as part of ABR Fiction, and we welcome submissions from new and established writers. Unlike Jolley Prize entries (2,000 to 5,000 words), the stories can be any length – though not Tolstoyan please. They must not have been previously published. We pay a minimum of $400 for stories published in ABR Fiction on our website. Please visit the ‘Submissions’ page there for more information.
Meanwhile, the 2017 Jolley Prize is open until April 10.
kris heMensley’s entourage More Cordite Books have appeared, and one of them is especially welcome: Your Scratch Entourage, Kris Hemensley’s first collection in many years. Hemensley, who turned seventy in 2016, published countless books in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but was then overtaken by – well, books. For many years he and Loretta Hemensley have run Collected Works, that gem of a bookshop in the smudgy old labyrinthine Nicholas Building on Swanston Street opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. Hemensley has done more for the circulation and appreciation of poetry in Melbourne – this country – than most. Collected Works is the first place to go to for poetry in Melbourne. How needed it is too, given the dearth of poetry sections in most
general bookshops (Kahlil Gibran and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rod McKuen do not, alone, constitute a decent poetry library).
So it is good to have this new collection from Kris Hemensley. The poet himself, who introduces it in a witty Preface, recalls ‘a year-long conversation with prospective publisher K MacCarter about singularity, locality, expatriation, eased by occasional tots of the Japanese good stuff during which I sometimes recast him as a Jonathan Williams, dual squire of Dentdale, Cumbria, and Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, notwithstanding the Minnesota Lutheran he owned up to be’.
Poetry galore
Yet more poetry. After all, it is our annual poetry issue. Despite jeremiads of yore, Advances can’t remember a time when so much new poetry was published in Australia. UWA Publishing has weighed in with six more titles in its UWAP Poetry Series. They are Rallying (Quinn Eades), Flute of Milk (Susan Fealy), A Personal History of Vision (Luke Fischer), Charlie Twirl (Alan Gould), Dark Convicts (Judy Johnson), and Snake Like Charms (Amanda Joy). The latter includes ‘Tailings’, which won the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Published in February, these paperback collections cost $22.95 each.
r&r in brisbane
In the wake of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature, and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘thoughtful’ and ‘absorbing’ autobiography Born to Run (reviewed by Varun Ghosh in this issue, page 66), we can assume that the boundaries between music and writing have well and truly dissolved. The Rock & Roll Writers’ Festival in Brisbane this year (1–2 April) will explore this fusion in a series of talks. Speakers include Tim Rogers, Brentley Frazer, Kirsty Eagar, and Peggy Frew.
In true rock and roll fashion, the festival will hit the road ‘for one show only’ in Melbourne on 9 April. Visit their website for more details: https:// www.rockandrollwritersfestival.com/
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REVIEW OF THE MONTH
Enough said!
Paul Keating’s latest biographer falls under the spell
James
Walter
PAUL KEATING: THE BIG-PICTURE LEADER
by Troy Bramston
Scribe, $49.99 hb, 784 pp, 9781925321746
Paul Keating has been much written about; his trajectory is familiar. His is a story of leadership and the exercise of power, about a man who led from the front and – like Gough Whitlam – was willing to ‘crash through or crash’ when following his convictions. No prime minister since has displayed a similar propensity. Troy Bramston’s biography conforms to that account. There is new material upon which to reflect, a valuable fleshing out of decisions, policies, and events, but there are no startling revelations that would cause one to revise the Keating life history. Still, this is a book with considerable virtues.
Its daunting length is offset with manageable subsections within chapters, providing logical reading breaks which nonetheless connect fluently with subsequent sections. Bramston’s capacity for clear narrative exposition maintains one’s engagement. His work is unusually well-informed, the product of diligent and intelligent research. It is enormously comprehensive, with a level of detail that no previous work on Keating has achieved. It has the advantage, granted to few, of Keating’s cooperation. It provides a deep history of the federal parliamentary Labor Party of Keating’s time, of caucus and cabinet, and of virtually every major policy issue with which he was concerned. It amply justifies the contention that Keating was a remarkable politician and a formidable leader whose boldness has rarely been matched. This is the best biography of Keating yet produced, and arguably the best single source for those needing an insight into this subject. This is indispensable reading, then, but with caveats. Bramston is, he concedes, a ‘broadly favourable’ biographer. This does not prevent him from considering the views of those who disagreed with, or even hated, Keating. Hence the book rightly registers many of the arguments and questions that others have raised about such an intensely committed policy activist – not only the reform breakthroughs, but also the corrosive aggression, and the unforeseen consequences of, and (sometimes)
the collateral damage from, the changes he wrought. Yet, in the main, Bramston comes down on Keating’s side: setbacks were, on this account, rarely a product of Keating’s decisions, but of incorrect Treasury figures, implementation failure, or the bastardry of others.
Bramston’s favourable orientation precludes necessary nuance in his interpretation of the relationship between Keating and Bob Hawke. He implicitly endorses Keating’s oft-repeated claim that Hawke started to fail as early as 1984, and that Keating ‘carried’ him thereafter. There is insufficient recognition that, despite the centrality of the Hawke–Keating partnership, it was embedded within one of the ablest cabinets in the postwar period, in which there was a brace of other egotistical, ambitious policy activists. They needed leeway to do their best work, but also direction from the chair. The government’s success depended upon collective endeavour. Bramston’s earlier book (edited with Susan Ryan) The Hawke Government (2003) demonstrated precisely this.
Bramston might thus have challenged Keating’s assertion that Hawke ‘spread himself too thinly’ by acknowledging a very different model of leadership than the crazy-brave solo performance that was Keating’s obsession. In fact, Hawke recognised that the complexity of the challenges facing government demanded a capacity to orchestrate those who could, together, do something about them, rather than assuming he could master everything himself. It was a capacity Keating was manifestly unable to match in his own term as prime minister when heroic hands-on engagement with singular preoccupations – such as Mabo – crowded out the rest of his agenda.
Bramston also advances tendentious claims. Undoubtedly, a biography benefits from a compelling argument: it is the point of differentiation, the narrative drive. This is especially the case when Keating, the figure in question, has been the subject of four previous biographies, numerous works of contemporary political history, Don Watson’s controversial insider account of
Also see Daniil Trifonov in Recital –Mon 6 Mar, City Recital Hall
Young Russians
Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.1
Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto, written in the closing years of the Russian empire, frames a glistening, Chopin-esque slow movement with virtuoso fireworks. Rising star Daniil Trifonov makes his SSO debut.
PROKOFIEV Classical Symphony
RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No.1
SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No.1
Gustavo Gimeno conductor
Daniil Trifonov piano [PICTURED]
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Kate Miller-Heidke
And the SSO
Classically trained and astonishingly versatile, Miller-Heidke presents her hits as well as highlights from The Rabbits in her first SSO collaboration.
Benjamin Northey conductor
Kate Miller-Heidke vocalist, keyboard
Keir Nuttall guitar
Thu 23 Mar 6.30pm Fri 24 Mar 8pm Sat 25 Mar 8pm
A BMW SEASON HIGHLIGHT
Symphony for the Common Man
Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No.4
Enjoy Copland’s stirring and heroic ‘Symphony for the Common Man’ and Australia’s own Simon Tedeschi as he performs Rachmaninoff’s Fourth Piano Concerto.
FORD Headlong RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No.4^
Wed 15 Mar 6.30pm
Songs & Vistas
An Alpine Symphony
Renowned conductor Asher Fisch will take you on a musical walk in the mountains with Strauss’s magnificent Alpine Symphony when he makes his SSO debut.
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his prime ministerial office, and an 800-hundred page set of transcripts on his career, curated by Kerry O’Brien, from the man himself. Political junkies and Keating fans will already be acquainted with most of the above.
What is it – apart from the further detail Bramston offers – that we have missed? Bramston’s proposition, notwithstanding such predecessors, is twofold: that Keating was a uniquely ‘big picture’ thinker, and that his contribution to the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s has too often been overlooked and needs reassessment. Keating himself has continually insisted upon these points. This, then, is the biography that Keating has wanted. But are they persuasive arguments?
Keating, to his credit, had a vision, and pursued it relentlessly. But with respect to big-picture objectives, he cannot touch the sheer range and scale of Whitlam’s ambitions – and, despite the chaos of the Whitlam government, so much has survived. Again, Bramston himself has had a part in reminding us of this in his (edited) book The Whitlam Legacy (2013).
Regarding the big ideas on which Keating stakes his claim, one recalls Keynes’s much quoted remark: ‘Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.’ Keating, like most politicians, never had an original idea. He was not an originator, but was fiercely intelligent and imaginative in seizing on ideas already in play for his purposes.
Keating, like most politicians, never had an original idea
Treasury had begun to question Keynes’s model and to advocate a return to classical economics by 1971. Informal bipartisan groupings of dries were seriously debating neo-liberalism well before Malcolm Fraser’s defeat in 1983. The Accord, about which Keating was initially sceptical, was initiated by Ralph Willis and Bill Kelty. The debate about an Australian republic precedes Federation; the current Australian Republican Movement was initiated by Tom Keneally, Donald Horne, Jenny Kee, and others. Asian engagement stretches back to John Latham in the 1930s, Frederic Eggleston in the 1940s, and in its postwar incarnation to Harold Holt (as both Whitlam and Fraser acknowledged). Nor should the influence of Hawke’s adviser Ross Garnaut’s Australia and the Northeast Asia Ascendancy (1989) be overlooked.
To be fair, Bramston acknowledges that Asian engagement had a prehistory, but suggests with this, as with all the other ideas, that Keating’s intervention was so profound as to make it his own. Keating’s ability to adapt and apply these ideas – not least in tackling the politics of their implementation – was a substantial achievement. But they are incremental parts of a longer story. The image of Keating listening to Mahler and spinning it all out of his head ignores the ‘bigger picture’ of what was going on.
Does Bramston’s recurrent assertion that the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s manifested the greatest reform governments since Federation withstand scrutiny? The ‘settlement’ achieved by liberal progressives, orchestrated by Alfred Deakin, Andrew Fisher, and others between 1901 and 1914, comprised reforms internationally lauded at the time by the likes of James Bryce and Henry Jones, despite the anachronistic derision of those who now fail to see it in historical context. It prevailed for fifty years. The title of Stuart Macintyre’s recent history of postwar reconstruction, Australia’s Boldest Experiment (2015) immediately stakes a claim for the Curtin and Chifley administration as another contender for the crown. Their Keynesian consensus lasted thirty years. And now the reform project championed by Hawke and Keating (and Howard) is unravelling, after roughly thirty years. Can we not accept that there is a series of policy and reform highpoints, that there can be no agreement on which was the greater, but that policy cycles inevitably reach exhaustion? Perhaps that would be to acknowledge a lesson in humility foreign to Keating, and hence untenable for Bramston.
Finally, the assertion that Keating’s contribution has never been properly acknowledged and needs reassessment beggars belief. The sheer volume of books and articles in which Keating’s centrality to the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s and the economic resilience that has followed is refutation enough. These include, but are not limited to, best-sellers: Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002); Paul Kelly (Bramston’s mentor), The March of Patriots (2009); George Megalogenis, The Australian Moment (2012); and Kerry O’Brien, Keating (2015). That Bramston is moved to take up the cudgels in the face of this deluge indicates that he has fallen for Keating’s spell. And for Keating, it seems, no amount of recognition will be sufficient. The reader, however, may conclude that enough has been said. g
James Walter is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash University. Volume Two of his history of the prime ministership (with Paul Strangio and Paul ‘t Hart), The Pivot of Power: The Australian prime ministership 1950–2015 (Miegunyah Press), will be published in August this year.
COMMENTARY
Whatever it takes
A chronicle of failure and deceit in the Chilcot Report
by Ross McKibbin
The publication of the much-delayed Chilcot Report on the origins and consequences of Britain’s participation in the Iraq war has had its resonances, but they would have been more profound had it been published two or three years ago. It is hard on John Chilcot that his Report has had to compete in the public mind with Brexit and Donald Trump. Furthermore, in a general sense, most people had already made up their minds about the Iraq war. Why the Report was so delayed was as much a matter of gossip as known fact. It is rumoured that the ‘Maxwell convention’ – a semi-rule that those criticised by an official inquiry should have a right to comment on such criticism before publication – delayed things. Tony Blair, UK prime minister from 1996 to 2007, and Jack Straw, his foreign secretary (2001–6), were alleged to be leading obstructionists; as was the US government. They might, however, have succeeded in delaying publication, but it seems unlikely, given the contents of the Report, that they much changed its conclusions. The notorious ‘whatever’ letter – Blair’s assurance to President George W. Bush that Britain would support America ‘whatever’ – is there, as well as much other damning material. Does the Report tell us anything that we did not already know or had not already surmised? Regrettably it does. Chilcot is almost painfully fair, as we would expect from a leading civil servant, which is why this is such a crushing document. To anybody who wants to know how Britain was governed under Blair, and probably still is, this Report is indispensable. It is not, of course, the first official inquiry into Britain’s part in the Iraq war. Lord Hutton presided over an inquiry into the death of the scientist Dr David Kelly (about which there are still many conspiracy theories): an extraordinary inquiry, since its conclusions appeared entirely at variance with its evidence. Lord Butler, like Chilcot a civil servant, in his 2004 Report was very critical of the way decisions were reached – it was he who described Blair’s prime ministerial technique as ‘sofa government’ – but there was a sense that he pulled his punches. Both inquiries raised questions which neither answered. Rather than settling things they allowed them to fester. Gordon Brown, by then prime minister (2007–10), appointed Chilcot, who was given more or less carte blanche, finally to settle things. Whether Brown now regrets the decision we don’t know.
As an instrument of government, the Chilcot Report makes plain, the cabinet was almost entirely passive, and largely excluded from serious discussions about policy. At no point did it (or anyone else) consider alternative policies: ‘policy’ making was largely confined to No. 10 Downing Street. Chilcot identifies no less than eleven occasions when ‘there should have been collective discussion by a Cabinet Committee or small group of Ministers on the basis of inter-departmental advice agreed at a senior level’. Before the ‘whatever’ letter was sent to Bush, it was seen only by No. 10 officials. It was later copied to Straw, but never shown to the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon. Chilcot is also very critical of the cabinet’s attitude to the legality of the war. This was a matter of leaks at the time and it was known that the attorney-general, Peter Goldsmith, had revised his views as to the legality of military intervention in a manner very convenient to the interveners. But no formal record of that decision (Blair’s ‘confirmation’ that Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions) was kept; the actual grounds on which that confirmation was accepted ‘remain unclear’ and ‘far from satisfactory’. Chilcot rather supports the widely held view that ministers were largely in the dark, and little better informed than members of the public who read the broadsheets. But even when they had the opportunity, ministers tended to duck it. Chilcot says, for example, that no ‘substantive discussion’ of the war’s legality was ever held.
As to intelligence, though Chilcot is again careful in his comments, it seems obvious that some senior intelligence officers were simply not up to the job, and were certainly incapable of withstanding pressure from No. 10 to provide convenient information. The methodological problems of intelligence gathering, and the inevitable limitations of its usefulness, were not recognised by Blair and his circle, or were brushed aside. Chilcot concludes that, in effect, intelligence, for whatever reason, was misused – particularly in the notorious memorandum of September 2002 – and this is the view, clear from their evidence to the inquiry, of several senior intelligence officers themselves. Once again, however, the failure is primarily one of government. At no time did ministers commission ‘systematic’ alternative evaluation of the choices facing them or the risks of military intervention.
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DIRECTOR PETER EVANS
Intelligence officers might have been muddled or weak, but it was ministers who were derelict in their duties.
Chilcot notes that the United States was a ‘determining factor’ in Britain’s decision to participate in the invasion of Iraq. It was indeed. Although, as he points out, Britain and the United States had not invariably agreed with each other – Suez and Vietnam are two good instances – the institutional and personal biases of British governments and the world view of its political élites increasingly tend to tie Britain to the United States; to defer to US ‘leadership’. The justifications for this are usually twofold: that America is Britain’s indispensable and only reliable ally; and that general deference allows Britain to desirably influence American policy in specific cases. There is also a cultural affinity that should not be neglected, though it is easily exaggerated. Blair seemed especially susceptible to these arguments. He liked the United States and clearly thought his casual style and democratic manner would give him an authority which, in the end, proved totally illusory. Furthermore, after 9/11 Blair became convinced that the United States needed British ‘help’ – they could not be expected to handle all this themselves. In fact, Bush was prepared to humour him in small things but ignored him in big ones. The falsity of Britain’s position became apparent in the ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq. Britain had no real standing in the Coalition Political Authority, which reported directly to Rumsfeld. Britain became associated with US blundering, and tainted by it, without ever being able to correct it or to offer (assuming Britain had them) alternatives. It is in relations with America that Blair most completely deceived himself.
Britain’s exclusion from overall reconstructionplanning might have partly released the United Kingdom from any responsibility for the shocking failure of reconstruction; but even within its own narrow sphere Britain had made almost no preparations for reconstruction or postwar security. Looting had been anticipated, but little was done to stop it. Chilcot’s description of interdepartmental buckpassing is amongst the most depressing parts of the Report. More time was spent on the question of which department should have the responsibility for civilian casualties than on efforts to discover the actual number; just as it was more anxious to deny charges that Coalition forces were killing civilians than it was to find out how many were killed. Chilcot is obviously astonished at the insouciance of government departments: ‘The inquiry views the inability of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development to confirm how many civilian personnel were deployed to or employed in Iraq, in which locations and in what roles, as a serious failure.’
Perhaps the most surprising but telling of the findings is the extent of military failure. There has long been a comforting story that British forces – though now much diminished – have a kind of morale and esprit, an ability to get on with the locals, that compensates for their de-
pleted state. That turns out to be what it is – just a ‘story’. In part, this was (again) the responsibility of government. The Ministry of Defence proposed to maximise Britain’s contribution to the invasion, and Blair recklessly agreed on 3 October 2002, even though he admitted Britain had only a ‘one shot capability’. The cabinet was neither consulted nor informed. It was government that decided to participate in Afghanistan, to run two interventions simultaneously, even though it ‘knowingly exceeded the Defence Planning Assumptions’. The forces’ chronic lack of equipment and of appropriate training was also due to government. Chilcot writes that it was ‘not sufficiently clear which person or department within the Ministry of Defence had responsibility for identifying and articulating capability gaps’. But the military themselves, including named senior officers, were partly to blame. They concealed from ministers and superiors in London the truth of life in Basra; they declined US help in their sphere of occupation; and in the end they had to persuade the local militia to allow them to evacuate Basra safely. They left behind a reputation for illdiscipline and violence we liked to think was exclusively American.
Finally, there is Tony Blair. Blair is central to the narrative even if governmental failure characterised it. Without him, Britain would not have joined the Americans. Without a belief in the parliamentary Labour Party that many MPs owed their seats to him, it would not have supported him even to the extent that it did. Why did such a man usually so risk-averse embark on such a risky enterprise? Blair’s mental world is not something Chilcot much considers, yet it shaped his actions. First, there is a sense of frustration. Blair sought to do much to reform British public life and services, but never really knew what he wanted or how to achieve it. Not for the first time, a frustrated politician turned to foreign affairs or war. Furthermore, that Blair knew so little about either probably added to the attraction. Second, there was that desire to be the centre of attention which had driven him since he set out to organise, on America’s behalf, the international coalition against terrorism, and his increasing use of the exculpatory ‘I did what I thought was right’, which apparently excuses everything. And there is the fascination with American power, a feeling that history is made in Washington; fascinating even to a man who is a strong supporter of the EU and who once wanted Britain to join the Eurozone.
in Australia’s political life, because the circumstances of British and Australian involvement in Iraq differed. Unlike Blair, Howard was careful to keep Australia’s presence limited and its soldiers away from dangerous territory. Blair chose the reverse. The Liberal Party as a whole was more compliant than the Labour Party in Britain, which was publicly very divided, and was readier to accept the indispensability of a wholly unequal alliance with the United States. The timidity of the ALP was also a factor. The Rudd government could have established a royal commission into Howard’s actions, which at least would have been very embarrassing, but was frightened that people might think it was being petty or unsporting. The issue therefore died.
Nor is the relationship of Australia and Britain to the United States the same. Whereas Britain now has no friend except the United States, the transformations of politics and economics in Asia and the Pacific, especially
Australia is not mentioned in the Report, despite the fact that Australia was one of the few countries to support Bush and Blair from beginning to end. But there has been no inquiry into Australia’s actions; no obvious institutional regrets or lessons painfully learnt; no real outrage. That is so, however a ‘determining factor’ the United States is
the rise of China, and Australia’s economic dependence on Asia, will almost certainly modify, possibly drastically, Australia’s relations with the United States. Furthermore, Australia’s obvious reluctance in Iraq to put its money where its mouth was – something the then Senator Obama noted in 2008 – suggests that even to someone like John Howard Australia’s support for the United States is not unconditional. If, however, this almost paralysing dependency on the United States is not modified, British and Australian prime ministers, as Theresa May, Tony Blair, and Malcolm Turnbull have discovered, face a lifetime of future humiliations. g
Ross McKibbin was educated at the University of Sydney and is a historian of modern Britain. An emeritus fellow of St John’s College, Oxford University, he is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. ❖
John Howard and George W. Bush at the White House, 2006 (photograph by Paul Morse)
The man and the myth
The life and times of Karl Marx
Sujatha Fernandes
KARL MARX:
GREATNESS AND ILLUSION
by Gareth Stedman
Jones
Allen Lane, $79.99 hb, 750 pp, 9780713999044
In this 750-page tome, Gareth Stedman Jones, a British historian and former editor of New Left Review, seeks to rescue the revolutionary thinker Karl Marx from the ‘Marxism’ he sees as the creation of his long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels and to reconstruct him as part of the nineteenth-century political and philosophical context in which he existed.
Given the luxury of space, Karl Marx: Greatness and illusion is a deeply immersive and absorbing account of the life, times, theories, and politics of Marx. His personal and family life is interwoven with accounts of the political turmoil of the era that gave rise to his ground-breaking work. The detailed accounts of vibrant café culture, heady and heated debates between leading intellectuals, and the ferment of a Europe in the throes of bourgeois revolutions evoke the heady cocktail of conditions that spurred Marx’s thought.
Marx was born in 1818 in the Rhineland, an area situated between France and the German Confederation. Europe was attempting to rebuild itself following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which had killed an estimated five million Europeans. An aspiring poet, Marx entered the academy and wrote a doctoral dissertation on the implications of Epicurus’s theory of the atom, pitched as a defence of the Hegelian theory of idealism that he would later dedicate his work to critiquing. As the revolutions of 1848 unfolded, Marx, his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, and their three surviving daughters moved from Berlin to Paris to Belgium to London, where
they finally settled. It was in London that Marx was finally able to earn a somewhat stable living as the European correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune
Stedman Jones builds a rich account of the intellectual debates of the era, as Marx responded to and recast the language of Proudhon, Bauer, Feuerbach, and others. He sees the key contribution of Marx’s early years as his clear statement and radical critique of political economy: asking why the ostensibly free exchange between the wageearner and the capitalist benefited the capitalist so disproportionately.
Yet the picture Stedman Jones builds of Marx the man in these years is not so flattering. He sees Marx as highly self-absorbed and entitled, one who shirked his family responsibilities and parental obligations in his single-
minded pursuit of his work. Although Marx and his wife were devoted to each other, he impregnated their housekeeper Helene Demuth, who gave birth to a son the same time as Jenny did. Stedman Jones also presents Marx as a profligate spender, incapable of managing money. Marx’s meeting with Engels in Paris was to be an opportune moment for the thinker, as Engels would come to be his long-term co-author, personal confidant, and benefactor. As Marx and his family struggled financially in London, living in hovels and suffering ill health, Engels’s comfortable job and family inheritance often allowed him to bail out his friend and eventually move them into better circumstances.
Stedman Jones differentiates between the early works of Marx on political economy and his next works: his famous political tract The Communist Manifesto (1848) and his historical appraisal of Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). Stedman Jones sees these works, inspired by Marx’s own participation and observations of the midcentury revolutions, as less successful than his political economy oeuvre. He sees the modernising vision of the Manifesto as one that comes to be identified closely with Marx’s thought, but whose abstract figures of ‘class struggle’, ‘proletariat’, and ‘bourgeoisie’ possessed less explanatory power than his earlier work. Stedman Jones says that Marx fudged the categories of classes involved in the insurrectionary battles of 1848 in his The Eighteenth Brumaire. The classes who supported Bonaparte the political outsider were not
Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and Marx’s daughters Jenny Caroline, Jenny Julia Eleanor, and Jenny Laura, c.1860s (via Wikimedia Commons)
simply the small-holding peasants and lumpen proletariat whom Marx derided, but also the labouring poor in the cities whom Marx so valorised.
Some of these criticisms are fair, and many others have also pointed to Marx’s enthralment with the bourgeoisie and capitalist modernity in his Manifesto, and his dismissal of the peasantry and the so-called lumpen proletariat as figures doomed to the dustbin of history and incapable of political action. But for a political history, Greatness and Illusion pays surprisingly little attention to genre and form. The Manifesto was
The picture Stedman Jones builds of Marx is not so flattering. He sees Marx as highly self-absorbed and entitled
written specifically as a political tract designed to inspire political agitation, and so, by nature, its language was less nuanced and more essentialising than his earlier works. The Eighteenth Brumaire was written as a piece of journalism for the American monthly magazine Die Revolution. It was not intended to advance the academic and theoretical insights of Marx’s earlier work so much as to see how the class forces of bourgeois revolution played out in reality.
It was during the final stage of Marx’s life and career, when he carried out the research for his magnum opus Das Kapital (published in 1867), that he began to succumb most deeply to the illness that had plagued him for most of his life. Despite Marx’s genetic predispositions to pulmonary disease, his unhealthy lifestyle, and his poor and unsanitary living conditions, Stedman Jones argues that the insomnia, fevers, staph infections, and liver disease that Marx suffered were strongly related to his incessant wrestling with high theory. Marx found the theoretical work so demanding and draining that at one point in 1862 he applied for a job as a railway clerk.
Stedman Jones also sees this later period as one of the most fertile and self-
aware in Marx’s life, one that produced alternative formulations of political change that were not incorporated into the version of Marx we receive due to the posthumous editing of his work by Engels. In his third, unpublished volume of Das Kapital, Marx wrote about his vision of post-capitalist society, outlining a transition from bourgeois property to associated producers such as cooperative factories. During this period, and especially in his engagement with the insurrectionary 1871 Paris Commune which governed the city for ten weeks, Marx began to embrace the trade union movement as a means for class consolidation, and he rejected the political party as a vehicle for revolution.
This period also saw Marx shift from his earlier support for British colonial occupation of India and other parts of Asia as a progressive force helping to bring about the transition to modernity, towards a view of the pre-capitalist village community and peasant communal ownership as resilient structures that could provide an alternative to capitalism. Stedman Jones argues that Engels did not look favourably on these views and concluded that it was a historical impossibility for a ‘lower’ stage of economic development to solve the conflicts that could not arise until a later stage of development. Following Marx’s death in 1883, Engels edited Volumes II and III of Das Kapital, which were published in 1885 and 1894 respectively. Engels did not integrate these ideas, effectively erasing them from Marx’s thought.
