But the reader can easily fail to be reminded of the Roman world. From what we know of Ovid’s eight years of killing time at the mouth of the Danube, the man at the center of Malouf’s book is hard to recognize. It is true that Ovid eventually set about learning the local language, but the suggestion that he had put the old world behind him and was ready to embrace something new is absurd: the Tristia and the Epistulae ex ponto are complaints, not letters of acceptance. The relegatio imposed on Ovid by Augustus was only the mildest form of exile, but was still meant to be a savage punishment, and it worked. Ovid ached for Tiberius to bring him back to Rome – to bring him back to life. Malouf’s Ovid hardly has Rome on his mind. His attention is fully occupied by the Child. Nothing happens, but one can’t help thinking that if the author of the Ars amatoria had had a telescope available it well might have.
The same enfant sauvage theme works much better in Remembering Babylon, Malouf’s justly praised novel of 1993. The setting is Queensland in the 1840s, and this time the wordless child is a white castaway ship’s boy who walks out of the bush to join the white settlers after sixteen years with the Aboriginals. With only a few words of English, the boy is effectively a white black. In America, Mark Twain pioneered this transracial device with Pudd’nhead Wilson, and variations on it have proved usable all the way through to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain; but in Australia it has rarely been exploited, not just because the country has a much smaller culture by volume but because Aboriginals, until very recently, were thought marginal if they were thought of at all. This latter point has always ranked high among Malouf’s preoccupations, and through his misfit bush boy he gives us his most thorough treatment of it. The wild child ought to be a bridge between cultures, but the self-elected representatives of the dominant culture don’t want a bridge; they’d rather have the river they can drown him in:
His arms are jerked back, his head pushed down. His head, roaring into the sack, is thrust under water and the darkness in the sack turns to mud. He gasps mud.
Touch by touch, a picture of inevitable tragedy is built up which would look very like despair if there were not also, at the centre of the story, the usual unstated mutual attraction, this time between the settlers’ boy from whose viewpoint we see the action and the boy from the bush whose mere existence is its principal cause.
*
Attraction might be the wrong word for what goes on between Malouf’s male principals. The lack of warmth might not just be due to the invariable obliqueness of the expression, the thoroughness of the ellipsis. Perhaps what we are shown is a kind of dependence. In Malouf’s Australia, the man of sensibility is walled in. He is not necessarily in a closet, but he is certainly in a cell, and without his yearning vision of someone wild in the street outside he would never dare to attack the bars in the window with that file he found in the cake. Solitude is common in Malouf’s work, but it is rarely self-sufficient; although it should be said that the eponymous hero of Harland’s Half Acre (1984) is very definitely a man on his own, a self-educated artist boiling and bristling at the center of the novel by Malouf that comes closest to being a masterpiece, and the more so because it is so unlike the others. As so often happens with prolific authors, the least characteristic work is the most fulfilled. For once the hero, instead of being drawn to another man and spending the rest of the book failing to find out why, resolves his conflicts within himself. If he has any sexuality at all, it all gets sublimated in creativity. Since the same almost certainly applied to Leonardo da Vinci, the reader can scarcely think this unlikely.
Born in poverty and ignorance, Frank Harland, through sheer strength of talent, becomes a great painter, staying true to his gift even when faced with another economic threat – prosperity. Malouf’s is not the only novel to celebrate the heroically inarticulate misfit painter. Joyce Carey’s Gully Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth was there first, and Patrick White’s Hurtle Duffield in The Vivisector must have been much in Malouf’s thoughts. (Malouf wrote the libretto for the opera version of White’s Voss.) But Malouf’s Harland is a true original. It has been said that he was based on the reclusive Australian painter Ian Fairweather, but really he has taken on too much life of his own to be pinned down to one progenitor. Saul Bellow’s Humboldt is said to be based on Delmore Schwartz, but he makes me think of a dozen writers who created a square mile of chaos around them for every square foot of order they created on the page; and in the same way, and for the same reason, Harland conjures up a platoon of Australian painters who came out of nowhere, followed their noses, and drew the world to their solitary hideaways. Harland in his hut on the beach could be Sidney Nolan on his country estate. Harland is the artist incarnate, the artist who has been born to it and can’t stop. The theme has an incandescent focal moment when his friend Knack, a learned refugee from Europe who has survived in Australia by keeping a junk shop, shoots himself along with his mistress. The war in Europe has come to an end but the news from the concentration camps has been too much for them. Harland visits the bodies in the junk shop. There is blood all over the walls and the shape of the stains gives him the idea for a painting.