On the whole, Greatness and Illusion gives too much agency to Engels in shaping Marx’s thought and promoting Marxism as a modernising theory, without considering the purposes for which Marx wrote different texts. Nevertheless, Stedman Jones’s revelations in this latter part of the book provide fruitful material for how we analyse Marxism and consider its ongoing contemporary relevance, particularly given the decline of the industrial working classes and the critiques of bureaucratic communism. g
Sujatha Fernandes is a Professor of Political Economy and Sociology at the University of Sydney.
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Unorthodox approach
A daring biography of a remarkable woman
Brian Matthews
DYMPHNA
by Judith Armstrong
Australian Scholarly Publishing, $39.95 hb, 202 pp, 9781925333657
In the summer of 1988 I was part of an Adelaide Writers Week symposium on biography, the stars of which were two justly famous and accomplished biographers – Victoria Glendinning and Andrew Motion. I described that occasion at the time, like this:
I greatly admired Motion’s panache. As we ascended the podium to begin the session in front of a huge crowd of biography buffs, he was heard to enquire of anyone within earshot what it was we were supposed to be talking about! He went on to give a fascinating, eloquent account of biography in general and his project at that time – a biography of Philip Larkin – in particular. Victoria Glendinning too spoke with fluency and conviction. Neither of them seemed to have the slightest doubt about the legitimacy of biography or the reliability of what biographical research turned up. This was not to say that they regarded biography as ‘truth’ or even ‘history’, but they certainly did not think it was fiction; they considered that when you committed biography you produced something describable to some extent as a verifiable life.
The assurance with which they approached the topic and its intricacies powerfully intensified my own sense of unease. As a Writers Week neophyte, I was beginning to doubt whether my intended contribution – to explore and elaborate on some doubts about the legitimacy of biography by deconstructing the biographical voice into several of its possible component parts – was such a good idea after all.
In ensuing years, however, both Glendinning and Motion also began to doubt, Glendinning rejecting what she
came to see as the ‘kind of authoritative tone that reckons to give you the whole picture of somebody’s life’, the tone, that is, of conventional biography; and Motion joining the ranks of the apostates to suggest that ‘if [biography is] only pursued by orthodox means, it will endlessly go round the same small wheels of people who left papers behind that we can re-read and re-interpret’. Motion’s doubts and worries about biography were brought to a head when he began to write Wainewright the Poisoner (2000). Confronted by the impossibility of constructing a ‘complete linear life’, Motion came to a conclusion that would have been anathema to him and his compatriot in Adelaide in 1988. ‘Well,’ he resolved, ‘I’m going to have to make it up.’
In seeking to ‘rescue’ Dymphna Lodewyckx ‘from her reputation as a woman of talent sacrificed on the altar of matrimony’, Judith Armstrong faces some of the problems that bedevilled Andrew Motion. Although she doesn’t ‘make it up’ (neither, strictly, did Motion), she espouses a Hilary Mantelstyle of ‘biographical fiction … serious scholarship … leavened by imaginative departures such as made-up conversations’. Conversations, however, exist in a context of personal encounters. Their timbre and tenor will influence how the speakers appear to a reader, so ‘making them up’ becomes a sensitive biographical manoeuvre. Likewise, the range, profundity, and power of the ‘imaginative departures’ will colour and influence the depiction of the ‘real life’ they have been invented to serve like one colour on a palette bleeding into and subtly transforming another.
Armstrong acknowledges some help from members of the Clark family
and inspiration from An Eye for Eternity (2011) – Mark McKenna’s multi-award winning biography of Manning Clark (wrongly cited in the Preface as Ever Manning) – and she is in any case an experienced and accomplished research scholar. She is not writing in a vacuum, but she seems in some ways a lonely figure. There is no bibliography, there are no notes, no formal acknowledgments. Her frank and admirable detailing of her ‘Mantel approach’ tends to contribute to the sense that these are ‘untrodden ways’ (though there are several biographically innovative Australian precursors): ‘Many of the thoughts and conversations I have attributed to her cannot be traced directly to a letter or an interview but are guided by the understanding I formed of her in many ways …’ Compare Motion in his Foreword at an equivalent moment: ‘… anyone wanting to write about Wainewright today … would face formidable difficulties, if he or she were to use orthodox biographical methods’.
Whatever Armstrong’s perceived or encountered problems, and whatever the liberties she has taken, or is seen to have taken, she has written a fine biography of a fascinating, immensely talented woman. Her ‘mission’ – to show that Dymphna was not ‘sacrificed on the altar of matrimony’ – means that the story of Dymphna’s marriage to Manning Clark must be one of her central concerns, and that story is threaded through the narrative, bringing with it some wonderful
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portraits and perceptions of the joys, intricacies, trials, and sacrifices involved in having and nurturing a large and growing family, as well as some sharply ironic glimpses of Manning’s selfabsorption. Gradually and expertly, as things unravel, in all senses of the word, Armstrong shifts the emphasis from Dymphna as a possibly unappreciated helpmate – her own growing suspicion, as Armstrong portrays her – to Dymphna’s being recognised as a brilliant linguist, translator, public speaker, and, when required, a commanding keeper of the flame.
In a conversation which begins with Judith Wright but becomes Dymphna’s recollection of a talk with her daughterin-law Elizabeth, Dymphna is asked if she acknowledges that she had had an interesting life. She replies, ‘Oh yes, that of course. I was quite often bored as a child, but never as a grown-up. Just miserable, frustrated, impotent. And angry …’ It’s not clear whether this important revelation is ‘biographical fiction’, a ‘made-up’ conversation, or ‘traceable to a letter or an interview’. Which brings us tantalisingly back to Glendinning and Motion, to seemingly authoritative tones and the difficulty or impossibility of ‘orthodox biographical methods’.
Dymphna is a challenging, beautifully managed, and daring biographical adventure, and a judiciously affectionate celebration of a remarkable woman. g
Brian Matthews’s Manning Clark: A life (2008) won the National Biography Award. His essay ‘What Dymphna Knew: Manning Clark and Kristallnacht’ appeared in the May 2007 issue of Australian Book Review
No cipher
An important and at times enthralling study of Queen Victoria
Margaret Harris
VICTORIA: THE WOMAN WHO MADE THE MODERN WORLD by Julia Baird HarperCollins, $49.99 hb, 752 pp, 9780732295691
The Empire over which Queen Victoria ruled for more than sixty years no longer paints the globe red. Yet Victoria is still ubiquitous. She is memorialised in the Commonwealth of Australia – formally proclaimed just three weeks before she died on 22 January 1901 – in the names of two states and innumerable other places, along with material objects like statues and portraits. The popular image of her is impassive and monumental, while ‘Victorian’ as an adjective is generally pejorative, implying earnestness in all things, and repression in most.
Julia Baird’s ‘intimate biography’ sets out to question such assumptions. Historian by training, journalist by profession, the Australian Baird was encouraged to take on the project by her editor at Newsweek during the 2008 US presidential election, stimulated initially by questions to do with women and high office.
Baird’s thesis is a deceptively simple one, encapsulated in the title ‘Victoria the Queen’, with its implicit tension between the woman and the monarch. The historian approaches her task sharply attuned to the accreted layers of interpretation that surround her subject. Her declaration in a ‘General note’ preceding nearly 120 pages of annotation may appear to be the manifesto of a very literal empirical historian: ‘All passages that discuss what Victoria was thinking, feeling, or wearing are based directly on journal entries, letters, and other contemporaneous evidence’ duly referenced. In fact, the note announces a mission of recuperation, both of material not previously utilised, and of documentary sources that have been demonstrably manipulated: Victoria’s journals by her youngest and longest-surviving child, Beatrice; her letters by ‘Two old Eto-
nians’ who ‘warped our view of Queen Victoria for decades’. The meta-narrative of how the life of Queen Victoria has been written is continued into the present, in a scrupulous account of the barriers that Baird encountered even to gain access to material in the Royal Archives. Only with the intervention of Quentin Bryce as governor-general of Australia did Baird gain admission, but although she acknowledges exemplary assistance from the Keepers of the collections, she also describes an attempt to restrain her from publication of certain material (diaries of Victoria’s last medical attendant, Sir James Reid – which in fact had already been published, and in any case do not form part of the royal collection). The sore point is the queen’s relationship with her Scottish servant John Brown. Baird maintains convincingly that it was extremely close, whether a physical affair in her view ‘not proven’. Certainly, what she uncovers about royal sensitivities over time provides unequivocal demonstration that generations of the royal family and their retainers have been extraordinarily defensive about Victoria’s relationship with the man her children and household referred to as ‘the Queen’s stallion’. Baird gives Victoria both personality and physical presence. She offers a child wilful and prone to outbursts of temper (a tendency evident throughout her life), who developed and maintained strong attitudes and opinions not always consistent with each other. She was a talented artist. This Victoria is a working woman, no cipher, who took her job seriously and to the end of her life actively participated in the business of government to the point of being meddlesome, for instance in the conduct of the African wars of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. The extraordinary dialectic between her paramount regal authority and uxorial submission to husband as master is demonstrated in detail.
Albert, the Prince Consort, has a starring role, with applause both for his abilities as statesman, organiser, and entrepreneur, and for his lesser-known capacity for tenderness and fun. Whatever his health issues – he is said not to have been strong, and Baird conjectures that he may have suffered from Crohn’s disease – he was evidently virile. Baird is explicit about Victoria’s high libido and its correlate, her obstetric history. She bore nine children between 1840 and 1857, welcoming the availability of chloroform for her eighth confinement (the haemophiliac Prince Leopold in 1853). She considered breastfeeding abhorrent and didn’t much like babies, but warmed to children: it is curious, if perhaps irrelevant, that she detested cruelty to animals.
In the short to medium term, her absorption by childbearing and rearing gave the opening for Albert to be-
come king in all but name. In the longer term, she suffered the consequences. Postmortem examination showed a prolapsed uterus and ventral hernia, apparently never diagnosed or treated, both painful conditions liable to further physical repercussions. It is also salutary to be reminded that several times throughout her reign there was concern that Victoria might have porphyria and be going mad. It is now conjectured that she and her oldest child, Vicky, had a mild version of the poorly understood disorder that overtook her paternal grandfather, George III.
Baird reminds us that Victoria lived and reigned for a very long time, but does not privilege any one period: hence attention to her birth and childhood, through accession, marriage, the histrionic mourning for Albert, down to her apotheosis as queen empress. Received accounts are persistently qualified by fresh research and new readings of previous studies. Throughout there is illumination, often of what might have been, beginning with the race to produce an heir among the six brothers of George IV. The succession, not only to the British throne, but to many European kingdoms and lesser domains, was a constant concern of Victoria and Albert from the birth of Princess Victoria in 1840 on. Often it is the sidelights that are most telling. So we learn that after the lengthy ritual of her coronation and procession through London, the queen returned to Buckingham Palace and washed her dog Dash. Such detail is largely responsible for the originality
and liveliness of this biography, and the impressive concision and authority with which major political, social, and economic issues are discussed. Baird’s learning is substantial, and lightly worn. This volume is itself monumental, and like its subject a triumph of thoughtful discipline. In round figures, it is 750 pages of which 250 are apparatus. I confess to loving a good index,
This Victoria, actively participated in the business of government to the point of being meddlesome
and this is one, and I was gratified by having also a ‘Cast of Characters’ with a paragraph on each, excellent maps –very useful and left to tell their own tale – a judiciously pruned family tree, and generous notes. Among the many illustrations, some in full colour, there is a rare photograph of Victoria smiling, taken during her Golden Jubilee celebrations in 1887. The image exemplifies the unexpected perspectives on Victoria the Queen developed in this important and at times enthralling study. g
Margaret Harris is Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita at The University of Sydney. She has published widely on Victorian topics.
Queen Victoria smiling at her Golden Jubilee in 1887
The front foot
Diana Bagnall
THE NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE 60s: STORY OF A DECADE
edited by Henry Finder
William Heinemann
$69.99 hb, 705 pp, 9780434022434
Journalism is on the back foot. That’s putting it kindly. Hundreds of newspapers and thousands of careers have been consigned to the great media burial ground since the dawning of the digital age. Those still standing operate in a climate of deepening mistrust. From Trump’s America to Erdoğan’s Turkey, demagogues saddled with democratic political systems trumpet their scorn of so-called media elites. Among those that refuse to die is The New Yorker magazine. Founded in 1925 as a ‘comic weekly’ under Harold Ross, it has proven remarkably durable with its signature blend of long-form journalism, highbrow criticism, poetry, fiction, and humour. I have my doubts about the wisdom of letting out into the world this superb collection of New Yorker pieces from the 1960s. Those were the glory days. In an era when so much ‘content’ is counted in characters, this is like looking at the ruins of the Parthenon and asking, what happened?
The 1960s were a different country. The New Yorker’s pages were stuffed with high-end advertising that paid the bills. Here is one example of how good the good times were when they rolled. In 1959, William Shawn (editor from 1952 to 1987) gave the novelist and essayist James Baldwin an advance to make a trip to Africa. Baldwin was a busy man, so he didn’t make it to Africa until 1962. On coming home, he decided he had more important things to write about than Africa.
The 20,000-word autobiographical essay he eventually delivered was a polemic of howling beauty that ranged across the black church, the Nation of Islam, and the racial crisis. Not only was it calculated to offend white liberals (a fair chunk of the magazine’s readership) but it had an unmistakably incendiary
whiff about it: ‘The only thing white people have that black people need, or should want, is power – and no one holds power forever,’ thundered Baldwin in oracle mode.
The courteous Shawn was ‘well aware that … [the essay] was a mold breaker for a magazine that had thrived for so long on reportage, humor, fiction and, for the most part, a generalized equanimity’, writes his successor David Remnick (Editor since 1998) in a short introduction to this elegantly packaged compendium. Shawn held his course, and published Baldwin’s ‘Letter from a Region in My Mind’ in November 1962. It exploded in the expected faces, and gave impetus to the next phase of the civil rights movement, Black Power.
Baldwin’s article made a big bang, but it was just one of several lobbed by The New Yorker in an explosive decade when the tenor of the magazine was reshaped by Shawn. In June 1962, the magazine began serialising marine biologist Rachel Carson’s conservation manifesto ‘Silent Spring; in February 1963 it ran Hannah Arendt’s report of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem; and in 1965 it published Truman Capote’s creepy ‘non-fiction novel’ In Cold Blood. All were news-stand sensations. Their influence is still felt today.
George Packer, a star of the contemporary magazine’s writing stable, says it was in the 1960s that The New Yorker lost its ‘habitual cool’ and acquired a social conscience. From Woodstock to the moon landing; from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the Prague Spring; from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the revolution in the Vatican; from Cassius Clay to the Beatles, The New Yorker put its writers out there. Some were surprisingly young, others were at the top of their game. Their reporting is delicately detailed, their sentences finely shaped, and they always have a point of view, even when it is later proven wrong. Still do. The New Yorker is never dull, for, as Adam Gopnik comments in his introduction to ‘The Critics’, it is a magazine that was ‘always meant to be read for pleasure in the first instance’.
Here’s E.J. Kahn Jr (a staff writer for five decades) getting amongst the occupiers of the Harvard Yard in 1969;
here, that same year, is Pauline Kael, the magazine’s most famous film critic, flaying Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (ouch); here’s Ellen Willis, who died too young, writing a deadpan sociological analysis of rock music in 1968 (she was twenty-seven at the time); here’s Michael J. Arlen, television critic, mowing down the networks’ lazy coverage of the Vietnam war on a lazy summer’s day in 1967.
A few bylines are familiar – Lillian Ross and E.B. White are part of the magazine’s mythology; John McPhee and Calvin Trillin, both represented here, are still contributors fifty years on. Readers will recognise poets and short story writers (Sylvia Plath, John Cheever), and profile subjects (Bob Dylan, Marshall McLuhan, Ronald Reagan). But so many marvellous journalists have been forgotten, among them Renata Adler, Richard H. Rovere, Henry S.F. Cooper Jr, and Flora Lewis. All once had big reputations, deservedly.
The staff writers who have contributed the sharp and insightful ‘notes’ that introduce each of the nine parts of the compendium – organised to reflect the usual content list of the weekly magazine, minus the famous cartoons, regrettably – include Packer, Gopnik, Malcolm Gladwell, Jill Lepore, and Evan Osnos. They are the hope of a side, led by the urbane Remnick, that each week gives many of us reason not to despair about the barbarians at the gate. They too will one day be forgotten –oblivion is a hazard of the occupation –but not The New Yorker. Please, not The New Yorker. g
Diana Bagnall is a Sydney-based journalist and author. ❖
Both hands full
Glyn Davis
THE BEST AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS 2016
edited by Geordie Williamson Black Inc.
$29.99 pb, 320 pp, 9781863958851
An annual challenge: how to select essays which capture the moment but live beyond the immediate?
For some, rigour matters. The series editor for The Best American Essays invites magazine editors and writers to submit contributions to a Boston postal address. The rules are strict: an essay is a literary work that shows ‘an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought’. It must be printed during the year, in full, in an American periodical. Unpublished work cannot be considered, nor extracts from longer works. The endless flow of submissions is reduced to just 100 potential essays and submitted to a guest editor – in 2016 Jonathan Franzen. The resulting volume includes a list of essays considered, so readers can test their judgement against the editor.
Geordie Williamson, critic and Picador publisher, takes a more expansive view. There are unpublished essays in The Best Australian Essays 2016: from Vicki Hastrich on art and death, and an unflinching reflection on her vagina and childbirth by Tegan Bennett Daylight. Most contributions touch on an Australian theme, though several essays do not. Williamson has curated carefully but says little about his editorial decisions. There are essays from fifteen women and fourteen men, with the women published first. The collection pivots on a discussion about football by Anna Spargo-Ryan, a homage to her grandfather’s deep love of the Norwood Reds,gently shifting the voice from female to male. Williamson has commissioned some pieces, sourced others from small magazines and web publications. Every rule offered by the American guide is broken somewhere, usually to good effect.
In a book that must span a federal election, Brexit, and Donald Trump, the overtly political is surprisingly subdued, though not absent. Jo Chandler writes
with restrained fierceness about coral bleaching along the Great Barrier Reef. Richard Flanagan provides an eyewitness account of trauma in Syria, while Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani describes with chilling bluntness his imprisonment on Manus Island. Julian Burnside reprises a superb lecture on Australian refugee policy.
Among the few overtly political essays is the contribution by Galarrwuy Yunupingu. He begins with song cycles in the life of the Yolngu. These cycles, laid out on ceremonial grounds, give meaning to a person’s life, linking them to the past, providing obligations for the present and future. When lived as sung, they make sense of the Yunupingu name, translated here as ‘the rock that stands against time’. This identity must stand in many worlds, as Yunupingu surveys Territory and national politics, the damage to community from battles over land rights and mining, the successive disappointments as prime ministers fail to deliver their promises to the Yolngu.
There are essays which point to policy consequences. In her beautiful evocation of a Brisbane storm, Ashley Hay reminds us of the wild weather in prospect as the climate changes. Rebecca Giggs touches on the degradation of nature as she watches a beached humpback whale slowly die on a Western Australian beach.
Reportage too carries political messages: Jennifer Mills on the economic and social forces that leave Detroit a ruin, Martin McKenzie-Murray on endless shootings in America. Guy Rundle asks when violence is a political act, and thus terrorism; too expansive a definition, he argues, threatens our civil rights. Many essays focus on literature and art, often offering a personal response to the work of others. Melinda Harvey has read deeply the novelist Elena Ferrante. Fiona McGregor reflects on performance art as practitioner and audience, drawn to – but still unsure about – the work of Marina Abramović. Michelle de Kretser writes on Randolph Stow, Peter Goldsworthy on Peter Porter, Gregory Day on John Kinsella. J.M. Coetzee contributes his preface to a new edition of The Good Soldier, perceptive and wellcrafted but an awkward fit in the flow
of the collection. James Bradley proves personal context for his moving tribute to David Bowie, while Michael Winkler, in his 2016 Calibre Prize-winning essay ‘The Great Red Whale’, pursues an improbable set of connections between Moby-Dick and Uluru, finding in the white whale and the red rock a profundity of silence. Clive James might spend days writing about Browning, but finds much to enjoy binge-watching The West Wing. James is an assured writer and worthy dedicatee of the book, but his essay sits uncomfortably in this context.
Essays are often intensely personal, the hard work of finding words for fleeting insights. In a striking opening for the volume, Maggie Mackellar offers a fugue on her father’s death. Anwen Crawford also links music and loss, while Mireille Juchau wonders about her grandmother fleeing Nazi Germany, and the life that followed. Fiona Wright writes about teenage depression and bulimia, and the consequences of treatment. Apparent fragments from Helen Garner achieve a coherence that belies the small moments described. Adam Rivett evokes the methodical silence of Berlin libraries, in a city marked by music and film.
The Best Australian Essays 2016 concludes with ‘Both Hands Full’, an essay from Kim Scott. This reprises – and integrates – many different approaches in this collection. Scott begins with death and grieving, moves to personal experience as he interrogates the role of literature, and reflects on Nyoongar ancestral lands and the politics of Indigenous experience. He closes by listening carefully for language, voices from the past singing of our present, making sense of possible futures.
It is an inspired close. In a survey collection that is more than parts, the essays must talk to each other. Here is the conversation of our moment – voices we know, new arrivals who startle, personal and shared political concerns addressed in many different ways. With quiet skill, Geordie Williamson has edited a single volume that contains the multitudes who are us. g
Glyn Davis is Professor of Political Science, and Vice-Chancellor, at the University of Melbourne.
Poor cousin
Danielle Clode
ATOMIC THUNDER: THE MARALINGA STORY
by Elizabeth Tynan
NewSouth
$34.99 pb, 390 pp, 9781742234281
Maralinga is a name familiar to most Australians as the site of British nuclear testing in the 1950s. Less familiar are the earlier tests at the Monte Bello Islands off Western Australia and Emu Field in South Australia. All have left a toxic legacy in our history.
Elizabeth Tynan’s finely researched book on the history of Maralinga and its precursors brings to light a remarkable period of Australian history that serves as a potent warning against complacency and lack of critical scrutiny of government policies, particularly on matters of ‘national security’. As South Australia again puts itself forward as a guinea pig, this time for a radioactive waste dump, it is timely to consider the lessons of the past and just how worthless government safety assurances can be.
Australia was not Britain’s first choice for a nuclear test site. They would have preferred to continue working with the United States. But the United States, having won the nuclear race with the benefit of British physics (and Australian contributions from the likes of Mark Oliphant), proved unwilling to share the rewards. Cambridge spy scandals did not help Britain’s reputation as a reliable nuclear collaborator. Canada, which had also contributed to the Manhattan project, was second choice but quickly rejected British overtures once it realised the level of planned contamination.
Australia was third choice. Far from being the favoured child, we were the poor distant cousin it seems, who could be readily deceived, kept in the dark, and later discarded without fear of reprisal. The strata of complacency, and contempt, lie thick across this period of history. The British exhibited a breath-
taking level of disdain for Australian interests – humanitarian, environmental, and political. The Australian government’s deferential and subservient attitude to the British was astonishing, if not profoundly embarrassing. Surely no one could retain any semblance of fondness, or respect, for Menzies’ ‘mother country’ after reading this book.
Far from being cautious about the impact of the testing on Australia, Menzies eagerly took up the British cause offering carte blanche for whatever land or facilities they needed. Australia even volunteered to shoulder a sizeable slice of the bill for site development. If Australia hoped to gain nuclear expertise through the collaboration, they did not insist on it, nor was it offered. In fact, Australian scientists, public servants, and even politicians were rigorously excluded. As Tynan reports, Australian suggestions that ‘a firm request’ be made to the British government for better access to information ‘seem forlorn at the very least, if not outright deluded’.
A fast-tracked development process identified the Monte Bello Islands off the Pilbara coast as the first suitable site, survey teams finding ‘an immensely rich natural environment’ today recognised for its globally significant marine biodiversity: the perfect place to detonate a twenty-five-kilotonne plutonium explosive underwater, sending up a column of radioactive water over one kilometre across and 170 metres high and contaminating a vast marine area. Further tests on Trimouille and Alpha Island were land-based. The Alpha test was the largest atomic device ever tested in Australia, which the British admitted was sixty-five kilotonnes although it may have been closer to ninety-eight. The atomic cloud rose fourteen kilometres in the air and spread east across the entire continent, causing radioactive rain on the Queensland coast.
The Western Australian’s editorial assertions that ‘the Monte Bello explosion reverberates with a vastly increased assurance of British Commonwealth power and defensive security’ began to sound a little hollow. Public murmurings over the scale of these experiments did not, however, encourage British pru-
dence. Rather, they moved their activities to Emu Field and then Maralinga, becoming even more secretive and devious. They continued nuclear testing under the guise of ‘minor trials’, probably in direct violation of the Geneva Convention’s moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons, with little concern for the health of their own or Australian participants.
The fact that the area included significant Indigenous archaeological sites, described by some as an ‘Aboriginal Stone Henge’, did not give any concern. Issues of Aboriginal health or land rights were barely acknowledged, and the fact that some of the land fell on an Aboriginal reserve seemed to be convenient rather than an impediment.
Despite the impressive mushroom clouds of the Monte Bello tests, it was the so-called ‘minor trials’ at Maralinga that did the most damage. ‘They left behind by far the biggest portion of the radioactive contamination in Australia and were the subject of an active coverup by the British,’ says Tynan. Paltry efforts to ‘clean-up’ made the contamination worse, scattering radioactive particles across the landscape. Efforts to keep people out of barely acknowledged danger were minimal. These trials could have been done in Britain, but would have faced stiff political opposition and far greater regulation.
Tynan has brought together a vast array of detail in this book. Rather like the plutonium scattered at Maralinga, the most powerful material is not concentrated in a single blast but is scattered liberally throughout the book. The sheer breadth of the story is astonishing: the barefaced duplicity of the British, the naïve sycophancy of the Australian government, the trusting complacency of the public and the ineffectual scrutiny by the media. This book is a timely reminder of the importance of active and engaged public debate in a democracy, and one that every Australian should read. g
Danielle Clode is a South Australian environmental writer who was the ABR Dahl Trust Fellow in 2014. She is currently writing a biography of the nature writer Edith Coleman.
Inga Clendinnen: An Appreciation
by Jay Winter
Inga Clendinnen, who died in Melbourne on 8 September 2016, was an historian whose primary research interest was the exploration of the social conditions of extreme violence in different periods and societies. She was born Inga Vivienne Jewell, the youngest of four children, in Geelong in 1934. Her father had a cabinet and furniture workshop, the income of which he shared with his workers during hard times. The family lived on a precarious footing, with frugality built into Inga’s early life.
Inga’s parents, she later recalled, were not happy together. They lived troubled lives. Her mother was reclusive, and was confined by household chores. To Inga, her mother’s domestic prison was partly a reflection of necessity, and partly a choice. That choice puzzled and then angered young Inga, who was determined not to accept a similar fate. Perhaps as formative were her father’s silences about the horrors of war. He had fought on the Ypres front, and harboured memories of losing a mate while driving an ambulance wagon. These images of horror surfaced intermittently until the last days of his life. The Jewells took in as lodgers American servicemen on leave during World War II, and Inga knew the wrenching feeling of hearing that one of them had later been killed and another blinded. The two world wars and their violence were palpable parts of her early life.
Inga read English and history at Melbourne, and earned a first-class degree in 1955.
The wise tutelage of Max Crawford and the young Ken Inglis helped her to choose history as a profession. One particular lecture by Inglis on Melanchthon and Erasmus lifted a mist in which she was wandering. When she thanked Inglis for his help in enabling her to see through the fog, he left the room blushing from this compliment from a young woman considered by some to be the most beautiful student of her generation. In 1955, at the age of twenty, she married John Clendinnen, who was then beginning what was to be a distinguished career in the Melbourne University department of history and philosophy of science, where he taught until retirement in 1989. They had two sons and followed parallel careers, his in the field of empiricism in experimental science, hers in what then was termed social history, which encompassed the history of societies, social structures, and social movements. She was a tutor in the history department at Melbourne from 1955–68. In 1969 she took up a post in the newly founded La Trobe University, where she worked in the congenial company of colleagues open to global history informed by the social sciences.
This was the moment when the English journal Past & Present edged ahead of the French journal Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations as the primary site for the publication of exciting and innovative social history. Once Marxist, and, after 1968, Marxisant and ecumenical, Past & Present
Inga Clendinnen
had on its editorial board radical historians like E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, as well as distinguished early modern historians, including Lawrence Stone, the historian of Elizabethan England, and the leading Hispanist John Elliott. They welcomed the publication in their prestigious journal of Clendinnen’s two pioneering articles, ‘Disciplining the Indians: Franciscan Ideology and Missionary Violence in Sixteenth-Century Yucatán’ and ‘The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society’, which appeared in February 1982 and May 1985 respectively.
In her first article, Clendinnen thanked her Melbourne colleague Greg Dening for inspiration, and used to great effect the insights of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. The second article reflected some of the stimulation of Clendinnen’s time (1983–84) as a visiting scholar at Princeton’s Shelby Cullom Davis Research Center in History, directed by Lawrence Stone. Among other visiting scholars at Princeton at that time were military historian John Keegan and Omer Bartov, historians of war and the Holocaust. Geertz then became a friend, as did Natalie Zemon Davis and others in that wideopen intellectual environment. Rhys Isaac, Clendinnen’s close colleague at La Trobe, had been there in 1981–82. In later years, she remembered with pleasure her visits to the United States, including her time exploring the treasures of Meso-American history in Princeton’s Firestone Library.
In her 1980s publications, drawing on Geertz time and again, Inga focused on the problem of extreme violence in a number of different contexts. The first dealt with the cruelties of Franciscan missionaries faced with back-sliding among converted Indians in the Yucatán, and the second, with the centrality of human sacrifice in pre-Columbian Aztec culture. Both subjects were interpreted as performative cultural systems, in which
Clendinnen both inspired and drew creatively and repeatedly on the American academy
pain and violent death are ever-present reminders of the fragility and evanescence of the human lifespan in a world dominated by deities to be appeased.
Clendinnen both inspired and drew creatively and repeatedly on the American academy. She honoured the great American archival scholar of Spanish America, France Vinton Scholes, by dedicating to him her first book, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatán, 1517–1570 (1987). To a degree, this book anticipated the influential work of the literary scholar of Latin America, Mary Louise Pratt. In her presidential address to the American Modern Languages Association in 1991, Pratt defined the ‘contact zone’ as a social space in which
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different cultural groups meet and engage in a range of conflicts, rhetorical as well as violent, the resolution of which depends on the relative degree of power each can exert on the other. Ambivalent Conquests developed Clendinnen’s research previously published in article form on one such contact zone in the Yucatán.
In her second book, Aztecs: An interpretation (1991), Aztecs live with and confront intimately prisoners they have doomed to human sacrifice. Her understanding of this danse macabre arose from her patient examination of the sources documenting a society both very similar and very distant from our own. Ambivalent Conquests won the Herbert Eugene Bolton Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for best book of the year in Latin American history in 1988.
In 1991, Clendinnen was struck down by auto-immune hepatitis. She survived a liver transplant operation; the antirejection drugs which followed gave her a new lease on life, but had secondary effects which plagued her for the rest of her life. Unable to continue to teach at La Trobe, or to travel to Latin America, she became, faute de mieux, a different scholar, a public scholar, to a degree liberated from academic constraints.
Her first subject was her illness and how it changed her life. The outcome of her reflections on her predicament and the effects of her treatment was a bold and original book, published in 2000 as The Tiger’s Eye. Particularly striking is her account of her terrifying hallucinations and the fragmentation of her command of language into an intermittent access to individual words, syllables, and sounds. Even the approach of insanity was not off limits to this historian of the limits of the human imagination.
others into looking away from this monstrous moment in history.
Clendinnen’s subject position as neither a Jew nor a survivor gave her a special perspective on these events, and announced a shift in her historical commitments. While retaining a keen interest in Meso-American history, she began to examine her own country’s history. The initial results of her thinking on this subject were broadcast in the Boyer Lectures on the ABC in 1999, and published the following year as True Stories
What gives her voice its particular resonance is a refusal to approach the writing of history as primarily an exercise in empathy. We are not, she said repeatedly – and at times with anger – the same as people in past times, and we cannot simply imagine that we walk with them and share their emotions, as we share those in our families and of our social circle today. We must accept the bedrock of our radical alterity in order to understand, through a critical examination of sources, what they were capable of doing and why they did it. The Aztecs were not just us in funny clothes, as in an early screen version of Antony and Cleopatra, in which the dancing girls undulated in dresses with zippers. They were both human like us and very different from us. Only by adopting this position of critical distance, tested time and again against the traces, visual and written, that they left behind, can we even have a chance of understanding the bloody world in which these people lived.
Clendinnen’s writing both here and in later works, took on a new and luminous character, not unknown among those passing through a near-death experience. The English historian Richard Southern produced his masterpiece, The Making of the Middle Ages (1953), under a similar sword of Damocles.
In this period, Clendinnen saw her writing as an affirmation of life, and used this insight to tackle a particularly difficult problem in the historical interpretation of extreme violence. Reading the Holocaust, published by Cambridge in 1998, is an act of literate defiance of those who pronounced the Holocaust either beyond history or beyond words. She refuted this view, and sided with Primo Levi, who wrote to save his own sanity, and by doing so, stared down the Gorgon which had terrified
Clendinnen’s rejection of empathetic history arises from her firm belief that primary documents, published and unpublished, and not our own sentiments, are the bedrock of historical study. No radical empiricist, she insisted instead that historians must abjure abstract categories like evil, in order to think hard about the motives of those who inflict pain on other human beings. She claimed that a perverse idealism drove forward many of those we call ‘Holy Terrors’, like the Franciscan Diego de Landa, the managers of the Spanish Inquisition, or those who made the Holocaust happen. Since context is all, she had great trouble understanding why some scholars called Australian practices concerning Aborigines genocidal; here her austere approach to historical sources and contexts took on a polemical form which on occasion offended more than it illuminated.
In her Boyer Lectures, Clendinnen deployed to
Inga and John Clendinnen with his best man, Tim Burstall (left), 1955
great effect Pratt’s contact zone approach in examining the encounters between Aborigines and settlers from the time of settlement onward. We can see as well how her ethno-historical sensibilities left entirely open the question of whether the violence attendant on white settlement was the only form in which the encounter between white and black took place. The title of the book which followed these lectures in 2003 gives away her answer. It is Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at first contact Her scintillating prose is on display in a collection of essays she wrote under the title Agamemnon’s Kiss (2006). In the same year, she published in the journal Quarterly Essay a set of reflections entitled ‘The History Question: Who Owns the Past?’ These were in part sparked by the intervention of the then Prime Minister John Howard on the question of how Australian history should be written and taught. In part it was a defence, at times strident, of history against what she believed to be the pretensions of some writers of fiction that they could raid history for good stories and then tell them better and more deeply than historians could do. Here, Clendinnen erected a road block, and made it clear that history was an arduous intellectual pursuit of the truth that emerged from critical engagement with those archives that disclose the past to us. It was not a pool in which well-intentioned novelists could casually dip their big toes before writing fiction about the past.
Even (or especially) when angry, Clendinnen’s work showed how deeply she was committed to history as a moral discipline. In this, her teacher was the great English
social historian E.P. Thompson, whose work and prose she hugely admired. History showed, both Thompson and Clendinnen believed, that men and women make choices; our job is to try to work out why they did so and with what consequences.
Clendinnen’s legacy rests in part on the brilliance of her prose, and in part on the way she bridged the work of a generation of historians who did social history in the 1980s and those who did cultural history in the 1990s and after. For Clendinnen, the difference between the two kinds of history lay solely in the sources historians consulted. In sum, her lasting contribution is as a social historian of the culture of violence which marked societies from the sixteenth century to the present.
Her honours were numerous. In May 2016, she became, along with the Parisian scholar Arlette Farge, one of the first women to receive the International Dan David Prize of $1,000,000, for a lifetime’s work in social history. She donated a substantial part of her award to Médecins sans Frontières, in part as a way of saying thank you to those in the caring professions who had saved her life twenty-five years before. These doctors and nurses had indeed opened a door through which Inga Clendinnen passed to the second phase of her brilliant and creative life. g
Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and visiting Research Professor at Monash University. He writes about World War I and its effect on the twentieth century. He has written or co-edited twenty-four books. ❖
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Australian Book Review in England Shakespeare Stratford, Glyndebourne and London
June 14-25, 2017
$8,550 per person, plus airfares
$2,450 sole use of twin room
Enjoy the English summer with the Australian Book Review’s editor and author Peter Rose and former curator–director Christopher Menz on this exclusive tour for lovers of theatre, music, art and literature. The group is limited to 16 like-minded travellers and visits Stratford-upon-Avon, the Sussex Downs and London.
For a detailed itinerary and booking information, contact ABR’s travel partners, Academy Travel on 02 9235 0023 academytravel.com.au
The carefully planned itinerary is built around a unique set of seven performances, including works by and associated with Shakespeare.
• World première of Australian composer Brett Dean’s new opera Hamlet at the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, directed by Neil Armfield
• Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, starring Damian Lewis and Sophie Okonedo
• Antony and Cleopatra and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-upon-Avon
• The Philharmonia Orchestra playing Shostakovich’s monumental Fifth Symphony
Excursions, walking tours and gallery visits follow a literary theme, and include Henry James at Rye, the Bloomsbury Group at Charleston, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Library and selected smaller galleries such as the Courtauld and The Wallace Collection.
The program is rounded out with several meals and private receptions arranged through ABR.
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Double life
Morag Fraser
LIGHT AND SHADOW: MEMOIRS OF A SPY’S SON by
Mark Colvin
Melbourne University Press
$32.99 pb, 304 pp, 9780522870893
Mark Colvin’s fine memoir – of a journalist’s life and as a spy’s son – was completed before the Macquarie Dictionary chose ‘fake news’ as its word of the year, and the OED and Merriam-Webster opted for ‘post truth’ and ‘surreal’. In July 2016, as Colvin was writing his acknowledgments chapter, Donald Trump was being nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States. Colvin does not mention Trump’s name. But his entire book – a principled insider’s history of the craft of journalism, of Cold War politics, espionage, and the pivotal political events of the twentieth and early twenty-first century – is a counter-instance to ‘fake news’ and the hyperventilating culture which spawns it. It is also a bracing reminder that the fourth estate – in its now myriad manifestations – remains the necessary counterweight to the abuse of power and to oligarchic or autocratic rule.
As I was rereading Colvin in New Jersey in January, six days before the presidential inauguration, Carl Bernstein appeared on television in his role as a contributing editor to CNN’s new investigative unit. Asked how journalists should conduct themselves in the new political order, the Watergate veteran replied: ‘By getting the best obtainable version of the truth, which is our mission.’ When asked for his response to Trump, Bernstein said simply ‘I don’t know enough. I’d have to do the reporting.’
Colvin is as circumspect as Bernstein in his claims for journalism: ‘the best obtainable version’ is not a claim to absolute truth. Colvin acknowledges that, as a reporter, he is a ‘single pair of eyes recording the precise moment … a single perspective on what’s known as the first draft of history’. As a broad-
caster (so authoritatively presiding over ABC Radio’s PM program since 1997), he hews to a credo that echoes Bernstein’s: ‘Don’t make up your mind before you have gathered the facts. Never start with a conclusion. Test your theories against the evidence. If the facts contradict you, change your thesis … listen to others’ opinions, cast your net wide. Then – and only then – draw your conclusions.’
Light and Shadow would serve admirably as a textbook for aspiring journalists (or for any professional ethics course), but, as its title indicates, it is a double-headed narrative, a father-son story wound through revelations of Colvin’s own life as a foreign correspondent and broadcaster. I say ‘revelations’ because, for listeners who have known only Colvin’s perfectly modulated voice and dispassionate, intelligent probing of all comers on PM, the boy and man revealed in these ‘memoirs’ (note the plural) of a spy’s son comes as a shock. Could such a calm, assured professional have such a tumultuous backstory? Well he does, and that reminds us, again, that human beings are mysterious, and we should be careful about our assumptions
Mark’s father, John Horace Ragnar Colvin, lived ostensibly as a diplomat. But he was recruited to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in 1949 and lived the double life of a spy thereafter. His son was not fully aware of his father’s profession until his mid-twenties. Now in his sixties, Colvin has had to accept (galling for a journalist and even more so for a son) that aspects of his father’s life will forever remain opaque to him, however assiduous his research into public records, diplomatic dispatches, espionage literature (including his father’s own memoir), and the reports of friends and family.
Colvin’s mode is one of effective self-effacement (though he is effusive about many of his peers, familiar names like Paul Murphy, Jim Middleton, Andrew Olle, Richard Carleton). He details the serious illnesses that have dogged him since 1994 in a scant page, saying that he has ‘tried hard not to let them define me’. They have not. About his father he is aware of the
psychological complexity of their relationship – ‘the possibility that I stepped unconsciously into a field of work that I thought was the opposite of what my father did’ – but never milks it for drama. He concludes: ‘by trying to be as unlike my father as I could, I was perhaps not so different at all: for both of us, information gathering was our trade, and constant doubt and questioning the knives we wielded’.
Their ‘trade’ has given us a journalist who knows the world from Iraq to Mongolia’s Ulaanbaatar Bator (one of his father’s strategic postings), and whose accounts of it are both serious and enthralling – ripping yarns no less. His life has encompassed childhood in Germany, Austria, Malaysia, and Australia. His mother – and bedrock after his parents’ divorce – Anne Colvin, née Manifold, grew up in Victoria’s Western District, country her son came to love. He was educated in England, at the Dickensian Summer Fields, then Westminster School, and finally the Australian National University. He has interesting connections (his mother’s great-aunt Ethel was married to Stanley Bruce – ‘Uncle Stanley’). His English accent helped earn him employment at the ABC but also curled-lip contempt from Bob Hawke whenever Colvin interviewed him (‘He just hates Poms, mate,’ explained one of Hawke’s staffers). He is an obsessive reader and a lover of the absurd. He understands fully the importance and the costs of his ‘trade’: he has seen colleagues die in the pursuit of ‘the best obtainable version of the truth’.
We are lucky to have Mark Colvin. Read his book and take from it the assurance that integrity and honesty are not extinct – even in the media. g
Morag Fraser is a Melbourne critic and commentator.
Schlink’s style
Miriam Cosic
THE
WOMAN ON
THE
STAIRS
by Bernhard Schlink
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
$29.99 pb, 227 pp, 9781474604994
Certain themes suffuse Bernhard Schlink’s fiction: memory, mystery, secrets, guilt, shame. Schlink mixes them in various permutations and intensities, but they are ever present in novels that have vaulting philosophical ambition beneath their simple narratives.
His most famous book is The Reader (1995), an award-winner and best-seller, nominated for Oprah Winfrey’s book club, and made into a star-studded film (2008). Yet the story of a boy seduced by an older woman, who turns out to have been a concentration camp guard, was not universally admired. Some critics saw an apologia for passivity in the face of Nazism and the defence of ignorance. Some admired Schlink’s simple writing style; others found the simplicity simplistic. I found the book interesting enough to finish, but unconvincing.
The Weekend (2008) tackled later German history. In it, a left-wing terrorist confronts his country’s fascist past. It was a syndrome of the 1970s in the previous Axis powers: the Red Army Faction in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy were violent residues of World War II. Again, the critics I agreed with found his simple style simplistic, his political arguments pedantic on the page, delivered by cardboard cut-out characters.
His new book, The Woman on the Stairs, suffers from all of the same. Yet
the story is intriguing, and the final section would be considered revolutionary if feminism were accorded the same significance as liberation movements propelled by the other half of the species. Two men – a wealthy businessman called Gundelach and an artist called Schwind – wage a power struggle over an arresting painting and the woman who is its subject. Wife of the businessman who commissioned it, and subsequently lover of the painter, Irene is depicted in the painting naked, walking down a stairway. The narrator of the book is, in the first section, a young lawyer engaged to arbitrate between the men. He, not entirely convincingly, falls in love with the woman in the painting at first sight, and then with the reallife subject after a couple of brief legal meetings. Under her spell, he helps her to dupe both men and escape with the painting, disappearing from all their lives.
At the other end of his life, a widower and a senior partner in a successful Frankfurt law firm, he is startled to find the picture hanging in the Art Gallery of New South Wales during a business trip to Sydney. Transported back to his first encounter with it, and the emotional turmoil that ensued, he impulsively sets business aside and begins a hunt for the woman – and for himself. He discovers that she, too, is in Sydney, illegally, and off the grid, on an island only reachable by boat. Meanwhile, the story of the painting’s rediscovery – the painter is now world famous and the work dubbed a masterpiece – has run in the New York Times. Soon enough, the ex-husband and the ex-lover also track her down.They arrive, stretching Schlink’s predilection for coincidence, at the same time.
The extended conversation that follows is faintly reminiscent of Sándor Márai’s brilliant, conversation-based novel Embers (1942), in which two elderly men spend a night at the castle of one of them, rehashing the event that broke their friendship. In The Weekend, too, Schlink collected his characters in a confined space for a political and emotional talkfest, though without Márai’s compelling craftsmanship.
In The Woman on the Stairs, Schlink
uses dialogue for similarly didactic purposes. One thing lacking, though Irene is the pivot around which the three men turn, is any real exploration of sexual politics, though Schlink does try. At one point, Irene tells the narrator, ‘I was the young, blonde, beautiful trophy, only the packaging counted. For Schwind, I was a muse, the packaging was enough for that too. A woman’s third stupid role, after the trophy and muse, is the damsel in distress who must be rescued by the prince. To stop her falling into the hands of the villain, the prince takes her into his own hands. After all, she belongs in the hands of some man.’ The narrator mentally lists his firm’s childcare policy, his own kindness to his wife and daughter, and thinks: ‘I don’t need to be lectured on feminism.’ Is this Schlink’s own response?
Most importantly, the men discover, and we read briefly, that Irene had been involved with radical politics in East Germany after she ran from them, and was in Sydney evading the German police. And yet, while the men pontificate about politics and law during their uncomfortable reunion, she talks only about those topics unreconstructed men of Schlink’s generation presume women prefer: herself and her own emotions.
For the most part, Schlink’s writing so lacks affect that it is as dry as a legal brief. Even the humid, raffish beauty of Sydney in summer fails to come alive. The voices of the characters and of the narrator are identical. If one can’t read the original, it is difficult to tell whether the translators – Joyce Hackett and Bradley Schmitt here, different to his previous novels and short stories – have helped or hindered his style. His nonfiction works on law and political psychology are more compelling.
The narrator’s, and the author’s, redemption comes in the final section, in his tenderness towards Irene’s ageing and ailing body and his equivalence in appraisal of ageing for man and woman. The surreal, deliberately confusing juxtaposition of reality and what-mighthave-been contains the only beautifully written passages in the book. g
Miriam Cosic is a Sydney-based journalist and critic.
The bardo
Beejay Silcox
LINCOLN IN THE BARDO
by George Saunders Bloomsbury
$29.99 pb, 368 pp, 9781408871751
From the outside, America seems defined by its brutal polarities – political, racial, moral, economic, geographic. The Disunited States of America. From the inside, the picture is more complex; American life is not lived at these extremes, but in the murky, transitional spaces between them. George Saunders’s muchanticipated novel Lincoln in the Bardo is set in another murky, transitional space – between life and death – a space that proves a powerful allegory for the desires and sorrows of a nation conceived in liberty, but forged in blood.
In early 1862, Abraham Lincoln’s eleven-year-old son William (Willie) died of typhoid fever. Lincoln had been president for less than a year; the Union had shattered and the Civil War raged. As families buried their sons, the president grieved for his own. Newspapers reported that Lincoln was so debilitated by grief that he returned to Willie’s crypt alone at night to hold the boy’s body. Saunders’s novel imagines that this private tenderness has been observed, not by the living, but by a wakeful and garrulous chorus of ghosts.
In Tibetan Buddhist thought, the ‘bardo’ is a state between death and rebirth. As Saunders writes, ‘consciousness is still operative but is no longer tied down to the physical body ... the mind is like some wild horse, suddenly untethered’. The narrators exist in this liminal state, aware of who they were but in denial. In their still-live minds they are merely sick, waiting to be revived, and so their purgatorial world is a spectral echo of America, riven by race, class, and gender. They spend their time in the bardo fiercely resisting the urge to move on, bickering like characters in a Beckett play, and retelling well-worn tales (‘One must be constantly looking for opportunities to tell one’s story’).
Loudest in this decaying community are Hans Vollman (‘not thin, somewhat bald, lame in one leg, teeth of wood’), a middle-aged printer whose skull was crushed by a falling roof beam before he could consummate his marriage, and Roger Bevins III, a young man who realised the beauty of the world seconds after making an irreversible, lethal decision. When the ghost of Willie Lincoln arrives, they devote themselves to saving the boy (‘These young ones are not meant to tarry’).
Literary attempts to inhabit a single day, such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, often find their power in the harnessing of detail, in psychological embroidery, finding metaphysical import in the rituals of daily life. Saunders eschews the micro for the macro and anchors his graveyard night in historical context rather than florid description. That Abe will leave the crypt a different man – a different president – to the one who entered is the grand promise of history, articulating how and why is the grand promise of this novel.
George Saunders is a literary heavyweight, often described as America’s best living short story writer. Accordingly, much has been made of the fact that Lincoln in the Bardo is his first novel. This attention belies the (somewhat tedious) privileging of the novel over shorter forms of fiction, the notion that short stories are somehow less valuable, ambitious, difficult, or serious. What is far more interesting is how insufficient the label ‘novel’ feels as a means to describe Lincoln in the Bardo, for Saunders explodes the form, constructing his story entirely in fragments; the book reads as if he jammed a grenade into the middle of history and then arranged the pieces to create a vast, polyphonic collage.
The narrative engine of the book is the ghostly account of the fate of Willie Lincoln’s soul.
Saunders originally conceived these grave-bound scenes as a play, and they remain entirely rendered in speech; however, it is a type of speech reminiscent of a Greek chorus – a collective narration handed from voice to voice, but united by a burden the ghosts ache to share with their grieving president:
Though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true. At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering, limited beings – perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.
Interspersed are chapters of historical quotations; some real and some imagined (though it is never revealed which), but few consistent with one another. Was Willie’s death an accident or neglect? Was the moon full, crescent, or absent? Was Lincoln a thoughtful leader or a reckless megalomaniac? In these interludes, Saunders acts as curator rather than storyteller, entreating the reader to enter another bardo, between history and myth.
Readers familiar with Saunders’s short fiction (most recently, the lauded collection Tenth of December, 2013) will expect the unexpected, though this book is a significant departure from the acidic irony of his previous work. Lincoln in the Bardo is often irreverent and ribald, but always earnest. There is power and poetry in this unashamed sincerity. This compelling mosaic of a novel will inevitably be labeled as experimental, which may alienate some readers. It shouldn’t. This book has earned the critical praise it will receive. Lincoln in the Bardo is not wilfully exclusionary: it is a profound, ambitious, and original meditation on what it means to suffer, love, regret, forgive, and lead, written at another liminal time in American history when such questions echo louder than ever. g
Beejay Silcox’s short story ‘Slut Trouble’, commended in the 2016 Jolley Prize, appears on our website.
Works in progress
Jane Sullivan
DO YOU LOVE ME OR WHAT?
by Sue Woolfe
Simon & Schuster
$29.99 hb, 240 pp, 9781925533286
An odd thing happened after I had finished reading this short story collection. I came back to it a couple of weeks later, intending to write this review, and found I had almost completely forgotten some of the stories. Such amnesia is unusual for me. Good short stories generally set up a resonance that lingers, even if not all the details stay in the mind. Does that mean, then, that these are not good short stories? I wouldn’t say that. Uneven, perhaps. Some seem unresolved, more like fragments: although they aim at completeness, and are polished to a finished form, on some level they go on unfurling, not yet ready to declare The End. This can be a good thing, a sign the writer is not complacent. I know Sue Woolfe’s work as thoughtful, highly intelligent, evolving over many drafts, the product of a mind intensely curious about its own creativity, as if she is constantly asking, ‘Now, what did I write that for?’ She has written about this process in her non-fiction books Making Stories (1993, written with Kate Grenville) and The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady (2007). So it figures that in her
Acknowledgements she should analyse the common impulse behind these eight stories, written at different times and developing at different paces. She quotes from Death of a Salesman, where Willy Loman complains about his son Biff’s lack of direction: ‘Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace!’ Woolfe confesses her own disgrace: at a much older age than Biff, she is still trying to find herself, and all these stories are about women (and one man) trying to find themselves at what Willy would describe as a disgraceful age.
Some of the women’s stories deal with friendship (‘the achingly pretty her’ who seems more like a rival); a beloved but mysterious father; a pregnancy and an old betrayal; and a famous writer’s account of her under-confident youth, framed by footnotes from a snarky editor. As the title suggests, love is longed for, but not always trusted. Place is used to evoke mood, and there is much use of the pathetic fallacy, where even coat hangers have feelings. All these women experience themselves as misfits. They struggle with shame, a sense of rejection, and suppressed anger. Finding yourself is clearly a painful path.
Perhaps the most appealing and poignant story, ‘Her Laughter Like A Song of Freedom’, is not about a woman at all. Gerard has learned early in life to eke out things. He is an innocent soul, reminiscent of Don in Graeme Simsion’s The Rosie Project (2013) although Gerard was created long before that book existed, and his history is a much darker tale, without Simsion’s populist feel-good factor – which makes it to my mind a better story.
Gerard was recycled into Owen, a character in Woolfe’s novel The Secret Cure (2003), and indeed several of these stories hold echoes of her other work: there is a little bit of her novel The Oldest Song in the World (2012) in both the title story and more specifically in ‘Small Talk’, where an eager but naïve and ill-informed young woman goes into the desert to locate the Indigenous women and to have a conversation with them. Against the odds, it is a funny and hopeful encounter.
No doubt these recurring themes reflect the experiences or preoccupa-
tions of the author, but she tells us the only autobiographical story is ‘Passport’, which began life as a short memoir but was almost entirely rewritten to include later information that solved a family mystery. Oddly enough, it is the least successful of these stories: the mystery solution, true as it might be, feels too contrived and tacked-on to work as fiction.
Woolfe implies she keeps picking away at these texts before and sometimes long after publication. ‘It’s taken years for me to find the story’s heart,’ she writes of one, ‘The Last Taxi Ride From Home’. Heart for the writer and heart for the reader can be different things: my abiding impression of this tale of an Australian woman’s unsatisfying but apparently necessary affair in Florence is of her lover’s ‘palely lidded orange eyes – I’d seen those pale eyelids without eyelashes a hundred times in medieval paintings’. What a masterstroke: I know at once how beautiful and how creepy this man is.
So, Woolfe’s stories may be works in progress, trying to find themselves, which may be why they do not always linger in the memory. The one I remember most vividly is my favourite in this collection, ‘The Dancer Talks’. Here is a finished story, about Magdalena, a shy and self-effacing tango dancer who might be going blind. Slightly outlandish metaphors quiver on the edge of absurdity, just as Magdalena appears to quiver on the edge of falling in the dance; but Woolfe pulls it off, with subtle distinctions between the tango dancers and the way they approach their art and each other. There is a gathering tension, fuelled by Magdalena’s failing eyesight and her constant feeling that heavily winged archangels are thundering down to banish her from the earth. Sometimes they wear hobnailed boots. There is an angel’s wing in ‘The Last Taxi Ride From Home’, but it is a laboured thing compared to these splendid beings, God’s bovver boys, and Woolfe’s final sentence, which changes point of view three times, is another masterstroke. g
Jane Sullivan is a literary journalist and novelist based in Melbourne.
Flawed milieu
Suzanne Falkiner GWEN by Goldie Goldbloom Fremantle Press
$29.99 pb, 392 pp, 9781925164251
Goldie Goldbloom has an eye for the dramatic and the morbid. Her novel about the real-life love affair, beginning in 1904, between artists Gwen John and Auguste Rodin, thirty-six years her senior, begins with a list of seventeen women – including Camille Claudel, Isadora Duncan, and Lady Victoria Sackville-West – whom Rodin allegedly bedded. One, we learn, was hit by a bus, one froze to death, three died by suicide, one from starvation, one in childbirth, one of a broken heart, one in the American bombing of Japan, one by accidental strangulation (possibly, it is suggested, during a sex act), and we all know what happened to Isadora Duncan. The last in her list is Gwendolen Mary John.
After a miserable childhood in Wales, Gwen John had followed her priapic younger brother Augustus – to whom she was unhealthily close – to London to take instruction at the Slade, the only British art school that took women. At a time when a woman artist had little chance of gaining the same education, training, and respect as a man, Gus thought Gwen the better painter, although it was Gus’s paintings that sold.
The story is told from the point of view of Gwen, whose dreams, fears, and delusions permeate the text, undifferentiated from reality. Lists of smells and sensations and remembered landscapes pile on top of each other. Gwen is haunted by a disquieting caricature of a Jew, apparently a figment of her imagination, that is a premonition of things to come, and other people appear at times to be witches or unnatural beings. The real Gwen was evidently an uncomfortable and needy woman; Goldbloom’s Gwen is also sexually voracious, almost predatory.
The novel, which comes with glowing back-jacket comments from Augus-
tus John’s biographer Michael Holroyd and from Dominic Smith, author of the popular The Last Painting of Sara De Vos (2016), begins with a series of set pieces – at a party in a bohemian café, in the studio, during a visit to Augustus’s wife Ida and their children – in which the characters do little else but play out, rather tediously, their sexual jealousies. Male members are sometimes a squirrel in the trousers, sometimes a ‘widow and two orphans’, and are quick to be unbuttoned. Gwen’s apparent imaginings sometimes make for a disconcerting read: what are we to make of this isolated non sequitur, when Augustus John puts on his coat after a family lunch to join his friends in a cafe: ‘Augustus was an unstoppable force of nature, spewing semen down the high street like a broken fire hydrant.’
This initial section does not bring to life the London artistic milieu of the period, although the names of various well-known figures are mentioned. Then Gwen decides to remove their shared model Dorothy McNeill, or ‘Dorelia’, from her brother’s sphere of influence, with a wild plan of walking to Rome. Ostensibly, this is to alleviate Ida’s troubled frame of mind, but in reality it is in the hope of seducing the beautiful Dorelia herself.
The story becomes more lively as the two women travel to France in the Autumn of 1903, walking barefoot, in stolen clothes, carrying an easel and paint box and their belongings in baskets, sleeping rough. From the dock at Bordeaux, they journey arduously to Toulouse, following the course of the river Garonne for some 246 kilometres south, apparently penniless despite the fact that Gus has given them £10 before their departure. Finally, in company with a commercial illustrator called Leonard, based on the Belgian artist Leonard Broucke, who becomes Dorelia’s lover, they take a train to Paris to seek out Rodin. A year later, Gwen parts from Dorelia and is finally accepted as a model by the bear-like Rodin, who treats her, body and soul, as she once treated Dorelia.
Much of the rest of the novel is taken up with John’s obsessive affair with Rodin, who sees her only clandes-
tinely but pays for her lodgings. In the book’s last sections, Goldbloom imposes on Gwen the task of commemorating, by prescience, the children of the 1942 Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup, a Nazi deportation of 4,000 Jewish children in which the French police were shamefully complicit.
Goldbloom is a talented writer who combines historical research with a vivid imagination, but the two don’t always meld convincingly. Anachronisms of language and manners render inauthentic the cultural milieu, even in these libidinous bohemian circles. Gwen is only sometimes convincing, either as a tormented woman or as an artist. Some secondary characters, such as Leonard, exist only as names, although Gwen’s friendship with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke is lovingly imagined.
I put down this book with very mixed feelings. A primary rule of reviewing is not to review the book that you think the author should have written, but when a novel purports to be based on the lives of real figures from the recent past, it must engender a willing suspension of disbelief, and a sense that the work is revealing a richer truth than the available historical facts allow. One winces at times for the ghosts of Goldbloom’s subjects, whose sins and virtues, whatever they were, were probably different from these. Goldbloom has bent John’s life rather too far towards her own agenda and to her own anxiety at the horrors the future held for the Jews of Paris. The novel veers giddily from trashy to literary, while parts are merely repetitious. Nevertheless, it is an exciting, if flawed, ride. g
Suzanne Falkiner’s most recent book is Mick: A life of Randolph Stow (2016).
Terrible love
Anna MacDonald
STORM AND GRACE
by Kathryn Heyman
Allen
& Unwin
$29.99 pb, 360 pp, 9781743313633
Kathryn Heyman’s novel, Storm and Grace, joins the recent proliferation of fiction by Australian women that deals with intimate partner violence. Like Zoë Morrison’s Love and Freedom (2016), it depicts the development of an increasingly troubled and ultimately violent marriage, over the course of which a woman loses her sense of self. Like Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), it is an indictment of the complicity of the media and other forms of representation – film, chick lit, ‘[a]ll that Fifty Shades shit’ – in setting standards of women’s behaviour, especially as it pertains to romantic love.
What distinguishes Storm and Grace is its narrative voice and reliance upon mythological forms of storytelling. This book is about the stories we tell ourselves and others. As such, it comprises layers of – often conflicting – narrative. On the surface, this is the story of freediver Storm Hisray (the ‘deepest man in the world’) and marine biology student Grace Cain, who meet and instantly fall in love. In response to Storm’s plea that she ‘live deep’ with him, Grace abandons her studies in Sydney and travels to an idyllic Pacific island where they live and dive together.
Grace is an experienced diver but until now has always dived with a tank. Under Storm’s tutelage she learns to free dive. When his own record is threatened by another diver (‘some ginger slut’,
according to Storm), he pushes Grace to deeper and more dangerous depths. Grace is all ‘perfect obedience’. In an all-too-familiar vein, she confuses pleasing Storm with loving, and being loved by, him. But there is also something in Grace that seeks out the danger of these deep, breathless dives. She has a history of self-harm. Throughout the novel there are intimations of violent sex – bruising, soreness, pleasure found in the ‘sharp brutal tang’ of pain – and, while free diving, Grace looks forward to ‘the glorious choral edge of death’. Thus, Storm and Grace is a cautionary tale. The desire for danger, for the cliff edge between life and death, is central to the threat of impending violence that colours the novel from beginning to end. The most inventive aspect of this book is its narration. The story is told by a chorus of vengeful, Fury-like sirens, women who have suffered violently at the hands of men, and who imbue the story of Grace and Storm’s relationship with a sense of foreboding. ‘You will be unsettled,’ they tell the reader, ‘unfooted, undone. We promise you this: that until you turn … and hear us, we will not stop. Listen … this is the true story’:
We have been here forever, watching ... We have been thrown from balconies; we have been pushed from boats … we have been battered with metal bars … we have been buried in piles of dirt … We are legion. And we will not forget.
These women lend the novel its narrative depth. Their siren song is a warning of the threat of gendered violence, but also, and perhaps most importantly, of the potentially lethal consequences of the kind of romantic love represented in this book. Grace – like all women, if we are to believe the story’s narrators –has been primed by popular culture for the ‘terrible love’ of romantic fantasy: ‘All she knew was this: adventure had called her, love had called her, and she would not say no. Who among us would say no to love? To romance? … We’ve read the books, we’ve seen the films, we know the songs.’
Grace succumbs to the idea of romantic love such cultural products propagate. But Storm is also a danger-
ous fantasist. By his own telling, he is of Inuit descent, has a Turkish grandfather, an ice-diving Austrian grandmother; he is named for a storm that raged as he was baptised in the ocean; his boat (the Sedna) is called after the mythical Inuit girl who married a god and became goddess of the sea and storms. It is Storm’s intimate association with the sea that attracts Grace, who has always felt at home there. Storm sees himself as the ‘god’ the girl (Grace) has fallen in love with, and, in keeping with the tropes of romantic fantasy deplored in this novel, they both see him as Grace’s saviour. Unsurprisingly, the reality is
What
distinguishes Storm and Grace is its narrative voice and reliance upon mythological forms of storytelling
quite different. Storm’s mother claims a more prosaic genealogy: the family hails from New Jersey and Storm was baptised James. The siren chorus, too, offers an alternative version of the Sedna myth in which, rather than marrying willingly, the girl is sold by her father to a man she does not love. When Grace questions Storm’s various accounts of his personal history he upbraids her for being ‘so literal’.
Heyman’s novel borrows from romance literature in order to critique it. As a result, the dialogue between Storm and Grace can be excruciating: ‘“I’m supposed to be interviewing you.” Weakly, she tried to grasp the memory of her task … “They shouldn’t send such charming mermaids to do the interviews if they don’t want their subjects to fall in love.”’ Likewise, Grace’s initial, virginal naïveté can be difficult to fathom. However, little is to be gained from an overly literal reading of Storm and Grace, which should be read as employing such tropes in order to expose them for what they are: dangerous harbingers of terrible love. g
Anna MacDonald is a Melbourne bookseller and a research associate at Monash University.
Gippsland bound
Fiona Gruber
WEDDING BUSH ROAD
by David Francis Brio Books
$29.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781925143331
Wedding Bush Road is a novel about contrasts and conflicts: new-age America versus an old-fashioned Australia; messy rural versus shipshape urban; high status versus low; the past versus the present.
Expat Daniel Rawson is a successful lawyer in Los Angeles. He has been tempered by seven years of ‘California dreaming’; life is good. His graceful girlfriend, Isabel, practises Kundalini yoga and reflexology. As the novel opens, we find the couple in a cabin in a canyon, cosily holed up for the Christmas holidays. All is mindful and embracing. Daniel has been planning to propose to her. From the outset, however, we also know that this idyll has already cracked, the mirrored perfection is already tarnished. There has been a phone call from across the ocean, a siren call from the parched landscape of the past; it is Ruthie, Daniel’s aged mother, down on the family horse farm in the flatlands of South Gippsland. She’s had a fall and, she tells him, will be ‘dead as Dickens by the end of the year’. Time to book the Qantas flight.
Ruthie’s vivid turns of phrase are jarringly fresh and direct compared to the more elegiac thoughts of her only child, as he arrives back home after years away. ‘I get my bag and roll it along the bluestone path to the big house. The long veranda striped by the shadows of the cypress trunks in the late afternoon, the lawn all but dead save for capeweed, the garden thirsty but overgrown.’ The ‘Toovareen Estate’ sign on the gate is drooping, the old homestead, once gracious, is spavined, and there is a burntout Mitsubishi in the middle of the bleached paddock.
Daniel’s assiduous exfoliation of his youthful self means that he is thin-
skinned and out of his depth when revisiting its pungent demands and clamouring, sly, argumentative characters. He is immediately wrong-footed by the new cottage tenants who roam the farm and house. There is Reggie, an elusive, almost elvish youth who appears at odd times of the day and night and seems to have a hold over Ruthie. Reggie’s mother Sharen, a woman of earthy charms, seems to be having an on-off affair with Earley, Daniel’s father. Despite a dicky hip and a pensioner’s bus pass, Earley is a tireless philanderer, which is why Ruthie kicked him out years ago. Then there is Walker, the most alarming of the players, Sharen’s ex, a fitful presence in the night, up to mischief and prone to violence.
The whole set-up, as the reader quickly discovers, is dysfunctional, laced with malevolence, and straight out of the Rural Gothic Songbook, with touches of Cold Comfort Farm. Who will inherit the property? Who will surrender to a lustful farmyard rut? Who will survive the night?
Francis’s sketches of landscapes and people are intense vignettes, particularly evocative when he conjures the dry paddocks and ‘familiar cacophony of crickets’ of high summer, and painfully sharp when describing the cruelties of old age. Stroke-ravaged Ruthie, nightie tucked into baggy jeans, has hair sticking up on one side ‘like a sea wall’ and is ‘thin as a picket’. Earley, still trying to charm the local girls while sagging on his broken hips, wears a face ‘rutted as a quarry’.
Ruthie is the key to the unfolding drama. Francis is acute in his portrayal of the mother–son dynamic; her mixed messages and dismissive attitude towards her failing health enmesh Daniel in a web of guilt that ties him to the future as well as to the past. An offer of help is met with a half-hearted wave ‘as though letting me know she’s familiar with neglect’. Yet later, in the dark of the paddocks, she tells him ‘you’re the reason I stay alive’.
Australia is a backward place in Wedding Bush Road. Francis’s sketchbook renders it brutish and brutal, its denizens’ needs urgent and basic, their emotional intelligence almost nonexistent. There is precious little Califor-
nian mindfulness or self-improvement, but more than a touch of William Faulkner in the concentration on place, on a disintegrating family, and the multiple voices that move the story forward.
For those familiar with Francis’s previous novels, Agapanthus Tango (2001) and Stray Dog Winter (2008), Daniel is a familiar construct, a questing young man, charming and amorous, emotionally tangled, liable to get into scrapes, farsighted but curiously blind to the bigger narrative in which he is embedded.
All of Francis’s male protagonists have troubled family relationships that compel them to leave but always draw them back. In interviews he has often spoken about the autobiographical elements running through his work. Like his protagonist, Francis is an expat lawyer living in Los Angeles who grew up on a horse farm in South Gippsland. For those familiar with that region, Toovareen is reminiscent of Tooradin; the nearby Tooradin Estate was the Francis family farm. Wedding Bush Road is dedicated to David Francis’s mother, Judith Francis, a horsewoman of renown, with many of the qualities and achievements of the fictional Ruthie Rawson.
The blend of fiction and documented autobiographical anecdote adds layers of interest to those with a curiosity for the life of the author. But one needs to know nothing of the real-life characters stalking these pages to be held by the novel’s exploration of defiant old age, love of land, and a family in decline. g
Fiona Gruber is an arts journalist and producer.
SCOUNDREL DAYS: A MEMOIR
by Brentley Frazer
University of Queensland Press
$29.95 pb, 304 pp, 9780702259562
Brentley Frazer, one of many scoundrels in his memoir Scoundrel Days, documents coming of age on the boundary of civilisation. His father’s vocation as the only policeman in a small northern Queensland mining town subjects Frazer to a chaotic side of life: a lockup only a stone’s throw from his bedroom; housing criminals and murderous poachers; bloodied victims of domestic violence showing up in the early hours; and the aftermath of car crashes. His parents’ involvement with the new-age cult ‘The Family’ introduces perverts into the home. But Frazer embraces his circumstances with a kind of brash vigour, starting The Wreckers gang, drinking, smoking, taking drugs, and committing acts of vandalism.
Frazer’s deft utilisation of E-Prime (where the verb ‘to be’ is elided) creates a visceral and urgent internal perspective which is both direct and poetic, often charming, and sometimes bleakly funny. As he moves from the casual and pervasive violence of his school days into a wandering and listless adolescence, drifting between Townsville and Brisbane, his growing intellect is glimpsed mostly second-hand via dialogue or anecdote. Given his proclivities (Byron, Plath, Hemingway), one would expect greater introspection, but this is a memoir that also tracks a fierce adherence to the philosophy of absolute freedom (he says: ‘I will never surrender’), charting its effect on relationships, and the tendency of the unrestrained id to challenge the bounds of the law. In Frazer’s case, it is a precociousness that justifies rather than redeems. Under it all lies a dark, nihilist void where, like Gordon in Andrew McGahan’s Praise (1992), expectation is seen as the root of unhappiness. But unlike Gordon, who slouches towards destruction content in the acceptance of a flawed physicality, Frazer oscillates between bravado and moments of self-awareness. This enigmatic, self-styled outsider bravely lets us into the inner sanctum, which makes for a fascinating read.
Duncan Fardon
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO CHEESE
edited by Catherine Donnelly
Oxford University Press
$78.95 hb, 869 pp, 9780199330881
The Oxford Companion to Cheese is an impressive undertaking with masses of fascinating and informed writing, and many illustrations on a delicious subject. It takes us from the origins of cheese – seventh millennium bce – to the most recent technological developments. The scope is broad: as Catherine Donnelly notes in her introduction, there are 325 contributors from thirty-five countries (though only two Australians: Paula Alvela and Sonia Cousins). Together they have produced 855 entries. These are arranged alphabetically and are followed by selected bibliographies for those wanting more information. There is also a helpful, topical outline of entries and an appendix listing cheese museums around the world, some of which sound worthy of a visit.
Patriotic Australians and New Zealanders will be pleased to read that the opening line of the combined entry for both countries states that they ‘are ranked among the top ten cheese-producing countries in the world’. However, any nationalistic pride will be quickly dashed by the realisation of how insignificant Australasian cheeses are in this international miscellany: there are over forty-one specific entries on specific French cheeses alone. Australian cheeses, including Coon, rate only a mention.
The production details for making different types of cheese are fascinating. The time, skill, judgement, and labour needed to produce even a small amount of cheese is extraordinary. Never again will I begrudge shelling out for Roquefort.
This is a volume to savour. Expected topics are well covered – different types of cheese, cheese chemistry, production methods, brief histories of cheese in numerous countries – and also some delightfully arcane entries. According to Homer, the Cyclops Polyphemus made cheese from sheep and goat’s milk. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, France had one major win to soften its humiliations: in a tasting competition proposed by Talleyrand, Brie de Meaux was elected ‘ le roi des fromages’.
Christopher
Menz
ONLY: A SINGULAR MEMOIR by
Caroline Baum Allen & Unwin
$32.99 pb, 384 pp, 9781760293970
Some ‘only’ children have revelled in that status. Iris Murdoch called her family unit ‘a perfect trinity of love’. Caroline Baum sees her family less happily as a triangle: ‘There’s something uncomfortable about a triangle: it’s all elbows, suggesting awkward unease.’ We find out in the following 380-odd pages the whats and whys of this discomfort. Some of it is historical; perhaps most is historical. Her father came to England with the Kindertransport. Her French mother had an equally traumatic but more singular childhood. Both were deprived of a normal family life as children.
Harry Baum dominated the family, and he dominates this book. However you look at it, he was a bully. He was a moderately successful businessman with expensive tastes, an exaggerated delight in name-dropping, and a compulsive need to control his wife and daughter. The language of warfare and international diplomacy crops up throughout the book: cold wars, battles, tactics, strategies, truces. At one stage, Baum’s husband approaches her parents on her behalf, ‘like an oldfashioned emissary sent from an enemy state … with peace offerings’. With the wisdom of hindsight, Baum can understand the psychological forces at work in her father’s behaviour, but in her teenage years she was confused and angry: ‘surrounded by material comfort, but told that nothing was mine; smothered with love, but also controlled, judged and punished’. It is not surprising that sometimes, as she admits, ‘I was foul.’
Baum manages to convey the complications of this unhappy situation for the most part with bittersweet candour. Her father’s ‘showy materialism’ is criticised, but at some level it is also celebrated in lingering descriptions of shopping sprees, luxury travel, and prestige cars. I felt the book could have done with less of this; it could have been 100 pages shorter with advantage. Gillian Dooley
Peter Porter Poetry Prize
THE SHORTLISTED POEMS
Drone
Someone says drone and I see the cell phone it tracks, see the hand holding the cell phone
Being tracked by the drone, see the arm connected to the hand holding the cell phone
Being tracked by the drone, see the shoulder manoeuvring the arm connected to the hand
Holding the cell phone being tracked by the drone, see the person attached to the shoulder
Manoeuvring the arm connected to the hand holding the cell phone being tracked by the drone,
See the people attached to the person holding the cell phone, attached by proximity,
By love, perhaps, respect, maybe duty, and the person I see is unseen to the drone and unseen
By the drone, is not seen even by the cell phone held by the unseen, who does not see himself
As the unseen while being tracked by the drone, seeing only the length of his arm and the hand attached to the arm holding the cell phone being tracked by the unseen drone.
Someone says drone and I see the hand that pushes the button – or flips the switch, maybe –
See the arm connected to the hand that pushes the button – or flips the switch, maybe –
See the shoulder manoeuvring the arm connected to the hand that pushes the button –Or flips the switch, maybe – see the person attached to the shoulder manoeuvring the arm
Connected to the hand that pushes the button – or flips the switch, maybe – of the drone.
And the person I see is unseen to the drone and unseen by the drone, is not seen Even by the button or the switch held by the unseen, who does not see himself as unseen.
Someone says drone and I see two hands gripping their devices in the grip of each other
Each hand convinced that it’s the hand that holds the truth.
Michael Lee Phillips ❖
Four Egrets
Four white egrets perch on four baby citrus trees at the four corners of the world and you wouldn’t
see this if you were not told to look. Their black eyes stare at the drying canal and stave hunger for snail and frog and minnow because those remains are not more than sinew or bone in cracking mud.
The two llamas and two horses in the chain-linked front yard, the one tree in that yard that has been
stripped of bark and leaves, the four of them eating hay that has been spread across cement – you would not share their thirst at the moment you hope for rain to fall on your dusty truck because you see them everyday and their backs are not your dusty truck. You wouldn’t see the barn buried under piles of hardwood vine stakes or wonder what is inside the barn in the no-light – you would not, before it’s gone. And what about the distribution of bee corpses from your windshield into fine dust under the few wilted melons near goathead thorns? The hard and tiny horns may stick to your boot and you must shake them loose after stepping back into the truck after taking a picture of the patch of weeds near sunbleached powder that streams across the upward face of the asphaltic chipseal – and further out, you may see the glint of shimmering mylar balloons that have released their helium and have set themselves
softly down, like dropped testicles, displaying bright round words that announce happy birthday or over the hill and you would not remember what day it was when you decided to try to be someone else between shifts, between each appearance of yourself embedded in the structures of everything but you.
Ronald Dzerigian ❖
The Snow Lies Deep
the low fish the late violin the dreaming wolf the mistletoe the firefly the favoured child
the favourite child the deepwater fish the comet fly-by the tuned violin the missed toes the dreaming wolf
a dream of wolves afraid child missing fingers & toes poison blowfish clown’s violin swarming fireflies warning fire lights screaming wolves lowly violinist flailing child dreaming deep fish kissing mistletoe
kissing missed you firefly alights deep sea fish flight howling wolf rites dreaming low child flighty violin bow low note violin falling mistletoe sleeping snowchild darkened firefly woken old wolf cloud of flying fish
fireflies light the child’s way through the town benthic fish gulp mistletoe berries down last known wolf tracks violin-playing clown and the snow lies deep all around, all around.
Saunders ❖
Laika
I’d spent the morning on the coast where I’d gone to be away from you and by extension, myself, the tabula rasa of the sky interrupted by ravens that had made of themselves a raised felt collage in the shade. A kite surfer was belting through the swell, too far from shore for me to read the maker’s name on the sail, but close enough to see the line she was leaving in dark green shelving like a fast download bar. I climbed a headland to see where I’d been, yet all but one compass point seemed defined by the decisions we’d made together, and even that was swinging between hard south, where we’d met, and our last nighta nor’wester blowing itself out like a trial separation. I walked to lose the sound of us having another shot, giving it our best. Cutting through littoral scrub, bearded dragons, like offcuts of distressed leather, stared from lantana and twisted trees the wind had cut back and down. I crossed a road where luminous cable was being unspooled, rolled out, the national broadband like a cannula, force-fed to the collective interface. I went off the track, unpicking myself from honey locust thorns. In a clearing I lay down to watch husks of old blood vessels bubble-chain across the sky. You were out of range and reach, like the retreating tag-end on a length of rope at the stern of a listing lifeboat taking on water. When I said your name,
a treecreeper quipped that distance and wistfulness are all we need, when healing. Starting back, with dusk on the make and bits of moon like stopgap animation through leaves, I found a tin crate, broken at the welds by impact. Inside, surrounded by glass, the skeleton of a dog. I thought of our kelpie from Working Dog Rescue, her love of balls, her going back and around a gull flock she’d follow down the beach. She was killed when a jet ski doubled back on its wake as she was closing in on a stick. I knelt beside the crate. I considered the flight of Laika, the astronaut dog, shuttled into obituary. A scattering of bones and glass in a beaten tin box as if she’d been satellite-tagged and released, already deceased, to burn out on re-entry and go to ground in the bush. It was raining as I reached the road, the lights of houses being turned off and on by windy trees. I found the beach gone under foam to the tideline. It was there we had talked about how to read the ocean, to find the direction of a rip in a gutter. You said panic kills more people than limited swimming skills. I stripped and stood in the shore break between the over and the underworld, the afterwards and the as it was, listening to the slurred pillow talk of the tide. Your face appeared, your features like a steady fall in barometric pressure, like memory loss where the hard drive of the sea crashes in to be erased.
Anthony Lawrence
and it is what it is
Chapter 1
You are given fingers before a mouth. Your ears are the last to form. What comes next becomes what I am most afraid of –I wonder where that wilderness in you was born.
Yesterday, they called me on the landline, asked for my date of birth and nationality; fourteen, zero six, thirty nine, China.
Nobody tells you to keep your hands tied behind your back and they need to stay behind your back they need to stay, they really need to stay.
Chapter 2
I want to cut something, I need, I need the certainty of a clear division. A binary, a slip, a something to keep my hands behind my back.
You write long letters about the man in there who springs overnight. There is nothing I can do, I swear it, there is nothing I can do.
They told me to tell you not to fight it when it comes because when it comes it will rupture your vocal cords, you will bend your knees.
I keep photos of us to compensate for your memory loss though now when I hold them, they feel like slices of seconds from someone else’s life, a life I push outside of myself, a life I have no care for.
Chapter 3
I told you so, I said that none of this would matter, the clocks on your face would lend itself to surrender and in the end it will all feel like a dream, a deep sleep dream.
I wake to find markings on my forearms, markings raised like welts and I wonder whether it came from the thrashing in your sleep or if I had lived some other life, become some other person when consciousness slipped away, ashamed by its own watchman.
They told me to tell you to close your eyes turn the self-immured blindness into a sea imagine the arms of her insidious pull weave its web of comforting tunes.
You will feel less if you let it run through you let the synapses burn through your wild river, and I will start to tell you, to neglect the parsimonious man in you.
Chapter 4
You take years to settle onto the ocean floor, spread your skin like particles of dust, entering the chain of subsistence they call evolution, though I knew for one moment.
They cannot hide you behind their panoply crust, gammon, imperviousness, all at once it seemed impossible
But again the seismic undergrowth of something I cannot see, something like a light I cannot extinguish. You put words into my mouth now.
Stop.
You need to stop putting words into my mouth.
Sentence to Lilacs
‘And that great black hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown It is there I will now fish.’
Aimé Césaire
Europe, stolen schoolgirl, she radishes on the fresh water creek snow on wheat … I mean no, don’t help me … no, don’t help … I have that lisp.
So I pitched my tent in the hotel lobby chiselling pegs into tiles until they burst like chalk under a hammer, wanting to sleep though no one taught me how
Her stutter
Her personal pronoun we
Her stutter
And she leaves me
To the imagination
Stuttering a way of stressing
Her point
We’re not history’s country. I was driving among the mangroves in the photo. I was zipped-up, galoshes on pushing through swamp to watch the bird-watchers in the photo. I was watching them watch the distant marsh terns and dusky-moor hens. In the photo cockatoos scream as if the sky itself has split from joy, though it’s hard to tell from the
When I wake on tiles the sky I remember taking interest in like a tourist the sky being gone soon anyway
When I wake on tiles and clouds in long procession like battles no one cares
When I wake on tiles reading War and War is, you might say, unknown to us our humanity never questioned
To us the sky’s the question that can beg all it wants and Peace, that bit when I’m not racist but the sky and Prince Andrey
Waking on tiles on a killingfield seeing only the sky. Its infinite
I can’t believe you’ve never heard of
I was driving through country-towns photos of closed-down milk-bar convenience stores hung on the bare walls of a private gallery
driving, slowing, at the boomgates a dog tethered to a stump, unbegrudging another day I’d sleep at the wheel
though no one taught me how another day I’d drive through country towns just to watch the cowpats basking in the sun
knowing I still own the word deciduous.
Others might use it but they don’t know how to pronounce the silence.
Louis Klee ❖
Sodium Hydroxide Washed out: the unbalanced washing machine jitters and grinds across the laundry choking on business shirts.
Bleach Someone has poured bleach over the evening. We can’t stand ourselves. We raw and rub and exsanguinate into silence.
Ammonia A rainbowed slip of chemicals wrinkles and cakes in an onshore breeze against the east side of the island. They will trace it to a container ship bound for Singapore.
11 Charcoal
She left the church early this morning, blinking and red-eyed. It’s too soon for Amazing Grace.
That song rolled into the furnace with a coffin.
10 Soap Only losers are prosecuted for war crimes. The foreign correspondent footnotes chemicals blistering in a child’s eyes, and barrel bombs germinating in Syria.
Skin doesn’t remain neutral.
9 Baking Soda
8 Sea Water
Breathing through the balloon of their skin, the Corroboree Frog stops calling in Kosciuszko.
Stained by a fungus dust, their skin skews and barks and peels.
Human interest story: scientists weep a solution of sodium and potassium but can’t save them. There is something out of balance.
7 Blood Water should be neutral, but all day we ferried test tubes and paper tapers bearing tell-tale colour. The tank smears with algae. Even the hardy, brutal goldfish would gulp and bloat in it.
6 Milk
5 Black Coffee
4 Orange Juice
The suncream doesn’t last. 15 Overs under the pinched membrane of ozone that pales the sky and we are painting ourselves again. Itching all weekend, the boys blister in missed lozenges of skin.
She has lost all her friends, strained off by marriage, tired out by children and the local café is precious to her. We perch studiously on the stools sip our coffees and talk to the owner.
This is a good year for mosquitos, burned out by the government’s careful carpet bombing of estuaries. We can sit on the deck into the evening and drink a haze of bitter wine. Something in the strafing chemicals attacks bees. Next year will be bad for crops.
3 Coke
2 Vinegar
1 Battery Acid
In the machinery of God 100 billion people have lived and died. The experiment must be nearly done.
Most days the river runs white downstream from the mine. The bunds have leaked for years, the seepage pits are full. It’s a fragile balance when the island’s economy depends upon that silver. The earth eats itself.
We rarely kiss and even less on the lips. My lips are an acid etch. She leaves at different hours and numbs her way to work. There is something out of balance.
Damen O'Brien
POETRY SURVEY
Unruly energies
Two general surveys of Australian poetry by John Hawke
According to The Magic Pudding , Bunyip Bluegum’s erudition is established through his ability to ‘converse on a great variety of subjects, having read all the best Australian poets’, a questionable achievement in Norman Lindsay’s day. A glance through the Annals of Australian Literature reveals the paucity of quality Australian poetry volumes published through most of the twentieth century, with selection shaped by the tastes of powerfully controlling editors, especially Douglas Stewart. Even in 1966, Max Harris’s survey essay on ‘Conflicts in Australian Intellectual Life’ – in which he inveighs against the academic gatekeeping of critics such as A.D. Hope, James McAuley, and Vincent Buckley in the post-‘Ern Malley’ era – notes the limited opportunities for publication by emerging ‘younger non-intellectual’ poets. This situation changed dramatically for the generation of poets who appeared in the 1970s, with generous subsidies and the emergence of a range of independent and commercial publishing opportunities for poetry volumes: poets of this generation – whilst splitting the spoils along the lines of painstakingly demarcated coteries – responded to this opportunity by producing oeuvres often staggeringly more voluminous than those of the poets who preceded them (Kenneth Slessor’s 100 Poems would these days barely constitute a single publication).
Apublishing by major presses in the mid-1990s, when a return to the deserts of earlier in the century seemed likely. That this didn’t happen was due to the energies of mostly unpaid volunteers in a cottage industry of independent publishing: previously regional presses such as Five Islands Press and Fremantle Arts Centre Press suddenly became more central, and they were joined by the collective efforts of supportive publishers like Giramondo and Puncher & Wattmann, who discovered that, with small government subsidies and limited print-runs, poetry publishing could indeed be made economically viable (though payment for the poet’s labour was restricted).
s the editors of Contemporary Australian Poetry (edited by Martin Langford et al., Puncher & Wattmann, $49.95 hb, 690 pp, 9781922186935) explain in their cogently instructive Introduction, the assurances of this fruitful period were at least threatened, if not ineradicably altered, by the abandonment of poetry
The result, over the twenty years surveyed in this valuable anthology, has been an unprecedented proliferation of Australian poetry books – too many, in fact, for even the most assiduous enthusiast to properly evaluate. This is partly a problem of distribution (these books have been mainly available via printon-demand), with most bookshops stocking only the scantiest selection of titles. But it is also the result of sheer productivity, not only by individual established poets, but with new presses launching a plethora of first books by poets whose work often hasn’t passed through publication in major literary journals – which had previously served as a kind of informal qualitative vetting process. These poetries also demonstrate a range of styles – formalist, Modernist, postmodern, avant-garde – never before witnessed in Australian literature (and at a time when mainstream ‘literary’ fiction has mostly reverted to a steady state of Wintonesque naturalism). The rate of production has swiftly moved beyond the capacities of our reviewing culture (though specialist journals such as Cordite do their best to keep up), while academic gatekeepers in this area of research – of the kind Harris railed against – appear thin on the ground.
This exposes the field to various forms of charlatanry, as evidenced in recent plagiarism controversies, with so many squeaky wheels competing for a fast-evaporating sniff of grease. Literary awards seem of limited assistance in this task of evaluation, with the multitude of state and national prizes yielding varying shortlists, depending on the allegiances of their judges.
The responsibilities of representation faced by the editors of each of these books are therefore heroic, if not impossible, and in both cases they deserve the highest congratulation for their efforts to provide a wide-ranging diversity of selection. Yet while these anthologies establish without question that we have a multitude of quality poets, what about the poems themselves: which are the specific works that most demand attention? In earlier, more approachable anthologies, such as those of Harry Heseltine and David Campbell, there was agreement on canonical works; the reader could comfortably expect to find the usual key poems by established figures such as Robert FitzGerald, Slessor, and Judith Wright.
The task of establishing a canon in Contemporary Australian Poetry is obviated by the time-limitations of the selection: this means that we receive only the finely matured later styles of elders such as David Malouf and Peter Porter. Les Murray’s representation includes three of his best poems of the 1990s – ‘The Tin Wash Dish’, ‘It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen’, and ‘The Last Hellos’ – rather than more famous earlier poems (at least two of which are represented in semi-parodic homages by younger poets). Robert Gray’s ‘In Departing Light’, an uncharacteristically emotive work by this most objectively unsentimental craftsman, now seems established as an anthology piece, and there is good reason to accept that Gray’s more recent poetry is indeed his best.
Gray’s remarkable new poem ‘The Latter Days’ is certainly the most outstanding piece in The Best Australian Poems 2016 (edited by Sarah Holland-Batt, Black Inc., $24.99 pb, 206 pp, 9781863958875). It draws on classical references in its revisitation of the family history explored in his autobiographical prose work, The Land I Came Through Last (2008): this stunningly achieved extended poem would easily substitute for any of those selected for the survey volume. While it is irksome to enumerate, it is worth noting that the twelve pages granted to Gray in Contemporary Australian Poetry position him as the leading figure of this period: John Tranter, by contrast, receives only four – this is possibly indicative of the anthologists’ position in relation to the ‘poetry wars’ of preceding decades.
It would seem unnecessary to identify the usual exclusions in a book which is so conscientiously inclusive, though these can certainly be found. While there is a deliberate attempt to feature previously overlooked poets with a focus on linguistic experimentation – such as the
work of Javant Biarujia and Chris Edwards – this field is only narrowly explored: Amanda Stewart is an obvious omission, as is π. O., whose book-length poem Fitzroy (2015) is widely regarded as a landmark recent work. Poetries that emphasise sound (including spoken word and dialect) and visual elements (including those emerging from digital technologies) are mostly unrepresented. There is also a kind of generational exclusion, which may arise simply from the ages of the editors: two of the highest-selling poetry volumes of recent years have been by younger poets, Benjamin Frater and Maxine Beneba Clarke – as a teacher I know that my students have found and enthusiastically read these books without any prompting – but the editors may not have encountered them. Writers in their twenties, such as Oscar Schwartz, have been exploring a poetics of ‘new sincerity’ (following the American Tao Lin): this work
There is a kind of generational exclusion, which may arise simply from the ages of the editors
is widely available in internationally networked online forums which are unlikely to have been consulted. And my more general feeling is that the new generation of poetry readers, accustomed to a culture dominated by techniques of sampling and collage, are more open to a disjunctive poetics of procedures and juxtaposition than is available here: again, it is younger poets such as Matthew Hall, Marty Hiatt, Claire Potter, and Corey Wakeling who miss out – but their work is available in other, more specifically targeted anthologies, such as last year’s Active Aesthetics.
The selection is instead dominated by poetry of natural description, familial recollection, and elegy, and it is impossible not to marvel at the attentiveness to observed details of experience, and the search for a pattern of language adequate for its transformation, evident in so many accomplished poems. Yet, and perhaps for this reason, some of the most striking works here are those in a less familiar vein: Fiona Hile’s ‘Francis Bacon was a Master Empiricist’ provides a bracingly corrosive counterview; David Brooks’s heightened rhetoric channels Lorca’s Poet in New York (1940) in the polemical ‘Pater Noster’; John Jenkins offers a surrealistic dream-vision of Robert Menzies; Jordie Albiston’s ‘Falling’ is a raw and compelling extended work; while Susan Hampton’s oblique notations stand out for their scrupulously antilyrical tone. John A. Scott’s excavations of the mythologies of European High Modernism in ‘Sketches from Montparnasse’ are also atypically exotic, and resonate with Jessica L. Wilkinson’s similar staging of the Nijinsky myth in ‘FAUNE et JEUX’, another of the outstanding poems in the Holland-Batt collection. The late Bruce Beaver flashes by in a page, but his tightly scanned ‘Aubade’ has a musical energy that eclipses many of
the more flatly declarative poems that surround it. Both anthologies are assiduous in their attempts to represent Australia’s multicultural heritage. Contemporary Australian Poetry includes a number of poems on transnational and immigrant themes, though these are often only one-offs: Ali Alizadeh provides a finely chiselled explication of Australian migrant experience, while Asian Australia (the subject of a separate Puncher & Wattmann anthology) is represented by such wellestablished poets as Adam Aitken and Ouyang You. The most striking political poems here are those by recent Indigenous poets building on the achievements of earlier figures such as Kevin Gilbert: Lionel Fogarty’s ‘Million to One Biami Spoken’ and Ali Cobby Eckermann’s ‘Intervention Pay Back’ are amongst the strongest works in the book (the latter curiously followed alphabetically by Quadrant poet Hal Colebatch).
In general, though, the more unruly linguistic energies of many of these poets are restrained by selection: Robert Adamson is mainly a chronicler of the Hawkesbury landscape; Pam Brown and Jill Jones are chosen for their Williams-like documentation of quotidian experience; and the multitudinous range of John Kinsella’s works are reduced here to a few representative pages. But this is an understandable editorial emphasis, and it is likely that in the future a more complete representation of the variousness of the current scene will require a range of specialised anthologies: these two general surveys provide an excellent and ambitious foundation on which such projects might be based. g
Family faultlines
In a rambling old house in Geologue Bay, Iris’s loved ones gather in the family home for one last time, one last weekend and one last party. Only Rosa is missing. The family matriarch is reliving her past and the secrets – involving two men and two earthquakes – that she may never get to share.
‘An intricate, intimate novel – and utterly humane.’ Anna Smaill
‘I wanted to stay wrapped in that house by the sea …’ Myfanwy Jones
John Hawke is a poet, anthologist, and senior lecturer at Monash University.
ALSO BY TRACY FARR
Which poets have most influenced you?
I first fell for the British Romantics: Keats for his sensitivity, and Byron for his humour, both qualities I try to exercise in my own work. Otherwise it’s the Americans of last century: the Moderns, Stevens in particular, and later the West Coast poets. I like to find these poets thinking (and sometimes running) in my poems.
Are poems chiefly ‘inspired’ or crafted?
The grit for a poem is found inside the poetic experience – a state of mind marked by sustained focus and deep immersion in a subject – and later crafted into an object of art. Paradoxically, a poem is nothing without craft, yet its craft must be made to look like nothing.
What’s the difference between poetry and prose?
In prose, a sentence has a single beginning and an end, but set in lines the same sentence refracts into additional beginnings and endings, granting heightened significance through emphasis and a sense of equivalence as words are balanced against each other. For this reason, poets will never fully abandon the line break.
What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?
A room of one’s own and £500 a year, adjusted for inflation and cost of living.
Which poet would you most like to talk to –and why?
I’d like to talk to Anna Akhmatova about her life, disproportionately blackened as it was by history; alternatively, Oscar Wilde, as I’d like to taste his wit in person (and give him a hug).
What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?
Solitude. Poets must revisit moments of consequence and settle into sites of extreme emotion – love, pain, loss, joy – for as long as is necessary to shape them into language. It is impossible to do this work in the company of others.
What have you learned from reviews of your work?
I’ve learned that minor poems sometimes make stronger impressions than ambitious poems I’ve sweated over.
I’ve learned to trust, sometimes even love, these little pebbles.
If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?
The great thing about poems is that they can be memorised, so we needn’t be limited by Plato’s autocratic rules. Poems can surge in the blood stream or lie dormant in the recesses of the mind before springing into action, and they can be transmitted without technology, via the instrument of the human voice box. We are all, potentially, walking libraries of poems.
Do you have a favourite line of poetry (or couplet)?
I am a person of many favourites, but here’s a couplet from William Blake: ‘I must Create a System or Be enslav’d by another Man’s / I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create.’ It was scored on my brain at an impressionable age, and possibly ruined my life. Or saved it. As a feminist, I took the gendered noun quite literally, and still do.
Is poetry generally appreciated by the reading public?
Most people don’t think about poems until they need one. One of the few unquestioned uses of poetry is its priestly function at baptisms, weddings, and funerals –or any occasion in which ordinary language is insufficient to the emotion. Sometimes people borrow the words of poets. Sometimes they compose their own. This too is good.
Bronwyn Lea was born in Tasmania and grew up in Queensland and Papua New Guinea. She is the author of Flight Animals (UQP, 2001), winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize and the FAW Anne Elder Award, and The Other Way Out (Giramondo, 2008), which won the WA Premier’s Book Award for Poetry and the SA Premier’s John Bray Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection is The Deep North: Selected poems (George Braziller, 2013). She teaches creative writing at the University of Queensland and is poetry editor for Meanjin.
Dragons and facts
David McCooey
GRAPHOLOGY POEMS 1995–2015
by John Kinsella
Five Islands Press
$74.95 pb for the set
Volume I, 268 pp, 9780734051639
Volume II, 281 pp, 9780734051646
Volume III, 246 pp, 9780734051653
John Kinsella, who lives mostly in Australia, is a transnational literary powerhouse. Poet, fiction writer, playwright, librettist, critic, academic, collaborator, editor, publisher, activist; his activities and accomplishments are manifold. He is best known as a poet, and the publication of Graphology Poems 1995–2015 – a mammoth (and ongoing) discontinuous series of poems published in three volumes –brings together two decades of work.
The collection has ‘a tentative beginning and no possible closure’, as Kinsella writes in his prefatory note. The poems are numbered sequentially, though there are numerical gaps and leaps. There are thematic sections (such as the ‘Faith’ and ‘Forgery’ poems), and the final volume includes a number of appendices and ‘Mutations’. Like the landscapes Kinsella so often writes about, Graphology Poems is sprawling, sometimes messy, often imposing, and always compelling.
The pseudoscience of graphology is the study of handwriting, especially as a tool to analyse character, attribute authorship, or determine an author’s state of mind. For Kinsella, it is a beautifully ambiguous and generative master trope, putting in train numerous characteristic concerns: identity, authenticity, memory, place, representation, power, and textuality itself.
Facsimiles of handwriting, doodles, and even scribble can be found in Graphology Poems, but more notable, more ‘telling’, are the poetic images of the vast material history of writing found here. The book is replete with typewriters, computers, dictionaries, IOUs, visitors’ books, prize books,
errata, bibliographies, notaries, documents in triplicate, surveys and reports, printer’s sheets, and – of course – lines of poetry. These lines of poetry are by a writer utterly taken up with the materiality of language, and by the intense, sometimes mysterious processes, in which the material world becomes the stuff of language. We see this dynamic relationship between words and the world in Kinsella’s attraction to nouns, especially proper nouns. His poetry teems with things: objects, animals, places, and people. The attraction to things can be seen in Kinsella’s use of catalogue, that most ancient of poetic forms. ‘Graphology 9’, for instance, uses catalogue to sketch out a family history:
a ballerina, an opera singer, a poorly paid landscape artist, a military man who was lost in India, a number of petty bureaucrats, a cigar manufacturer, a preacher from a dissenting church, a swag of colonists and teachers, a suicide, a seamstress, and a piano teacher.
Graphology Poems exhibits a tension in Kinsella’s work between mobility (the moving between places and times) and stasis (the intense scrutiny of those times and places). Characteristic, too, is Kinsella’s sensitivity to the ways in which places are the site of human destructiveness. Many of the poems here – as elsewhere in Kinsella’s work – are powerful denunciations of modernity. But Graphology Poems also includes several poems that are wholly singular in Kinsella’s vast oeuvre. One of these, ‘Graphology 3834’, I quote in full: ‘I’ve decided to become fantastical. / I’ve decided to give up on the facts, / the points of repair, the markers / on horizons. All swirls, digresses. / I will call back the dragons. / The facts will be reinstated; / then, and only then.’
It goes without saying that bringing together twenty years of poems on place and identity is a vast undertaking, and one heroically realised by Five Islands Press. But what is perhaps most extraordinary about this work is the equal relationship between the whole and its parts. As the American scholar
Australian Book Review will be hosting three major poetry events in coming months.
States of Poetry South Australia
Monday, 6 March 2017
Adelaide Writers’ Week West Stage, Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, Adelaide
Six South Australian poets, chosen by Peter Goldsworthy, will read poems from ABR’s 2017 South Australian States of Poetry anthology.
The 2017 Peter Porter Poetry Prize Ceremony
Thursday, 23 March 2017
Collected Works Bookshop 1/37 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Shortlisted poets will read their poems, then the overall winner will be named. Refreshments will be served.
States of Poetry Tasmania
Thursday, 6 April 2017
The Hobart Book Shop 22 Salamanca Square Hobart
Six Tasmanian poets, chosen by Sarah Day, will read poems from ABR’s Tasmanian States of Poetry anthology.
For more information and to confirm your attendance please visit our events page: australianbookreview.com.au/events
Nicholas Birns writes in his long essay on Graphology Poems (available on the Five Islands Press website), ‘What astonishes about Kinsella is that this vast, dilating rhizome, this meme of global poeticizing, coexists with an intense dedication to craftsmanship on the level of the individual poem.’
This is an important observation, especially for those tempted to give Kinsella’s politics more attention than his poetics. Of course, one cannot separate the two, but it can be worthwhile doing so briefly if only for heuristic reasons (to evoke a late section of the Graphology Poems). The volume and intensity of Kinsella’s poetry, its sense of immediacy and speed, should not stop us from giving these poems the careful readings they deserve. The inventiveness and playfulness of Kinsella’s poems, on full display here, are central to his poetics. (In this respect he reminds me of Les Murray, however different the two poets might be politically.) There are puns and wordplay of all kinds here; extended metaphors; rhyme, halfrhyme, and assonance; rhetorical figures
such as anaphora, personification, and chiasmus; refrains; the strategic confusion of poetic and non-poetic registers; jokes; an attention to prosody (often, as Birns points out, through syllabic patterning); and an encyclopedic intertextuality.
Regarding this last point, Graphology Poems is capacious in its postmodern referentiality. The poems take in Andy Warhol, racist graffiti in a Kelmscott bus stop, Middle English, Middlemarch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, an AC/DC cover band, and so on. But this isn’t ‘merely’ – should one want to use that modifier – postmodern plenitude, or specificity, or irony, or whatever. The specific details of the Graphology Poems unite subjective and material places, in particular Western Australia, Ohio, and Cambridge. Such places stage the collision between the human and the non-human. This collision is sometimes benign and creative, but it is often destructive, a source of elegy, polemic, or satire.
But Kinsella’s poetry, however harsh it can be, retains a sense of optimism,
as Graphology Poems illustrates. At its most fundamental level, Graphology Poems is not only a poetry of critique, but also one of positivity, producing a shared virtual space for Kinsella and his readers to engage in that beautiful pseudoscience called poetry.
Graphology Poems is a major publishing event in Australian poetry. In what is surely Kinsella’s magnum opus, we find the dragons and the facts miraculously together on common ground. g
David McCooey’s latest collection of poetry is Star Struck (UWA Publishing, 2016). Available at ABR Online, SoundCloud, and iTunes
7 to 9 April 2017
• Ashley Hay on ‘mongrel trees’
• Colin Golvan on parallel importation
• Craig Silvey on Jasper Jones
• Gabriel García Ochoa in Mexico
• Peter Rose meets Sieglinde ... and more.
Poetry in South Australia
Welcome to States of Poetry, a major project intended to highlight the quality and diversity of contemporary Australian poetry. Funded by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, these are the first nationally arranged poetry anthologies published in this country. All states and the ACT are covered with separate anthologies, each of them edited by a senior poet living in their state. The state editors choose six local poets actively publishing new work (up to five poems per poet). The state anthologies appear free of charge on our website, with introductions from the state editors, biographies and remarks from the individual poets, recordings, and other features. A mini-anthology (one poem per poet) also appears in the print edition. Peter Goldsworthy, distinguished poet and much more, has again selected the South Australian anthology, with six new poets. Here is the mini-anthology to accompany Peter Goldsworthy’s 2017 selection.
Poem for A
I sit with you and watch you smoke cigarettes in front of me you take photographs but not here not of me I didn’t ask for sugar in my coffee but I didn’t return it either when the bus leaves you will be on it when the sky opens you will be beneath it one day in the future we will agree on something the first time we met the last time we will kiss but these are kept safe between us there is icing on the carrot cake and I let you finish it after you tell me it is the only thing you have eaten so far today the five words of overheard French you translate to me make me love you even more though they are not beautiful words your sketches remain upside down in my notebook your name written across every page
Dominic Symes ❖
dreaming with Ted Berrigan
I met Ted Berrigan in a dream
wearing a T-shirt standing in a sparsely furnished room
the early Berrigan not yet bed ridden but distinctly pot bellied
& the beard of course it was a vivid dream I can’t remember if he said anything literary but he seemed pleased to be there.
Steve Brock ❖
A Rich Full Life
a tablescape
drooping roses near death in a jam jar dull Ian Rankin in a yellow cover lying upside down Mongolian phrasebook sample tube of Sensodyne Cinema ticket: The Great Beauty opener for the Italian Film Festival password to Smartygrants for accessing two hundred applications business card for Phnom Penh silver and gemstone jeweller a blue and a black biro invitation to popup arthouse fundraiser at Goodwood School receipt for Geranium Leaf Aesop cleanser Yuri’s business card at the Apple Store with the bitten silver apple on gloss white white enamel teapot with red-rimmed lid remote control for Smart TV another Scottish crimemeister, Stuart MacBride Close to the Bone, his back to me at the far end of the table notebook this pen
Cath Kenneally
String says
in my end is my beginning – just a rat’s nest coiled in back-shed dust, a tangle of demented knots
gothic as the Grimms’ dark plots, a thrumming song of wreak and wreck (whose satin bed, whose trusting neck?), the tautened threat from fist to fist, the carpe diem tug and twist. My image haunts your DNA,
that tiny ruthless shadow play. I’m hairshirt-hallowed, gallows shred,
bog-buried hair and voodoo thread, discord from a black mass choir, devil’s helix / heaven’s tripwire. My dreams are rope, I nightly string up rank despair, the summer swing to grace the judas tree’s green spread.
Crumble up your holy bread and feed the the crows spaced out along my cousin wire who codes this song.
Jan Owen
Roget’s Thesaurus
Peter Roget suffered from depression, disconsolation, gloom, melancholia, pessimism …
He lived a life of bitterness, desolation, grief, irritation, lamentation, misery, pain …
Not that there weren’t periods of bliss, exuberance, happiness, joy, light-heartedness …
Not that he wasn’t awake to the wonders of the world, to its beauty, brilliance, grace, loveliness, magnificence …
After a visit to the village of Inverkeithing in the Scottish Highlands, he recorded in his diary that it was beautiful.
When he first set eyes on the meandering water of the Tay, he wrote that it, too, was beautiful.
And as for the riverbanks near the village of Dunkeld, his diary asserts that they were remarkably beautiful.
That his thesaurus was still fifty years away is perhaps worth mentioning.
Louise Nicholas ❖
Eulogy
When a child dies
A cross is made in woodwork
Angels are drawn in the art room
The school flag is hoisted to half mast
In the assembly hall vases of lilies are placed
At recess the children sit together a little tighter
The playground swing has a minute’s silence
Jules Leigh Koch ❖
TO KNOW MY CRIME
by Fiona Capp HarperCollins
$29.99 pb, 337 pp, 9781460752807
Described as ‘modern literary noir’, Fiona Capp’s novel delves deeper into the psychology of its characters than most in the genre. The opening is sleek and pacey, as Capp guides us expertly through the central intrigue.
Ned is squatting in a boatshed on the Mornington Peninsula, having entrusted the investment of the sum of his and his sister’s inherited wealth to a childhood friend, who promptly disappeared. When Ned overhears a conversation between the politician Richard Morrow and a developer implicating Morrow in corruption, he sees an opportunity to recoup his losses. Though honest by instinct, Ned decides to blackmail Morrow on account of his sister Angela’s deteriorating quadriplegia. After springing Ned in his boatshed, Morrow employs him as a gardener, but from here the narrative lines spiral inwards.
Thanks to the insights offered via Angela, a psychoanalyst, the novel swerves towards more profound questions than who did what. It owes its title to the idea that every patient of psychoanalysis ‘believes they’re guilty of a crime’. Indeed, the characters’ ‘crimes’ are ambiguous rather than fully articulated; it is difficult to divide her characters – well drawn and psychologically nuanced – into the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’.
Capp inhabits each character effortlessly, communicating subtle distinctions in gender and background through their observations, if occasionally labouring their back-stories. The exterior world is described with pictorial rigour (one example: cormorants dive ‘like heat-seeking missiles’). Questions of class mobility underpin the novel, making the Mornington Peninsula backdrop appropriate, where sleek architectural monuments displace fibro shacks: not far away on Melbourne’s port, ‘a container ship silently cleaving the water’.
To Know My Crime morphs into an examination of the nature of love and its attendant responsibilities. Accordingly to Angela, ‘Romantic love’ is ‘pathology’, though the quietly devastating conclusion to this finely calibrated novel proves her thoroughly wrong.
Gretchen Shirm
BARKING DOGS
by Rebekah Clarkson Affirm Press
$24.99 pb, 230 pp, 9781925475494
Mount Barker, its surrounding environs and proliferating estates, might be situated in volcanic territory for all the ferocious eruptions of violence that occur in Rebekah Clarkson’s collection of stories, Barking Dogs. The demographic is noticeably white Australian. In ‘Dancing on Your Bones’, a loathsome consultant suggests the government develop the Summit – a sacred site – in response to a native title claim and name it ‘Peramangk Estate’. The physical absence of other ethnicities is stark throughout Clarkson’s book; even the Summit itself seems invisible to those living at its base.
Thus characters often elide history and its implications. In ‘Here We Lie’, the reader bears witness to a townswoman’s suicide and the ugly gash of a secret it exposes. An unnamed narrator insists on employing ‘we’, never ‘I’. To employ the latter would be to admit personal culpability; an impossibility for one who claims, ‘We’re good men.’ Largely, people appear in convincing states of fallibility, grappling with their families and their own tenuous positions within them. Clarkson exposes the particularity of characters through penetrating prose, and is adroit at capturing escalating tensions.
‘Novels in stories’ create a quandary for readers and critics. The form operates at its finest in Elizabeth Strout’s exquisite Olive Kitteridge. The stories work individually, but in their entirety they produce a memorably textured study of a singular woman and the town in which she lives. Clarkson might very well have been inspired by Olive Kitteridge (2008), but Barking Dogs sits within a more modern, distinctively Australian terrain and vernacular. Being non-linear with multiple changes of perspective and narrator, it is best read as a collection of interconnected stories (one was shortlisted for the 2013 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize). As such, the book depicts a highly arresting see-saw of human frailty and doggedness.
Tali Lavi ❖
Psych ward
Gig Ryan
THE
GREEN BELL
by Paula Keogh Affirm Press
$29.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781925475524
Since Michael Dransfield’s death at the age of twenty-four in 1973, there have been two books of poems, a Collected Poems (1987), a study of his generation, Parnassus Mad Ward (Livio Dobrez, 1990), as well as Michael Dransfield’s Lives: A sixties biography (Patricia Dobrez, 1999), and John Kinsella’s Michael Dransfield: A retrospective (2002). Unlike other poets who died too young, such as Charles Buckmaster (1951–72), Dransfield had cultivated an older, more established group of poets who ensured that his many poems would be issued posthumously.
Dransfield’s best poems vary from ornate lyricism to witty satire to defiant protest to a playful, often tragic bluntness: ‘Nothing left but the / whim of survival’ (‘Overdose’). Paula Keogh, Dransfield’s fiancée at the time of his death, shows a more idealised view of the man than the manipulative and self-promoting poet recalled by some peers and investigated admiringly in the Dobrez studies. To Keogh, Dransfield was ‘a shy exhibitionist, sensitive and outrageous, old-fashioned and avantgarde, earnest and ironic’, whose genuine love and shared interests lessen her confusion.
The Green Bell begins with Keogh and Dransfield cutely romantic outside the Canberra psychiatric ward where they had met, but then reverts to the chaos of Keogh’s first breakdown, when even the doorknobs of her student college room were menacing. Her schizophrenic psychosis is bracingly vivid, and the subsequent treatments resemble those in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), with their routine of pills and electroconvulsive therapy: ‘A nurse stands to the side of a trolley that supports a rectangular black box with dials and cords ... I realise you don’t die once only. Death is not a one-off event.’
This is 1972, a year before Dransfield’s death, and treatment of those deemed mentally ill, or drug-addicted, is brutal. Both Keogh and Dransfield had lost a close friend at school; Dransfield was also grieving his father’s recent death. Keogh’s schoolfriend died mysteriously while undergoing treatment for mania in Sydney. (Chelmsford Hospital’s ‘deep sleep therapy’, from which at least twenty-four people died, is mentioned in passing.)Yet although they discover affinities and solace in each other, Keogh seeks a defined reality, while Dransfield yearns for escape.
Keogh depicts the poet as tenderly in love, but soon after also as the cause of more pain for her because of his casual infidelities. Here, Dransfield is a young madcap befriending the inmates, not just the intellectual puzzle of earlier studies or the ‘heightened’ modernist kindling postmodernist poetry that Kinsella posits. Keogh captures well the intensity of love, ‘a glow worm in a cave of bats’, that colours all the young couple sees and fills them with audacious plans, but she has a queasily naïve concept of ‘the poet’, and by the book’s end her view is only slightly more coolly assessed. Dransfield was both the charming personality she sees through a lover’s eyes as well as an exploitative careerist and real-estate speculator.
Keogh’s search for authenticity and her desire to quieten the noises in her head (first manifested when she was a bereaved teenager) takes her to asylums of various kinds, then in turn to ‘recreational’ drug use, communal living, marriage and a child, an ashram, psychotherapy, and finally to further university studies. These quests are clichés of the 1960s generation, but each generation quests for authenticity of its own, and for Keogh these are not only sincere but necessary to anchor her to reality, and to understand, and thus avoid, the traumas of instability: agonisingly, she receives news of Dransfield’s death only after his funeral. Yet much of her life post-Dransfield is perfunctorily noted. At times her insights are profound, but much of her trajectory through life is summarised in simple statements that can seem drably unexamined.
By book’s end, Keogh has reached
a truce with her past selves, but there is little perception of Dransfield that could not also be imagined from his work. The glamorised view she has of her first love, ‘the golden-winged god, hovering close’, can never be entirely discarded. There is cursory understanding that much of his behaviour, as well as being sexist, was drug-affected or typical of many young artists, though Dransfield’s selfmythologising and property ventures were probably exceptional. The few poets Keogh meets through Dransfield are mostly the older father figures and mentors he flattered and teased, rather than less gullible contemporaries such as Nigel Roberts, John Tranter, or Vicki Viidikas. Many contemporaries view him as an ‘arch-fabricator’ and ‘romantic bullshit-artist’, as Pam Brown has written, rather than a poet displaying the hint of ‘genius’ that some poets wished to indulge. In short he was, like everyone, full of contradictions. Ultimately, and thankfully, it is the poems that matter. Keogh’s post-Dransfield life may be equally worthy of interest, but because The Green Bell focuses on her short period of romance with Dransfield in his final debilitated months, one is left with the impression that the intense psychosis and turbulence of her early years, musing with Dransfield in the ‘green bell’ curtained by the willow tree’s leaves, remain the most significant parts of her life because they augur its adult awakening. ‘Moments expand into what the two of us call “round time” – the boundless space inside the green bell.’ g
Gig Ryan has published several books of poetry. Her New and Selected Poems was published in 2011.
Grimm parcels
Elisabeth Holdsworth
FLIGHT FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM: A EUROPEANAUSTRALIAN MEMOIR
by Valerie Murray
Books Unleashed
$20 pb, 184 pp, 9780992592189
Valerie Murray, born Valika Morelli in Hungary during World War II and, for the past half century, wife of poet Les Murray, has written an enchanting memoir of her early life in Europe and Australia. The description ‘enchanting’ is used deliberately. The brothers Grimm and their terrifying tales are deployed throughout the work. The metaphor extends to the writing style – spaced paragraphs of fractured nightmarish episodes interspersed with mordant humour.
Murray began to write about ‘the early me and how I got this way’ in 2003. With her parents both in nursing homes and deteriorating mentally, the project gathers urgency.
There are two children at the heart of this work; Valerie and her younger brother, Steve, both damaged by the war. Steve never fully recovers. His life is dogged by depression and a lack of selfesteem. Valerie too has suffered from depression and anxiety attacks. Identity is a confounding variable. The mother, Berta, is German-Swiss; the father, Gino Morelli, Hungarian with Italian antecedents. He is declared missing in action,
presumed dead, after the failed Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia. Due to his skiing prowess and ability to survive harsh winters, Gino manages to walk home.
In 1944, as the Nazis begin to round up anyone suspected of being a Jew lover, Berta Morelli decides to send threeyear-old Valerie and eighteen-monthold Steve to relatives in Zurich. The children travel to Switzerland in the care of nuns. Not once during the long journey do they change the baby’s nappy or offer comfort to the screaming infant. Valerie attributes this experience as setting the stamp on the rest of Steve’s life. For the next year, until they are reunited with their parents, the siblings are passed between their Swiss relatives like inconvenient parcels.
A life is established in Switzerland when the family re-forms. Both parents find work: Berta in the fashion industry, Gino in a publishing house. The children are often left to fend for themselves. To entertain Steve, Valerie reads to him from the Brothers Grimm, ‘so-called fairy tales … of unembellished cruelty’, but the only reading material to hand. Chance brings the family to Australia rather than to Argentina or South Africa. Gino rejects queuing for the Assisted Migrants Scheme and opts to take his family to the new country as displaced persons. They arrive in Melbourne on the first Tuesday in November and are transported to Bonegilla Migrant Camp (north-east Victoria) on tarpaulin-covered cattle trucks reminiscent of the worst excesses of the war.
In a land of plenty, the Morellis find the food inedible and incomprehensible; grey mutton, pumpkin, and Vegemite. The children hear themselves referred to as ‘bloody reffo’ and ‘bloody Nazi’. They clamour to learn English: ‘to pass muster and turn ourselves into Aussies as fast as possible’.
The Morelli family settle in Sydney, Gino finds work as a translator, Berta in the rag trade. There is enough money to buy a block of land and begin the construction of a house. The Australian dream is about to be realised. The parents work long hours. On one of their first skiing holidays, Gino and Berta leave the children at home. Valerie is
ten, Steve eight. They cope; they have each other. Valerie is considered good at coping on her own, but the parents have doubts about Steve. He is sent to a Catholic boarding school where he is subjected to harsh punishment and abuse, another rejection for an already traumatised child.
On their next skiing holiday, the Morelli parents leave Valerie on her own for a week in a half-finished house. Having begun to menstruate, she suffers from cramps and general misery. Alone in the house at night, she cannot sleep and fears death. She cannot eat due to an irrational fear of choking and she is without her brother, who has been banished to the nightmarish boarding school. Valerie walks the streets near her home late at night, ‘desperately doing my best to stay awake’. The Brothers Grimm have followed the Morelli children to Australia. Valerie Murray offers these passages in flat, unadorned, unjudgemental prose. They are the best things in the book, and they are the most confronting. I found it difficult to maintain empathy for the parents beyond this point.
Valerie, who understands the value of an education, thrives at school. She meets a ‘terribly shy’ Les Murray at Sydney University. At twenty-two, he already wears the campus descriptor, intellectual giant. The couple have five children, one of whom is autistic. Family life, for that matter life with the poet, is not central to the book; Valerie Murray is adamant that these are her own words about her early life; her personal explanation as to why she is the way she is; a project of catharsis and resolution. Yet a friend of the Murrays, on being told that Valerie is writing a memoir, exclaims: ‘Not another bloody migrant memoir!’ In her typically stoic fashion, she writes about feeling downcast.
Seven million people have arrived in this country as immigrants since 1945. The first wave (1945–50) have left us a surprisingly meagre record of their experiences. Valerie Murray’s story is another migrant memoir, but it is a bloody beauty. g
Elizabeth Holdsworth won the inaugural Calibre Essay Prize (2007).
A perfect storm
Robert Reynolds
GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER
by Duncan McNab Vintage Books
$34.99 pb, 303 pp, 9780143780786
The rash of unsolved murders of gay men along the Sydney coastline during the 1980s and early 1990s has been in the news again. In 2013, Australian Story ran a feature on the quest of American Steve Johnson to have the coronial ruling of suicide overturned for his younger brother Scott, who died at North Head in 1988. Lateline followed up with a controversial interview with Detective Chief Inspector Pamela Young of the Unsolved Homicide Unit, who had been tasked to reinvestigate Johnson’s death. Young was smartly removed from the investigation after intimating that Steve Johnson had exerted political pressure to have his brother’s case prioritised, a suggestion Johnson and the New South Wales Police Minister flatly rejected. Late last year, to considerable fanfare, SBS screened a four-part drama series, Deep Water: The real story, a companion documentary and online investigation into the murders of gay men around Bondi Beach and the eastern suburbs.
You can see why this is a topical subject: murder, sex, mystery (the trifecta of the true-crime genre). Duncan McNab’s Getting Away With Murder is not the first book to cover these murders – journalist Greg Callaghan’s Bondi Badlands: The definitive story of Sydney’s gay hate murders (2007) traversed similar territory – but what distinguishes this book is McNab’s former life as a Sydney police detective, and one with a good working knowledge of Sydney gay subculture. From a law-enforcement perspective, this is an insider’s account into a lamentable aspect of Sydney policing. Too often, as McNab chronicles, the murders of gay men were lazily investigated and summarily dismissed by the police as suicide. This enabled groups of young thugs to roam the cliffs and parks of Sydney beaches with im-
punity, bashing gay men, which McNab mordantly describes as ‘the team sport of the eighties’. Moreover, as McNab sorrowfully reveals, there may well have been occasions when the gay bashers were themselves police.
As McNab notes, the 1980s was a difficult time for the Sydney gay community. Homosexuality may have been decriminalised in NSW in 1984, but many gay men remained reluctant to report homophobic violence, not least because there was a pervasive belief that the police didn’t care. These attacks often took place in secluded public spaces where gay men cruised for sex. Fear of exposure and shame may have been another reason why bashing victims were loath to report the violence. Public hysteria about AIDS was inflamed by the tabloid press and by right-wing morals crusaders such as Fred Nile. In many ways, the 1980s was something of a perfect storm for homophobic violence in Sydney. Fifteen years of gay rights activism and the growth of a gay ghetto had turned parts of Sydney into visibly gay areas. This activism and overt gay life attracted attention, as it was meant to. But gay pride and gay neighbourhoods ran alongside patchy public acceptance of homosexuality and a deadly epidemic. Moreover, Australian masculinity remained resolutely heterosexual, and one way to prove one’s heterosexuality was to bash a poof. Paradoxically, the increased visibility and incremental social acceptance of homosexuality in the 1980s may have heightened the risk of homophobic violence. Prosaically, gay bashers had a better idea where to find their victims.
I suspect this book is primarily written for true-crime aficionados. McNab, who certainly knows how to pen a page-turner, has written previously in the genre, including a bestseller on the corrupt policeman Roger Rogerson (2016), now serving time for a drug murder. McNab plots his way through serial gay bashings and probable gay murders in Sydney during the 1980s and 1990s, including the death of Wollongong television news reader Ross Warren, whose mother, like Steve Johnson, refused to be fobbed off by a lethargic police investigation. McNab
has also sought out gay men who survived these attacks. Their initial relief at survival has curdled over the years; now they bridle at the lack of serious police attention. In bracing prose, McNab talks to men who were once gay bashers: ‘To be honest, I wanted to knock them out because I hated gafs [their term for gay men] at that stage.’
You can see why this is a topical subject: murder, sex, mystery (the trifecta of the true-crime genre)
In many ways, the New South Wales Police Force is the central player of this book. McNab demonstrates how the institutional homophobia of the Sydney Police Force corrupted good investigative practice. He sketches the sorry postwar treatment of gay men by the police, not least the art of ‘peanutting’: the practice of stationing handsome plainclothed officers in public toilets with the intent to entrap same-sex-attracted men. Practised by the police until the late 1970s, this exercise had the handy effect of inflating the number of arrests, which also kept the authorities happy. At the same time, McNab is at pains to point out that there were police officers and detectives who went against the institutional grain and treated gay men respectfully and also treated violence against same-sex-attracted men seriously.
McNab concludes his book acknowledging ‘a gang of old coppers who’ve always given a damn … reminders of what we should expect from our police’. There is a passion for justice, then, that courses through Getting Away With Murder. McNab wants justice for those men who survived homophobic violence in the 1980s, as well as justice for the families, friends, and lovers of those men who didn’t. Perhaps, above all, he hankers for a just and accountable New South Wales Police Force. g
Robert Reynolds is an Associate Professor in Modern History at Macquarie University and the co-author (with Shirleene Robinson) of Gay and Lesbian, Then and Now: Australian stories from a social revolution (2016).
DISCOVER NEW TITLES
A Little Spot of Poetry
Lisa Ride
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5144-9408-0 Paperback
978-1-5144-9409-7 E-book
A Little Spot of Poetry is a collection of poems by emerging Australian bush poet Lisa Ride. Awarded ‘New Novice Writer’ at the Australian National Bush Poetry Championships in 2015, Lisa was also a nalist in the 2015 and 2016 Australian Poetry Slams. This former police and army o cer writes poetry about her life experiences in the style of A.B. Paterson meets Pam Ayres. This book is for all ages.
Jane
Denise Cairns
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5245-1619-2 Hardback
978-1-5245-1618-5 Paperback
978-1-5245-1617-8 E-book
Jane is a young girl living under the oppressive and sometimes violent hand of her family. Her life was dark, dull, and constricted until she discovers a devastating secret that changes her forever. Leaving her old life behind, she sets out to forge her own destiny, trying everything she can to nd a place she ts in and where she belongs. Join Jane in her personal odyssey towards her happiness.
Napoleon’s History of Australia
D. Y. Gilbert
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5144-4684-3 Hardback
978-1-5144-4683-6 Paperback
978-1-5144-4682-9 E-book
This family saga spans 5 generations - rags to riches and back again, Convict Tasmania, Gold, squattocracy, 2 world wars, death and poverty in Port Pirie, and scandalous unwed motherhood in Adelaide. It proves that fact is stranger than ction.
The Golgotha: South Sudan 15 December 2013
Jada Pasquale Yengkopiong
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5144-9520-9 Hardback
978-1-5144-9519-3 Paperback
978-1-5144-9518-6 E-book
The Golgotha is the most up-to-date book written to reveal the e ects of the SPLA/M Dinka-dominated tribal regime in South Sudan, the leadership that caused the 15 December 2013 killing of the Nuer people in many parts of the country.
Rottnest Reflections
Robyn Roper
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5144-4110-7 Paperback
978-1-5144-4111-4 E-book
The approach I have taken in the book is the desire to illustrate the beautiful features of the island through photographic reflections. Be challenged to recognise these particular features of Rottnest Island linked to the reflections.
A Tail of Two Kitties
Terry Cosmas
www.xlibris.com.au
978-1-5035-0952-8 Hardback
978-1-5035-0951-1 Paperback
978-1-5035-0950-4 E-book
A Tail of Two Kitties is about two conjoined kitties who were left to fend for themselves. Two children try to separate them in vain. Their hope of being rescued happens during a storm that causes much harm and destruction.
Berlin absences
Andrea Goldsmith
BERLIN FOR JEWS: A TWENTYFIRST-CENTURY COMPANION
by Leonard Barkan
University of Chicago Press (Footprint)
$55.99 hb, 191 pp, 9780226010663
The title of this book has a resonance that would not occur, for example, in a text called ‘Paris for Jews’. Most readers will approach the work with understandings and expectations shaped by Hitler and the Holocaust. The title suggests that Berlin is a different city for Jews than for other visitors, and that Jewish Berlin itself is different from ecumenical Berlin. Is this book a travel guide? Is it a travel guide specifically for Jews? These questions and others rumble beneath the chapters, gathering strength as the book progresses. Only towards the end do they start to be addressed.
Leonard Barkan’s quest, although never clearly stated, is to reclaim Jewish Berlin, with its rich and diverse history, from the powerful and seemingly inescapable dominance of the Holocaust. His book is intended as a travel guide to contemporary Berlin, a city that owes much to its post-Enlightenment Jewish residents. For Barkan, contemporary Berlin is Jewish Berlin. Even though buildings have been destroyed and the landscape significantly altered Barkan guides the reader to where notable Jews once lived, landmark buildings stood, and famous salons took place.
The shadow of the Holocaust is not so easily dismissed from any consideration of contemporary Berlin. Indeed, it could be argued that Barkan’s quest occurs because of the Holocaust. In 1933, when Hitler assumed power, Germany had a population of sixty-seven million people. Of this number, less than one per cent, about 520,000, were Jewish, and one third of the entire German Jewish population, approximately 160,000, lived in Berlin. At the end of the war only a handful were left, and most of their legacy had been destroyed. The rollcall of well-known Jews who called Ber-
lin home includes Stefan Zweig, Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt, Mahler and Schoenberg, Heine and Marcuse, and a swag of physicists including Max Born, Leo Szilard, and Albert Einstein Barkan, a secular New York Jewish professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton, describes himself as having ‘less than ten years ago, fallen in love-at-first-sight with Berlin’. Like many late-blooming lovers, he derives great pleasure in sharing his love; and, as so often happens, a passion so obvious to the besotted readily loses something in its transmission. Barkan begins by selecting two Berlin locations to reveal the rich and varied history of Jewish Berlin. The first of these is the Schönhauser Allee. Barkan stops at graves, he reads epitaphs, and he mentions a raft of men and women, most of whom are not well known. Each of these people receives only a few sentences. While it might be different if I were walking the cemetery with Barkan’s book in hand, at home in my study, these fleeting references gain no traction, nor do they cumulatively provide me with a sense of nineteenth-century Jewish Berlin. (Is it not the case that the best travel guides are those that take one on a vibrant and utterly compelling journey without the need to leave home?)
Next, Barkan guides the reader through the Bayerisches Viertel, the Bavarian quarter once home to Einstein and Born, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Fritz Perls, and many others. As Barkan briefly notes, most of these people were direct descendants of German-Jewish emancipation as well as the Jewish Enlightenment known as the Haskalah. I find myself eager to read more about the circumstances that permitted so many Jews to be so productive despite pervasive anti-Semitism, but this does not gel with Barkan’s personal journey. Indeed, I am discovering that Berlin for Jews is not the unique hybrid of travel guide and intellectual history that I had anticipated.
In his last three chapters, Barkan focuses on three Jewish Berliners whom he portrays as ciphers to the city: Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833) who ran her famous Berlin salon for three dec -
ades; the industrialist, philanthropist, and patron of the arts James Simon (1851–1932), and the social philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). With his three Berliners, Barkan highlights the paradox of being a German Jew or rather a Jewish German and the contradictions involved in such an existence. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the book, but again it is touched on only briefly.
In his long epilogue, Barkan discusses what he calls Berlin’s Jewish ‘competing star attractions’: Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman’s huge Holocaust Memorial with its maze of tomb-like structures. The former he considers far too directive in what the viewer is supposed to feel and understand, while the latter is too abstract. He far prefers the Stolpersteine, the stumbling stones that mark the threshold of a house where a Jewish victim of the Holocaust once lived, and also Stih and Schnock’s Places of Remembrances, eighty signposts throughout the Bavarian Quarter each marking one of the Nazi laws of repression: e.g., ‘Jews are expelled from all choral groups’, ‘Jews are forbidden from buying newspapers and magazines’, ‘Eggs are no longer sold to Jews.’
Barkan began his quest in a cemetery – graves are monuments – and he finishes the book with Berlin’s major Jewish monuments. All monuments are testimony to an absence, and all absences speak of presences. Modern Berlin was shaped by its Jewish citizens, and contemporary Berlin carries the indelible mark of Hitler and the Holocaust. Berlin today is a monument to past times, as well as a hallmark in creative resilience. This is Berlin’s burden and its brilliance. g
Andrea Goldsmith’s most recent novel, The Science of Departures, won the 2015 Melbourne Prize.
Lost cause
Nick Hordern
RETURN TO MOSCOW
by Tony Kevin
UWA Publishing $29.99 pb, 332 pp, 9781742589299
The idea that the world faces a second Cold War started out as hyperbole, but by 2016 it was sounding increasingly plausible. For more than a decade, Moscow, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, had been waging a diplomatic, political, and military campaign to restore Russian power – in the Caucasus, in Ukraine, and in Syria. In the West this has usually been portrayed as unprovoked aggression, but Tony Kevin takes the opposing view. It is the West, he argues, which has behaved aggressively towards Moscow.
Kevin is a former Australian diplomat, regarded in Canberra policy circles as an ‘old lefty’. And not only does the argument of Return to Moscow recall those made by the left during the first Cold War, it is based on questions still open at the end of that conflict, crucially this one: was Moscow promised that NATO would not expand into eastern Europe?
If you believe that Putin’s behavior demands a robust Western response backed by military force, your answer to that question is ‘no’, or perhaps ‘that’s irrelevant’. But if you are Putin – or Tony Kevin – the answer is ‘yes’ and, rather than being some arcane historical detail, the issue determines your entire outlook. This is the sort of disagreement that starts European wars.
This was more or less where matters stood before the election of Donald Trump threatened to reverse the
traditional diplomatic polarities. For seventy years US presidents had led the anti-Russian alliance; now there was a president who seemed to be saying good relations with Russia were more important than with Washington’s traditional allies in NATO. But it remains to be seen whether Trump’s pro-Moscow tilt will survive the furore about Russia’s hacking of the US election campaign and claims that he had been compromised by Russian intelligence. Even if it does, the inveterate hostility of the Western security establishment – the deep state – to Moscow and seemingly to Trump himself will pose a significant obstacle to any new détente.
Kevin’s geopolitical argument is the most salient part of Return to Moscow, but the book is actually a mélange of memoir, travelogue, and essays about history and literature. The memoir covers Kevin’s 1969–71 posting as a junior diplomat in Moscow, where, by his account, the Australian Embassy was an insignificant player. There to boost the Western presence, its staff was so tiny they had little to contribute to the pooling of information that is the stockin-trade of the Anglo club of embassies.
With one seeming exception: Laurie Matheson. As Kevin tells it, Matheson was a fluent Russian speaker, a Pushkin-quoting former naval intelligence officer who fostered Australian exports to the Soviet Union during the 1970s, first as a trade official, then as a private businessman. Later, Matheson got caught up in the 1982–83 Combe–Ivanov Affair, in which senior Labor figure David Combe was accused of compromising national security through his association with Soviet diplomat Valery Ivanov, identified by ASIO as a KGB agent. Combe was subsequently cleared by the Hope Royal Commission into Australia’s intelligence services, but the real victim, Kevin argues, was Matheson himself. He had hired Combe as a consultant and was informing ASIO about his employee’s Soviet connections. When all this came out in the Royal Commission, Matheson’s reputation was shredded. In an intriguing footnote to Australian intelligence history, Kevin devotes a whole chapter to Matheson’s rehabilitation.
The subsequent chapters cover more well-trodden ground: Boris Pasternak’s life and work mirrored the tragedy of the Stalin Era; physicist Andrei Sakharov campaigned heroically for human rights during the Brezhnev era; the murder of the imperial Romanovs was a human tragedy; and Tolstoy was a great writer but a bit of a domestic brute. Anyone headed for Russia could follow Kevin’s itinerary, his book in hand, to his or her advantage.
Kevin uses this material, spiced with sympathetic vignettes of Russian life and people, to support his geopolitical argument. Look, he says, we’re dealing with an ancient and highly cultured nation with a strong sense of its historical and political identity and not, as so many of ‘the war party’ would have it, with a pack of brutalised automata. Washington and its allies, Kevin says, should adopt a more conciliatory approach.
He is right and he is wrong. Right, because the West does bear significant responsibility for the current standoff; wrong, because it is too late to recover the goodwill of the 1990s. Conciliation has already been tried: President Obama followed up his March 2009 offer of a ‘reset’ in relations with Moscow with a number of placatory gestures, including the cancellation of George W. Bush’s provocative ballistic missile defence base in Poland. By then an embittered Moscow had itself turned from the path of moderation, and the downward spiral into more open confrontation had begun, culminating in the 2014 Russian seizure of Crimea.
The standoff between Russia and the West is like a bad marriage, where both parties recite a history of the relationship in which it is all the other’s fault. Given the political rewards for displays of nationalist posturing (or ‘shirtfronting’ as it is known in Australia), mutual understanding is a lost cause. We’re headed back into an era of mutually assured (nuclear) destruction and proxy conflicts in places like Syria and Afghanistan. It is a measure of just how bad things are that a Trump solution seems like a good outcome. g
Nick Hordern is a former political staffer and journalist.
Questions
Bruce Moore
THE WORD DETECTIVE: A LIFE IN WORDS, FROM SERENDIPITY TO SELFIE
by John Simpson
Little, Brown
$49.99 pb, 366 pp, 9781408706732
What does a lexicographer do? How do you become a lexicographer? What makes a good lexicographer? What is the difference between a ‘standard’ dictionary and a dictionary based on historical principles? How do you reinvent the Oxford English Dictionary so that it has a secure place in an online modern publishing world? These are among the questions explored in John Simpson’s memoir.
John Simpson was chief editor of the OED from 1993 until his retirement in 2013. Unlike some of his predecessors (especially James Murray and Robert Burchfield), he was not imported directly to the top job, but worked his way up through the firm from assistant editor (1976), to senior editor (1982), to co-editor (1986), and finally chief editor (1993). He had studied English literature at York and was doing an MA in medieval studies at Reading when he applied, on a whim, for a job with the OED. He was knocked back for the advertised position, but was offered another position on the rebound. And so, like James Murray, he arrived in Oxford as an ‘outlier’; he left after refashioning and reimagining that most Oxonian of enterprises, the OED. When Simpson started work on the OED, he knew little about lexicography but learned quickly. At the time of Simpson’s arrival, chief editor Burchfield (a New Zealander) and OUP were not setting their sights on anything beyond the completion of the four planned Supplements to the OED. From early on, however, Simpson was disturbed by the tacit acceptance of the notion that the basic text of the OED was never going to be revised. He was also alert, more than most, to the im-
plications of the emerging revolution in communications technology.
Along with Edmund Weiner, his co-editor in 1986, Simpson convinced OUP to produce a ‘computerised’ (what would later be called ‘digitised’) version of the OED that integrated the original text with all the supplements, and added about 5,000 new entries. This appeared as a printed twenty-volume work in 1989, and also as a CD-ROM. By 1994 Simpson had convinced OUP that a complete revision was viable, and in the cloud cuckoo land of publishing schedules, the year 2000 was proposed for completion. Of course, this became 2005, then 2010, and then a finishing date was no longer mentioned. But during the noughties the project became unstoppable (and noughties was an addition in 2001): the OED was online, revisions were being added quarterly so that publication became incremental, the reading program was broad and democratic, there were many new features (a thesaurus, graphics, and so on), and it was reaching an audience unimaginable to the previous editors.
Simpson began his lexicographical training in the Victorian tradition of transcribing quotations on to index cards. By the end, he and his lexicographers were searching massive electronic databases for evidence of words and meanings. The basic skill-set, however, remained stable: the ability to trace the history of a word, to sort its evidence into different meanings, and to reveal how one meaning leads to another, and to construct clear and precise definitions for these meanings. Left-handedness seems to be an advantage. Training in linguistics is not.
While Simpson at times sets out what he regards as the skills required of a lexicographer, these skills are most evident in the fifty or so page-length interludes (set off from the main text) that explore the histories of particular words, such as burpee (were earlier editors not interested in sport?), flavour of the month (originally ice-cream), inkling (whatever happened to the verb ‘to inkle’?), marshall (a Germanic word, literally ‘mare/ horse-farrier’), niche (it rhymed with ‘hitch’ until very recently), 101 (yes, it’s a word), pom (‘for every Australian
it is knowingly ambiguous’), and selfie (perhaps from ‘self-portrait’, but Simpson urges ‘caution’, since it might come straight from ‘portrait of myself’).
Simpson’s discussions demonstrate how a historical dictionary constructs the life-histories of its words. Thus, the narrative of Simpson’s account of his professional career is interwoven with these word histories that show us why the profession of lexicography matters.
Left-handedness seems to be an advantage. Training in linguistics is not
There is a third strand in this weaving process, and this is the history of Simpson’s personal life, focusing on his life with Hilary and their two children, Kate and Ellie. Hilary and John were at York as undergraduates, and as postgraduates at Reading, and it was Hilary who spotted the advertisement for the OED job in the Times Literary Supplement in 1976. The primary focus in this personal narrative is on Ellie, who was born in 1990, and who reached a developmental age of only eighteen months. Doctors have been unable to give a cause or name to Ellie’s condition: she neither speaks nor understands words. Thus there is an awful irony in the fact that the man who was in charge of the world’s words has a daughter who is wordless, and that his wondrous dictionary cannot give a name to her condition.
Simpson comes across as a person of quite forthright views about his craft and those who pursue (or attempt to pursue) it, while at the same time revealing an extraordinary humility and dry humour. There has never been a book that so successfully demonstrates the labours and joys of dictionary making, and it reveals Johnson’s famous description of the lexicographer as a ‘harmless drudge’ to be the Johnsonian joke that it always was. g
Bruce Moore, the left-handed editor of the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary (2016), was director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre from 1994 to 2011.
The only leaf
John Funder
WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE
by Leah Kaminsky HarperCollins
$27.99 pb, 293 pp, 9781460749999
Good general practice is the cornerstone of a good healthcare system: Australia is blessed with both. Leah Kaminsky has been a Melbourne general practitioner for three decades and by her own explicit admission wrote We’re All Going to Die as a way to address her own fear of death. Her beloved mother was ‘the only leaf left dangling from her charred family tree, having survived the horrors of BergenBelsen’. She emigrated to Australia with a single suitcase and a butterfly marcasite brooch, now worn by Kaminsky in remembrance. Kaminsky’s parents met in Melbourne, worked hard, made do, like many in the Jewish community. They wanted Kaminsky to become a lawyer, where her capacity of empathy may have been stifled, wasted. Fortunately, she chose to do medicine. Thousands of patients in Melbourne have every reason to applaud her choice.
The book’s front cover, among the butterflies, bears a quote from the New York Times by Mary Roach, best-selling author of the unfortunately titled Stiff (2003): ‘A beautiful, brave, inspiring work. Required reading for anyone who plans to die.’ This is routine gush: the book is engaging but by no stretch of
the imagination beautiful, the eye of the beholder notwithstanding. It is brave, in that the author examines her own fears and responses, openly, frankly, and selfcritically. Inspiring no, but a very useful book for ‘anyone who plans to die’, and who might need help for a besetting fear of death, as shared by the author.
What the book does is to present a series of vignettes, in some instances case studies, documenting a patient’s fear of dying, or in some cases peace and resignation in the face of impending death. We are clearly all going to die: none of the hype about living to be 120 will change that. Mercifully, we know not the day, nor the hour thereof, in ‘normal’ circumstances: what many of us do know, for example those with aggressive metastatic cancer, is that the day is likely to be sooner rather than later. Sometimes, as the author recounts, it might not be a generalised fear of death, but a specific one – dying in childbirth, say. Sometimes it is the quiet decision to go for palliation rather than active intervention.
As a physician, I have a number of comments and questions arising. First, the case studies are excellent, wellchosen, and clearly presented. Kaminsky is unafraid to cite occasions of awful behaviour she experienced as a resident at the hands of male ‘seniors’. Secondly, it is important to acknowledge that a book cannot possibly cover all the bases. That said, I would have liked to hear from Kaminsky about those among us who live fairly orderly lives but do not particularly fear death: is this denial or wisdom, fulfilment or unreadiness? Kaminsky talks about the impact on her as a young woman of her mother’s sudden death. What about the effects on the family of the impending death of one of its members, whose ‘days are numbered’?
Generally, we need to go further into why in Australia (and the United States) we have gone so far in the medicalisation/hospitalisation of dying. An intensive care unit is not a peaceful or serene place to die: the ‘regular’ ward is better, and better still, if at all possible, is the patient’s own bed at home. ICUs are for severely ill or damaged persons with every chance of good survival,
not a way station to the mortuary. We have superb palliative care, and in 2017 realistic use of appropriately high-dose opiates. Ten years ago, I had two PhD colleagues in Texas, a husband and wife: she was terminally ill with an inoperable, aggressively expanding brain tumour. She couldn’t speak, but every waking morning shrieked with pain. The attending physicians prescribed only low-dose opiates – she might
ICUs are for severely ill or damaged persons with every chance of good survival, not a way station to the mortuary
become addicted – and no steroids to lower her intracranial pressure, because they would waste her muscles. Sweet Jesus!
One tension in the book remains unresolved. The opening chapters are full of growing up in Melbourne: this rings true and is a source of joy, at least to this reader. Then I come upon ‘crapshoot’, a ‘peek’, and the least relevant chapter, set on the east coast of the United States. Clearly, the target is the US market: I think that the persistent groundedness in Melbourne will be the major draw for American readers, not this incongruous tenth chapter. Which leads to the final question: what is the target readership? This is not a book to be easily read and digested in a single session, even by the most resolute person. It helps if you are familiar with the touchstones – Atul Gawande and Jerome Groopman, The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books. For all its easy-to-read style, this is a serious book: my fear is that it will be read by those not particularly afraid of dying, rather than those who are but may not have the author’s insight into the condition, or her resolve. I hope that, having written the book, Kaminsky is now less afraid of death and has thereby learned ‘to live in a more vital, fearless and truthful way’ (pardon the adjectives), in the concluding words of the back-page blurb. g
John Funder is a Melbourne physician.
ABR Arts
Origins: Christopher Menz on MONA’s latest exhibition
Film
Tim Byrne Lion (Transmission Films)
Theatre
Bernadette Brennan The Testament of Mary (Sydney Theatre Company)
ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation.
Film Andrew Nette Jasper Jones (Madman Films)
The Island, Walton Ford, 2009, photograph courtesy of MONA/Rémi Chauvin
The Testament of Mary
by Bernadette Brennan
The opening scene of the The Testament of Mary sets the tone of this excellent production and dramatises brilliantly Colm Tóibín’s radical reassessment of Mary as the Mother of God. Elizabeth Gadsby’s dark marble set, bordered by a red velvet rope, holds one empty chair, one empty cardboard box. Two stairs lead to a tall, seemingly solid marble arch. A sepulchre? No. When the lights come up, the richly robed Blessed Virgin is revealed in all her iconography – votive candles, golden halo, suckling breast, cradled lamb – standing rigid in her niche. She steps down from her pedestal, discards her regal dress. She casts off her pulsing heart and rigid breast, throws down the lamb, then peels off the immobile mask of serenity. Before us stands Mary, the ageing, grief-stricken mother of a crucified son.
Tóibín’s Mary cannot sleep. She is haunted by what she has witnessed, by her loss, her regrets, her personal failures. She now lives in a foreign land, guarded by men who want to transcribe her memories of ‘that time’, ‘that day’; to validate the narrative they are busy constructing. They tell her that she held her son’s broken body after he was taken down from the Cross. They inform her about his conception. She knows better. In their absence, she gives voice to her truth.
Alison Whyte delivers an assured and powerful performance of a woman who, in articulating her trauma, recovers and relives strange, shocking, painful memories. Whyte embodies Mary’s raw and savage emotions, building to a gripping crescendo as she recounts the chaotic horror as well as the banal realities of that fateful day on Golgotha. She reads her audience well, delivering restorative moments of well-timed humour. Under the astute direction of Imara Savage, rapid, sometimes jolting scene changes operate to unfold key dramatic narrative moments as well as to replicate the sudden disruptive surfacing of traumatic memory. Whyte’s Mary emerges from each blackout repositioned both bodily and psychologically.
For eighty minutes Whyte delivers a monologue, but there are subtle conversations established between her story and Max Lyandvert’s pitch-perfect musical score
and the sound effects that he viscerally imposes on the audience’s experience. So too Emma Valente’s lighting, from the first flickering candles through muted darkness, occasionally pierced by searing brightness, reflects and responds to Mary’s experiences and emotions.
The Testament of Mary was commissioned and first performed for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2011. The next year, Tóibín rewrote the monologue into a novel of the same name. Then, in collaboration with Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner, he wrote a tighter, more confronting script that was performed on Broadway in 2013, and recently produced by the Sydney Theatre Company. It works better as a play, and Wharf 1 theatre offers a space with effective acoustics and a necessary intimacy.
In the program, Tóibín explains that the play grew out of his discovery, in E.V. Rieu’s translation of the Four Gospels, that John may have read Aeschylus. John was the only gospel writer to place Mary at the foot of the Cross. While visiting Ephesus, Tóibín imagined John in the open-air theatre there. Could John have been inspired by watching ‘the enactment of a grieving woman imploring, crying out, and gaining power from her own voice’? For some years Tóibín also wondered about the competing images offered by the luscious transcendence of Titian’s Assumption and Tintoretto’s ‘earthly, all human’ Crucifixion. The Mary of his Testament inhabits the space between the two. Beneath her blue cape and blood red dress, she is clothed in a khaki singlet and loose dark trousers.
They were protests outside the Walter Kerr Theatre in 2013. Some viewers may find the recasting of the Blessed Virgin as a fallible, sexual woman offensive, even blasphemous. But there is much respect, love, and empathy in this play. Tóibín insists that he could not have written it if he had not had a Catholic upbringing in Ireland: ‘The play comes from belief.’
It is only after the lights first come up that we realise we are positioned before one of those demarcated spaces of worship within a Catholic cathedral (which quickly becomes Mary’s humble Ephesian house). Moments from the conclusion, Whyte sits back in Mary’s niche cradling the scarlet robes as if they were her dead son; the dimly lit iconic Madonna has been transformed into a feeling, breathing Pietà.
The Testament of Mary is very much about Tóibín’s Mary, but it is also a play about witnessing, memory, and trauma, history and narrative, politics and the way young men across time can so easily be drawn into the thrall of a charismatic spiritual leader, with cataclysmic consequences. g
The Testament of Mary, written by Colm Tóibín and directed by Imara Savage for the Sydney Theatre Company, was performed at Wharf 1. Performance attended: 19 January 2017.
Bernadette Brennan is the author of A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work (Text Publishing, April 2017).
On the Origin of Art
by Christopher Menz
MONA is not afraid to stage exhibitions that tackle big ideas and ask difficult questions. The latest offering, On the Origin of Art, does just that. As David Walsh, MONA’s owner says, ‘Let’s see if those who have insights into evolution can tease out something about the nature of art.’
The exhibition takes its name from Charles Darwin’s famous book On the Origin of Species (1859). Via four separately curated exhibitions, it explores the nature and origin of art and creativity. Sensibly, it does not claim to provide answers. As the exhibition pamphlet states: ‘Maybe that ambition is a little lofty; maybe it lacks modesty. Humour us. If nothing else, you’ll get to see some pretty pictures.’
In addition to many ‘pretty pictures’, and several that are not so pretty, there are numerous other works – sculpture, installations, videos, antiquities, decorative arts – ranging from prehistorical artefacts to the present day, from a multitude of cultures. The breadth of the selection is refreshing, with a vast number of Australian and international loans. Several commissions created for MONA and the exhibition were also displayed for the first time.
Unusually, the four guest curators – Brian Boyd, Mark Changizi, Geoffrey Miller, and Steven Pinker – are not art historians or museum curators. They are ‘biocultural scientist–philosophers’ who are interested in exploring what it is about humans that makes us create
art. They have been given the opportunity to explore their ideas in four separate but adjoining art exhibitions.
On arrival, the viewer is presented with four open doorways to choose from, reminiscent of a set for The Magic Flute. Each doorway leads to an exhibition chosen by the respective curator. Through the informative though at times overlong audio guide, each guest curator acts as the viewer’s personal cicerone, explaining the rationale and theory for his exhibition and selection of works, followed by talks on the works in each section. Some presented better than others. Changizi and Pinker seemed to be at pains to talk about their academic distinctions and publications. Boyd and Miller, on the other hand, were more relaxed and approachable.
Mark Changizi, in ‘Does Civilisation Mimic Nature? I Believe So …’, takes as his premise that recognition of
Unusually, the four guest curators are not art historians or museum curators. They are ‘bio-cultural scientist–philosophers’ who are interested in exploring what it is about humans that makes us create art
forms and sounds and mimicking the environment around us – ‘nature-harnessing’ – is how we respond to art. He chose sculptures and videos that relate to the body (human or animal), including works by Barbara Hepworth, Clifford Last, and Berlinde De Bruyckere.
Brian Boyd, whose section is titled ‘Art is Cogni-
Ajax and Cassandra (1886) and Eros (c.1921) by Solomon J. Solomon and India (Frost) by Ryan McGinley (2013) (photograph courtesy of MONA/Rémi Chauvin)
tive Play with Pattern’, is interested in the roles that patterns and interconnections play in communication and how they underpin art. His exhibition begins with an engaging yellow- and black-patterned room, Dots Obsession – Tasmania, by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama; the second room features patterns in nature: flowers, butterflies, birds. This exhibition continues with works illustrating his argument and ends with a room of comics and a version of Hokusai’s most famous print, The Wave The intervening rooms present skilfully selected and arranged works that draw on patterns and interrelationships and include a marvellous group of works by Sopolemalama Filipe Tohi, Benin bronzes, and Faig Ahmed’s Liquid , a central Asian carpet whose pattern ‘melts’ off the wall onto the floor.
Geoffrey Miller’s ‘Artists Are Sexy Af’ exhibition has the basic premise that art is about selecting mates. It began with a dazzling new work, The Centrifugal Soul, by English artist Mat Collishaw, a rotating tiered arrangement of model humming birds and flowers that, when spinning with flashing lights, has the effect of simulating flight, in much the same way as cartoons. Other works included paintings and sculptures where mating was one of the key subjects – we were warned – whether in Japanese shunga prints, massive history paintings such as Solomon J. Solomon’s Ajax and Cassandra, or ancient fertility figures.
give us pleasure. With this looser theme, the selection of works was more varied; inevitably, works from the other sections could easily have fitted in here. Pinker’s selection, refreshingly unhierarchical, ranged comfortably between paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts objects.
For this reviewer, the most successful exhibitions were those by Brian Boyd and Geoffrey Miller. These exhibitions work best when the curators worked from the subject matter and used the visual argument to make a case. Boyd focused on a visual theme of patterning which meant that the groupings and cross-links were clear to the viewer. Similarly, Miller’s selections were clear and made visual sense. Changizi and Pinker’s works appeared chosen to fit their theories, rarely a successful way to curate an art exhibition. Their exhibitions included many fine works, but at times the relationship between the works and the ideas seemed forced or tenuous.
The ambitions of On the Origin of Art are high. While it may not supply many answers, it is well worth seeing for the wide range and the quality of works included, the interesting juxtapositions, and for the intellectual pleasure (and occasional frustrations) of exploring the various themes. g
On the Origin of Art is at MONA, Hobart until 17 April 2017.
Steven Pinker (‘We Make Art Because We Can’) is interested in how art is something that has developed to
Christopher Menz is a former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia. A longer version of this review appears online in ABR Arts.
It was a job worthy of William himself: not only the ambitious scale of the project, but the speed with which it was completed. In just seven years, between 1958 and 1964, Argo Records, with the Marlowe Dramatic Society, released the complete works of Shakespeare in forty boxed-set LPs, unabridged and fully dramatised. This remarkable venture was led by George Rylands (1902–99), a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and for many years the head of the Marlowe Dramatic Society, a university theatre club. Known among his Bloomsbury friends as ‘Dadie’, Rylands was a leading Shakespeare scholar and a more than capable project administrator. When the British Council first floated the idea of creating unabridged recordings of Shakespeare, it was Rylands who insisted that a complete set should be released in time for the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth. And he saw it through, ahead of schedule and under budget.
Rylands and the Society were working to promote the cause of Empire. The British Council wanted an educational resource for foreign students of English and of Shakespeare, particularly in the United States and the Dominions. Rylands had plenty of experience with these sorts of government-directed cultural activities. In 1948 he took productions of Measure for Measure and Webster’s The White Devil to Berlin as part of the Foreign Office’s hurried response to the historic Red Army Choir tour. Perhaps this is why he went to such pains, knowing that the recordings could only be of lasting value if they were also works of art, capable of educating and also inspiring. Some of them are still among the best of their kind, such as the recording of Much Ado about Nothing (1962), with John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft. The two stars had done the play in 1950 and again in 1952 and 1955, to much acclaim; here their voices sparkle with the silvery echo of all that applause. Ashcroft also plays Kate in The Taming of the Shrew (1963), which is as good an unabridged recording as you could wish to find. Rylands had a connection with the Royal Shake-
speare Company through Society alumnus Peter Hall. He filled many of the leading roles with RSC regulars like Dorothy Tutin, Irene Worth, Michael Hordern, and Ian Holm. They are, across the board, more than competent. The ethos of these recordings is not to dazzle with novel interpretations or charismatic idiosyncrasies, but to highlight the fine modelling of the verse with as much naturalness as possible.
By the early 1960s there was competition. American audiobook specialist Caedmon was creating its own series of unabridged Shakespeare recordings with much starrier casts. Today, some of these Argo recordings can seem a bit underpowered by comparison. Tony Church, for instance, was a good man to swell a progress – his Polonius at the RSC was highly praised – but he doesn’t have the voice of a natural Othello or Macbeth or Shylock. And yet these recordings are never supernumerary. Each one has its surprises and advantages. Compare the Caedmon and the Argo recordings of Twelfth Night, both released in 1961. Caedmon has a glittering cast, with Siobhan McKenna and Vanessa Redgrave as Viola and Olivia, and Paul Scofield as Malvolio. Argo’s leads are less bright, but we do get Peter Pears, the renowned tenor and muse of Benjamin Britten, as Feste the musical fool touched by a melancholy God. And the young Prunella Scales, Sybil Fawlty herself, turns out to be ideal casting as Maria the chambermaid. It is also good fun in these recordings to hear those who will go on to bigger things. Derek Jacobi’s voice, even when he was a stripling undergraduate, is all honey. There is Corin Redgrave, Clive Swift, and Trevor Nunn. Jacobi’s Cambridge chum Ian McKellen pops up in a handful of smaller roles.
Decca has now released the complete set of Argo recordings as a set of 100 CDs. It is a large but elegant package, with clean, minimalist presentation. The striking illustrations produced by Arthur Wragg for the original covers have been retained. There is also a booklet combining the useful liner notes. But it was a serious oversight not to include access to MP3s with the set. It simply creates extra work for the large proportion of listeners who prefer to enjoy these recordings on their iPod or mobile phone or whatever. The only other major complaint is that this set does not include the four re-recordings made with new casts in the early 1970s, including Richard Johnson as Othello, Janet Suzman as Rosalind, Ian Holm as Julius Caesar, and Richard Pasco as Richard II.
Still, the Argo collection will fascinate anyone interested in spoken word recordings, and is a necessary item for universities and high schools; no other complete set of Shakespeare recordings is so consistent or so attentive to effective verse speaking. g
Shakespeare: The Complete Works (Decca). $399.99 100 CD-set. 254783506
Andrew Fuhrmann is a Melbourne theatre critic.
Chasing the mirage
Varun Ghosh
BORN TO RUN
by Bruce Springsteen
Simon & Schuster
$49.99 hb, 508 pp, 97811471157790
‘Icome from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I.’ Thus begins the captivating autobiography of Bruce Springsteen. No treacly guitar man’s reminiscence, Born to Run grapples with the trickier paradoxes of family, love, mental illness, and musical success. At turns confessional and unapologetic, sentimental and honest, funny and devastating, Born to Run is a serious effort to tell the story of Springsteen’s life – how a young man from Freehold, New Jersey made himself into one of the great rock and roll musicians of all time.
The opening chapters paint a textured portrait of small-town life in America in the 1950s, a time at once idyllic and idealised. Springsteen, a wonderful storyteller, vividly captures the voices and emotions of particular moments in his early life – retrieving his father from the local bar; restoring discarded radios for resale at his grandfather’s workbench (‘Here … the resurrection is real’); the welling pride of walking through the law firm where his mother is the head legal secretary.
Yet the hardness and tribalism of his upbringing are never far from the surface. The Springsteen home was not a particularly happy or easy one for the young Bruce. From his mother and grandmother, he was the object of ‘a horrible unforgettable boundary-less love’. His father – an ominous presence – was emotionally hostile and sometimes physically aggressive. ‘I was not my father’s favorite citizen,’ Springsteen notes with dry understatement. Other memories – his father in the kitchen drinking beer after beer in the dark – are haunting. The relationship shadowed Springsteen throughout his life.
In the music of Elvis Presley, the young Springsteen heard ‘a joyous demand made, a challenge, a way out of this dead-to-life world, this small-town’. The Beatles, The Drifters, and later, Bob Dylan all spoke to a longing for truth, ‘for some honest place, some place of one’s own’. Springsteen dedicated himself to playing the guitar, first on his own and then with a series of New Jersey bar bands. He achieved modest success with a band called Steel Mill, building loyal fan bases in New Jersey and Virginia and opening for Roy Orbison and Ike and Tina Turner. Nevertheless, after a tour to California, he arrived at an important conclusion.
I was not a natural genius. I would have to use every ounce of what was in me – my cunning, my musical skills, my showmanship, my intellect, my heart, my willingness – night after night, to push myself harder, to work with more intensity than the next guy just to survive untended in the world I lived in … I knew when we got back home, there would have to be some changes made.
From that point on, Springsteen would set the standards. Band members who failed to meet them were given no quarter. The Bruce Springsteen Band, later the E Street Band, was a ‘benevolent dictatorship’, with Springsteen as writer, lead singer, guitarist, and bandleader.
Born to Run devotes chapters to each studio album and Springsteen’s major tours. An absorbing journey through the creative origins of Springsteen’s music, it offers insight into the craft of producing brilliant rock and roll. Springsteen’s singular perspective and his gifts as a writer prevent the volume of detail from becoming prosaic. Paradoxes emerge from the intersection of Springsteen’s life and music. Unusually self-aware for a rock star, he worries that his success distances him from the working-class lives he describes with such felicity in his songs. There are frustrations too. Springsteen calls ‘Born in the USA’ (1984) – a song that helped launch him into superstardom – ‘one of my greatest and most misunderstood pieces of music’.
Conceived as the protest of a soldier returning home from the Vietnam War, it became a kind of patriotic anthem. Springsteen notes wryly: ‘Records are often auditory Rorschach tests; we hear what we want to hear.’
Similarly, Wrecking Ball (2012) –a searing critique of the Wall Street firms that caused the crash of 2008 – was the number one album in the US and around the world without having a deeper impact. Springsteen has ‘been following and writing about America’s post-industrial trauma, the killing of our manufacturing presence and working class for thirty-five years’. Yet as blue-collar tribune, he has always been more popular than politically effective.
The Beatles, The Drifters, and Bob Dylan all spoke to a longing for truth
In Born to Run, Springsteen tackles his own personal demons with a candour that is compelling. Describing his often-troubled relationships, he writes:
Part of me was rebelliously proud of my emotionally violent behavior, always cowardly and aimed at the women in my life … [T]here was a part of me, a significant part, that was capable of great carelessness and emotional cruelty, that sought to reap damage and harvest shame, that wanted to wound and hurt and make sure that those who loved me paid for it.
Likewise, Born to Run does not shy away from the too infrequently discussed subject of mental illness. Springsteen, who has been in therapy for more than thirty years, describes the struggle as a war that is ‘never over’ and has ‘no permanent victories’.
By the end of Born to Run, there is a sense that Springsteen has matured on the pages – a masterful effect achieved through the subtle evolution of his voice and perspective. Overall, the book is thoughtful, lucid, and conveys the visceral emotion captured in so many of Springsteen’s songs. It is, in short, an exceptional autobiography. g
Varun Ghosh is a Perth-based lawyer.
Lion by Tim Byrne
For the first third of this film, you would be forgiven for thinking you were back under the influence of the Italian Neorealists: largely non-professional actors in a realistic milieu; themes of poverty and deprivation; a child at the centre of the action. That it takes place in India only heightens this effect; it is difficult to conceive of a contemporary setting more dangerous or overwhelming for a lost boy than teeming Kolkata. Or Calcutta, as it was known when Saroo (Sunny Pawar) arrived by train in 1984, having accidentally left his family thousands of kilometres behind in a town he was too young to name.
Director Garth Davis plunges the viewer into this nightmare with a documentarian’s eye for emotional distance and germane detail. Saroo’s mother, Kamla (Priyanka Bose), survives by ‘moving rocks’ on a building site; Saroo and his older brother Guddu (Abhishek Bharate) help out by stealing coal from moving trains. One of these trains will inadvertently carry Saroo thousands of miles from his home, into the hands of a Dickensian cast of undesirables, and eventually into an orphanage. He ends up in Hobart, where he is adopted by Sue and John Brierley (Nicole Kidman and David Wenham). It will be more than twenty years before Saroo returns to India and the family he lost.
These Indian scenes are the muscular heart of the film. Greig Fraser’s cinematography is superb here; dun-coloured and dusty, it fairly pulses with danger and over-stimulus, powerfully evoking the childlike wonder and the horror of abandonment. Pawar, as Saroo, is astonishing. It isn’t just that he seems incapable of a false action or forced expression; he fills the screen with his presence. It is the kind of casual magnificence that must make every trained actor weep.
As soon as Saroo flies to the Apple Isle, the film loses some of its immediacy and tension. The early scenes with Kidman and Wenham are not bad, by any means: the awkwardness of abrupt intimacy is well conveyed, and the complexity of cross-cultural family dynamics becomes apparent with the addition of Mantosh (played as a child by Keshav Jadhav and as an adult by Divian Ladwa), another adopted Indian child with pressing emotional needs. But the film seems to be treading water, and that sense is hard to shake even when it jumps forward twenty years and
we meet Saroo as an adult, now played by the immensely charming Dev Patel. The rest of the film deals with his attempts to find his lost family, but the stakes are never quite as high as those opening scenes, even if we are constantly willing his success.
Apart from the purely logistical, nothing really prevents Saroo from achieving his goal; his parents are incredibly supportive, he has a girlfriend (Rooney Mara) backing him all the way, and Google Earth has just been invented. Luke Davies’ script, so sparse and suggestive in the first third, becomes rather flavourless and clunky once Saroo decides to search for his lost home. The internal conflicts are dictated to the audience rather than revealed, and little is left for the viewer to do than wait for the inevitable reunion.
There are rewards along the way. Kidman is excellent as the emotionally brittle but deeply maternal Sue, and the scene in which she explains her reasons for adopting her sons is quietly tectonic. (Wenham is, by contrast, mostly useless in an admittedly colourless role.) Mara is beautifully nuanced in the thankless girlfriend role, and Patel is effortlessly engaging for the most part – his Australian accent is so convincing it is hard to believe he wasn’t raised here. It is a pity that his final scene, ostensibly the emotional catharsis of the whole film, doesn’t quite gel. There is a sense, reminiscent of Liam Neeson’s final moments in Schindler’s List, that the actor wasn’t given the requisite preparation, as if the filmmakers were pressed for time on location. The result is a slight tilt into mawkishness.
In fact, the film has an overall tendency towards the reductive and sentimental, even while it attempts to tell one man’s personal truth. It is an undeniably poignant tale – and large chunks of the film are almost overwhelmingly moving – but the filmmakers have cleaved too closely to the tone and viewpoint of Saroo Brierley’s book A Long Way Home (2013). His account is generous and unfailingly polite, but it leaves the most fascinating questions unacknowledged, let alone answered. It is more than merely ironic that Saroo finds his family through a technology that he would most likely have no access to in his native country; the film treats Kamla’s decision to stay put and hope her son will return as a noble act, but it surely speaks far more to the limited options of her poverty.
Most disconcertingly, Saroo’s own identity crisis is depicted as a completely external problem, his journey home merely a matter of joining dots on a map. The film opens with some beautiful shots of geographical phenomena: streams, pathways, and naturally occurring circuits. It is obsessed with roads and tracks. Unfortunately, it never moves beyond these symbols, content to render one man’s inner search as something unambiguously topographical. g
Lion, 118 minutes, directed by Garth Davis and written by Luke Davies. Based on the 2013 memoir A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley. Produced by See Saw Films, Screen Australia, and The Weinstein Company. Distributed in Australia by Transmission Films.
Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic.
Jasper Jones
by Andrew Nette
There is something deeply satisfying about watching a classic cinematic trope done well. The film version of Jasper Jones, the best-selling Australian novel of the same name by Craig Silvey, is a uniquely Australian take on the coming of age film, done very well.
In publicity material, director Rachel Perkins (Radiance, 1998; Bran Nue Dae, 2009) name-checks Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me (1986) – the story of four boys in a small Oregon town who set out to find the body of a missing child – as a central inspiration. Other examples come to mind, including Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and, closer to home, The Year My Voice Broke (1987), both of which portray the messy collision of childhood idealism with the mysterious, cynical world of adulthood.
Unsurprisingly, given that Silvey co-wrote the script, the film adheres closely to its source material. In the fictitious rural Western Australian town of Corrigan on the cusp of the 1970s, thirteen-year-old Charlie Bucktin (Levi Miller) is roused from bed one night by a local mixed race boy, Jasper Jones (Aaron McGrath), who asks for his help. Jasper leads Charlie into the nearby forest, to a billabong next to a large tree. From one of the thick branches dangles the body of sixteen-year-old Laura Wishart, Jasper’s secret lover and the daughter of the local shire president.
Jasper maintains his innocence, but knows the town’s police will blame him regardless because of his mixed racial background and his reputation as a troublemaker. He claims to know the identity of the murderer, a local recluse, ‘Mad’ Jack Lionel (Hugo Weaving), rumoured to have killed a woman many years ago, whose dilapidated wooden house on the edge of town functions as one of the story’s key points of narrative suspense.
Charlie helps Jasper hide the body in the billabong and agrees to find the killer, little knowing what he is letting himself in for. As he guards the secret knowledge of Laura’s fate, panic over her disappearance mounts in the town. He also has to deal with the disintegration of his parent’s marriage (the mother and father played by Toni Collette and Dan Wyllie) and a burgeoning romance with Laura’s precocious, bookish sister, Eliza
(Angourie Rice).
In addition to the coming-of-age story, the film is a noirish take on the underbelly of small-town rural life. Not only do adults prove confusing and disappointing in their actions, they harbour secrets which Charlie gradually begins to uncover as he digs into the events surrounding Laura’s death. In this respect, the film has a similar feel to Jocelyn Moorehouse’s The Dressmaker (2015). The dark tone, to some degree present in the novel, has no doubt been amplified by the presence of Shaun Grant, whose last major big screen credit was the real-life serial killers tale Snowtown (2011), as the other half of the screenwriting duo.
Jasper Jones also functions as a strong but nuanced depiction of racism in 1960s Australia. The consequences of the treatment of Indigenous people is evident in Jasper’s clear-eyed recognition that he will be fingered for Laura’s death, regardless of whether or not the evidence supports his guilt. Australia’s fumbling engagement with Asian immigration is explored via Jeffrey Lu (Kevin Long), Charlie’s Vietnamese friend, whose humour and indefatigable determination not to bend to the town’s racist stereotyping steals every scene in which he appears.
McGrath, Rice, Miller, and Long (in his acting début) all deliver fine performances, as does Weaving. Wyllie and Collette are good as a couple whose relationship is falling apart in slow motion without their realising why. But it is the young members of the cast who deliver the film, conveying what it means to be a young person trying to comprehend the harsh, often violent ways of the adult.
The other aspect of Jasper Jones worth commenting on is the pitch-perfect way Perkins weaves changing Australia in the late 1960s into the fabric of the story. Rock music, news of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, the Vietnam War – which claims one of the town’s young men as a fatality – the stirrings of youth rebellion, create a deeper sense of social unease into the story. The period feel is aided enormously by the real-life setting. In a departure from the book, which was set in a desert town, the film was shot in Pemberton, a former logging township 330 kilometres south of Perth. According to the production notes, Pemberton has lain almost untouched for the last half-century. Perkins uses the period detail and lush, forbidding forest surrounding it for good effect.
None of Jasper Jones is particularly new. The dominant tropes of coming-of-age films having been treated on the big screen so often that many of the plot twists are not really very surprising. But novelty is not what this film offers, so much as a virtuoso take on a familiar theme. g
Jasper Jones, directed by Rachel Perkins, distributed in Australia by Madman Films, opens in selected cinemas on 2 March 2017.
Andrew Nette is a Melbourne crime writer and freelance journalist.
King Roger
by David Larkin
Within the Australian context, any allusion to King Roger would be taken by most to be an admiring soubriquet for the Swiss tennis maestro who, as it happens, won through to the quarter finals of the Australian Open while this review was being written. But while Melbourne was in thrall to the silky skills of the re-energised Federer, the opera-going denizens of Sydney were thrilled by another royal Roger. The advertised appearance of Jonas Kaufmann in Parsifal might have been Opera Australia’s biggest coup in the way of performers for 2017, but cognoscenti were just as delighted that Karol Szymanowski’s opera, Król [i.e. King] Roger, would finally have its Australian première. Given that it was first launched into the world in Warsaw in 1926, no one could call its arrival here premature. But better ninety years late than never.
The story, co-written by the composer (1882–1937) and his cousin, the poet Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, borrows core ideas from The Bacchae by Euripides, and adapts them to twelfth-century Sicily. From the ancient Greek tragedy comes the idea of Dionysus as protagonist, seducing a monarch onto a new, less trammelled spiritual path. In its new context, this becomes a struggle between the dominant Byzantine Christianity and a liberated, hedonistic paganism preached by the Shepherd (a human disguise for Dionysus). During the composition, Szymanowski revised the ending so that Roger, although profoundly changed by his encounter with the Shepherd, ultimately opts for an independent third way. In the words of the musicologist Jim Samson, this decision makes Roger ‘a powerful symbol of modern
WRITTEN WORD
Nietzschean man’.
The dramatic focus was thus shifted from the Shepherd to Roger, which explains why the earlier plan of calling the work Pasterz (The Shepherd) also changed. This is not unprecedented: other famous instances include the Ring cycle (where Wagner’s initial idea of two Siegfried dramas was supplanted by the far more interesting character development of Wotan and Brünnhilde), and Der Rosenkavalier (initially the working title was Ochs, but Strauss and Hofmannsthal came to see the Marschallin as the true dramatic focus).
Like several other OA shows in recent years (including Eugene Onegin and the current Cavalleria rusticana/ Pagliacci double bill), King Roger was a co-production with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Kasper Holten, Director of Opera at the latter institution, took on the direction of Szymanowski’s opera. He is quoted in the program book as having purposely disregarded the original setting in favour of a representation that explores the composer’s own psychodrama through the titular protagonist. Hence no Byzantine churches, realistic palace courtyards, or ruined theatres, the original settings of the three acts. Instead, a curved backwall with rows of arch-shaped apertures is present throughout, suggestive of opera boxes or amphitheatre openings. The costumes were also updated to the early twentieth century.
The production will chiefly be remembered for the massive head created by set designer Steffen Aarfing, which dominates the stage in Acts I and II. Projected onto this are the clever lighting and video designs of Jon Clark and Luke Halls, suggestive of the ever-changing patina of the king’s internal thoughts and feelings. In a brilliant twist, Act II takes places in the rotated king’s head itself, on a series of gantries and stairs. The sensual impulses within the king are represented by masked semi-naked dancers writhing and gyrating in the basement level, until they go out of control at the end of the act and start hurling the contents of the library down. In Act III, the head is projected onto a front scrim initially, before this rises to reveal a smouldering pyre where the physical head once had been. The message is clear: Roger’s original identity has been destroyed.
The problems associated with the Shepherd’s utopia are made clear when his possessed crowd of followers hurl books onto the flames, an enacted denial of know-
ledge in favour of emotion that feels all too relevant to our post-truth world. All who fall under his spell –dancers, Roxana, and eventually Roger – are stained with ash. This fire is as much destructive as it is invigorating. One might be reminded of Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History (1992), where college students who give themselves over to the Dionysian also end up destroyed.
Szymanowski’s score is a marvel of inventive textures and sensuous beauties, and the OA orchestra revelled in it. ConductorAndrea Molino moulded sounds sensitively; there were only a couple of moments where the singers were at all occluded. The easily swayed crowd are crucial protagonists in their own right, initially manhandling the heretical Shepherd, but by the end having become his maenadic followers. The OA chorus was in fine fettle, whether chanting the orthodox liturgy, or throwing themselves into the fray, and those entrusted with short solos hit the mark. The chorus was supplemented by the unseen Sydney Children’s Choir in some scenes, and these young singers managed the tricky lines with commendable, if not quite perfect, accuracy. The old order was represented in the figures of the Archbishop, a bluff Gennadi Dubinsky, and a rabble-rousing, venomous Deaconess played by the excellent Dominica Matthews. In the title role, Michael Honeyman gave a powerful performance as a monarch who sees his wife fall for the stranger and his subjects desert him. His ecstatic final monologue was beautifully delivered, leaving a lasting impression (as did the blinding light shone directly at the audience for the last few seconds). The role of Edrisi is a somewhat curious one: in this production he came across as nothing more than a confidential servant of the king, although Szymanowski specified that he was an Arabian sage, who ‘might be viewed as a symbol of wisdom or rationality’, as Samson puts it. James Egglestone shaped him sympathetically, his easy tenor voice
carrying without fuss or stress.
Lorina Gore may have looked like a postwar flapper with her heavy fringe, but her voice exuded an orientalist languor entirely appropriate to the role. Her Act II vocalise, which unfurls and caresses above the stave, was particularly delicious.
The only ‘import’ among the cast was the outstanding Saimir Pirgu, who had the looks and the charisma to represent the Shepherd without requiring the usual suspension of disbelief from the viewers. He had an impressive tonal range, floating top notes then delivering them in full stentorian voice.
Taken as a whole, this was a brilliant conception of a fascinating work, performed magnificently. It is a short opera (no bad thing in itself), and the decision to have only one interval before the twenty-five-minute final act was questionable. Two shorter intervals would be dramatically apposite but might be logistically problematic. A case could also be made for running straight through without breaks, since the full opera runs for less than ninety minutes. Would patrons feel short-changed in such circumstances? Should it be coupled with another short work (as are Cav/Pag), and if so, which one? Questions like these should be pondered by the OA directorial team on a future occasion, if (as I hope) there is one. Although the publicity for this production advertised it as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear a 20th-century Polish masterpiece’, it clearly merits more than a single outing. g
King Roger (Opera Australia), directed by Kasper Holten, was performed in the Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House. Performance attended: 20 January 2017. Four performances will follow during OA’s Melbourne season (May 19–27).
David Larkin is a senior lecturer in musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Opera Australia’s King Roger (photograph by Keith Saunders)
In defence of television
James McNamara
TELEVISION: A BIOGRAPHY
by David Thomson
Thames & Hudson
$45 hb, 412 pp, 9780500519165
Great books have been written on television. David Thomson’s Television: A biography is not among them. This surprises me, because Thomson is one of America’s most lauded film critics. To have his thoughts on television over the sweep of its history, viewed through his decades of experience, seemed a boon to me –a critic born in 1982. But Television judges its subject too harshly in a study that often feels painfully dated.
Taking on television as a whole is an admirably vast job. The term ‘television’ alone encompasses an array of meaning, technologies, and history: the broadcast of a coronation, 1960s ads, game shows, tonight’s Netflix comedy. The term’s meaning has evolved, as economic and technological change shift its methods of consumption, artistic quality, and cultural significance. Tackling ‘television’, then, requires structural and critical rigour.
Thomson abdicates from this in the introduction: ‘how does one tell “the story” of the television era? ... [T]he more I thought about that (and tried to find a structure), the more I felt confounded.’ It shows. Arguing (speciously) that he would have to cover everything ever made to do it properly, Thomson declines a linear history and instead divides the book into the ‘Medium’ and its ‘Messages’.
That could have worked, had his study of the ‘Medium’ clearly established the parameters of ‘television’: guiding the reader through various golden eras that he name-checks, the technologies that pushed television from fuzzy screens to cultural dominance, the meanings of ‘network’, ‘cable’, ‘streaming’, and why that difference matters. There are bits of this, scattered through a porridgy
structure that creates confusion as Thomson topic-shifts and digresses into pop-philosophising better suited to the tail-end of a boozy dinner. His self-consciousness is telling: ‘I hope this is not too roundabout’; this ‘may seem foolish or impossibly belated’; ‘Maybe this theory seems vague.’ Yep.
Thomson’s lack of precision in using ‘television’ underpins the book’s dated feel. He hands down axioms possibly correct fifteen years ago but wrong today. ‘Television is not for attention.’ Really? What about complex serialised drama like The Wire? ‘Television seldom strays far from likeable people’ – except for the past decade and a half of antiheroes. Advertisements ‘are the staple programming of television and still the formative element on our diverse screens’. Not on Netflix, Amazon, or HBO. Television ‘has always favored the sly, hip presentation of self, as opposed to the studious playing of Great Roles. Heavy-duty acting can look…silly on television.’ James Gandolfini in The Sopranos, Julianna Margulies in The Good Wife – they weren’t playing Great Roles?
Television’s datedness also comes through in certain attitudes. It is wrong to call Thomson sexist: he advocates fiercely for women on screen. But I could hear my eyes roll when I read: ‘There have been women newscasters and talk-show anchors, but it’s hard to put them in the company of Dick Clark, Merv Griffin, or Mr. Rogers. Or is that just a stuffy male point of view?’ (Yes). After lightly praising Ellen DeGeneres – recipient of thirty-five Emmys and a Presidential Medal of Freedom – he dismisses her because, unlike the male hosts, ‘she has refused magic or mystery’. Whatever that means. While rightly criticising television for ‘putting women to a stricter and sexist test’ about appearance, he unironically writes of a Fox sports reporter: ‘[Erin] Andrews does a breathless, subcompetent job, but she is attractive in the way of twenty or thirty years ago … Television has many women commentators on male sports events now, some as good as any reporters.’ And so on.
The book improves as Thomson studies television’s ‘Message’ by genre: the news, documentary, comedy, police
procedurals. He writes vividly about live events like the Kennedy assassination, offers valuable contexts to older shows like I Love Lucy. Yet ‘Long Form’ – the revolutionary, HBO-era of artistic drama – gets seventeen pages in a 412-page book that happily digresses into imagined television episodes, block-quoted internet comments, and recaps of ads. Nearly a third of the section concerns a little-known network show, American Crime, leaving cable and streaming’s medium-shaping achievements woefully underdone. Here is Thomson on the most ambitious television production in history: ‘Then there is Game of Thrones (2011-), based on the appeal of medieval costume and warfare.’ Thomson admits that ‘I feel guilty over series I have not included here – or not seen properly’; there are, he self-justifies, ‘too many long-forms to keep up with’. Which would be fine, if he was an ordinary viewer. But he’s not. Television claims the currency and authority of being the medium’s ‘biography’, yet too often Thomson shrugs off the critical responsibilities of that role. Crucially, he seems to have missed many of this century’s defining achievements, and to lack textured appreciation of how these have changed and heightened the form.
This leads to an unjustly bleak judgement: that ‘television – that foolish, wasteful, inept medium’ makes us lesser, that ‘our most ardent and honorable hopes for meaning may be eclipsed by the passive persistence of the thing itself’, that it is a ‘harbinger’ of technological doom that ‘witness[es] decline, entropy, and even a narrowing of human aspiration’. ‘Instead of watching stories that might be art,’ he says, ‘I feel we’re witnessing a world past caring.’ Rot.
Tellingly, Thomson concludes with Friends, which ended in 2004 and forms a natural closing point for twentiethcentury television. I could understand his grim perspective had Television been printed in that year – it certainly reads that way. But not in 2017, when television’s artistic promise seems boundless. g
James McNamara was the third ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow for his essay ‘The Golden Age of Television?’.
Publisher of the Month with Jonathan Galassi
What was your pathway to publishing?
After university I knew I didn’t want to do deconstruction; I wanted to be involved with contemporary writing, so I looked for an editorial job and eventually found one, in Boston, which was no longer the Athens of America, in 1973.
Name the first book you ever published. I think it was A Boston Picture Book (1974), by the artist Barbara Westman. I loved her and loved the whole process!
Do you ever edit the books you commission?
Very often, though I sometimes also have a collaborator backing me up.
How many titles do you publish each year? Twenty-plus.
What are the main qualities you look for in a new author?
Originality of expression, freshness, and coherency of voice.
In your dealings with authors, what is the greatest pleasure – and challenge?
Pleasure: minute engagement with the author’s text, and hence with his/her mind. Challenge: winning the author’s trust, so that she/he feels we’re in this together.
Do you write yourself? If so, has it informed your work as a publisher?
Yes, I’ve written poetry, translated Italian poetry, and am now writing fiction. The interplay with what I do as a publisher is constant, but I might say my work as a publisher has informed my writing more than vice versa, though I’ve never felt impinged on by others.
Who are the editors/publishers you most admire?
There are a lot. Here are a bunch, in no particular order: Horace Liveright, Alfred Knopf, T.S. Eliot, Edward Garnett, John Murray, Pat Covici, Malcolm Cowley, Bennett Cerf, Donald Klopfer, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, James Laughlin, Valentino Bompiani,
Giulio Einaudi, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Gaston Gallimard, Hamish Hamilton, Norah Smallwood, Carmen Callil, Siegfried Unseld, Robert Gottlieb, Roger Straus. I didn’t say I liked them all. But I admired them.
In a highly competitive market, is individuality one of the casualties?
Individuality is what we’re offering. Imaginative writers, by definition, are different from each other. They’re trying find ways to express new attitudes, feelings, ways of being.
On publication, which is more gratifying –a brilliant launch, a satisfied author, encomiastic reviews, or rapid sales?
Rapid sales! – because it means people are really paying attention. And this is a business, which is one of the wonderful things about it, in fact. Non-profit publishing has no appeal for me. But many great books don’t enjoy great popularity going out the gate – or ever. And they have very real satisfactions, too.
What’s the current outlook for new writing of quality?
I think it’s pretty much what it’s always been: a crapshoot. I do believe that great work is – eventually –recognised. But the ways this happens are many and sometimes tortuous. Think of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s
The Leopard, one of the twentieth century’s greatest novels, which the author worked on for decades; it was published only after his death. The book is immortal, as is the author’s reputation. But he was not. That’s an extreme case. But writing and reception are two dissociated channels of activity. There are lots of publishers desperate to find the Trumpian Leopard But will they recognise it when they see it?
Jonathan Galassi is president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which he joined in 1985. He has translated the poetry of Leopardi and Montale. His own poetry appears in three collections, most recently, Left-Handed: Poems (2012). He has published one novel, Muse (2015).
Entries are now open for the
2017 ABR Elizabeth
Jolley Short Story Prize
The Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is one of Australia’s leading prizes for an original short story. It honours the work of the great Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley (1923–2007). The total prize money is $12,500. The Jolley Prize is open to anyone in the world who is writing in English. The prizes include:
First prize: $7,000
Second prize: $2,000
Third prize: $1,000
The closing date is 10 April 2017
‘Winning the Jolley Prize after being overseas for several years was an immensely bolstering welcome back – all the more so for the honour it pays to one of the most influential and tenacious forces in Australian literature.’
Josephine Rowe, 2016 winner
Full details and online entry are available on our website