Harland’s fruitful naïveté is boldly imagined, clearly defined, and psychologically true, so all of Malouf’s gifts can be put to work reinforcing the center of the book instead of glamorously circumnavigating its perimeter. The best gift is his easy access to the memories of his youth, a treasury of sense impressions upon which he seems able to draw at will, with no need to check up on their accuracy. When he names the objects in his mother’s sewing basket, it’s doubtful whether he needs a photograph: he photographed them with his mind when the basket was on a level with his eyes. James Joyce had to write letters home to get some of his details about Dublin right, and Thomas Mann had to be in a constant process of researching his own past to pull off a tour de force like the description of the Frankfurt am Main shop windows that provide Felix Krull with his freshman year at the academy of material desire. But Malouf’s inventories read as if he can just pull them out of his head. You can tell he doesn’t feel the need to check up, because sometimes errors creep in. (In Johnno that little imported English car called the Mini is on sale a couple of years too early.) But anomalies and anachronisms are hard to spot, and it’s a fair guess that they are very few.
*
In The Great World the prisoners of war sustain themselves by playing memory games, cherishing their personal histories. Clearly Malouf feels that way about his own. He can take his personal recollections with him into Australia’s nineteenth century because the layout of the households and the surrounding scenery in the subtropical south Queensland littoral area wasn’t all that different then than it was in his childhood. An Imaginary Life remained singular in his work because he couldn’t take his memories with him into the ancient world. The supposed classical purity of that book was really just an absence of detail, and when he tried to supply some the results were strangely impalpable. (And in at least one instance disabling, as when Ovid observes that the barbaric locals ride without stirrups, the author having failed to apprise himself of the information that everybody did, since the invention of the stirrup lay six hundred years in the future.)
So far, Malouf has been at his most comfortable with his house around him. At whatever time they are set in the two hundred years of white settlement that we used to think of as the whole of Australian history, his best stories – with Remembering Babylon, Fly Away Peter, and Harland’s Half Acre as the outstanding examples – are richly detailed transitions between wooden-walled interiors and landscapes in which every plant and living thing is catalogued by memory. Even when the house is crowded, there is a place in it for a precocious boy. Frank Harland and his brothers are brought up in a single room, sleeping several to a bed, but Frank ends up getting the single bed against the wall, the way to the world. And there is always a space under the house, which is the way to adventure. Not just in the autobiography but in a surprising number of the novels as well, the dark
, wedge-shaped space under the house is where the protagonist goes to be alone and to find his way forward, up to the limit set by the line of light where the front of the house almost meets the ground. (In Queensland the old weatherboard houses usually had a moat of air between themselves and the ground, thus to stave off the white ants, a species of termite fanatically dedicated to the demolition business.) In the title story of the new book he is still under the house, still feeling its weight on his shoulders, still mesmerized by that line of light.
But there is a difference. The old entrapment has, at long last, been reduced to something merely formative, rather than definitive. ‘Dream Stuff’ is a story about someone who has been out into the light and let it change him: it is the story, in fact, of an internationally successful writer who has taken his risks, including the risk – perhaps the scariest of all for an Australian expatriate – of going home. Thus to draw on his adult experience is a rare thing for Malouf and one can only hope for more of it. On the evidence of his new book, there is a new expressive impulse that will be hard to deny. Probably it was always there, but he kept the lid on it. In Antipodes there is a beautiful story, ‘That Antic Jezebel’, about the Sydney community of European beau monde refugees. A one-time all-conquering beauty dresses up in her old finery to go to the new opera house, where she is disturbed to find that one of her ex-lovers fails to take his regular seat. He has died of old age, and soon she will too.
From someone who could write a story like that, it would have been legitimate to expect a string of books that dramatized the complex postwar interchange between Australia and Europe, but apart from a few pages about Tuscany appended to the autobiography, Knack’s suicide in Harland’s Half Acre was the only further sign of such interests. (Malouf lived in Tuscany at one stage and still spends part of each year there: he has been frank about finding the Australian arts world too attentive. Though pleased enough to be accepted, he is not the type to relish being found familiar.) More often than not, and certainly more often than a man with his qualifications might have, Malouf has written novels as if he were setting out to meet the demands of an unreconstructed Australian nationalist for reliably indigenous yarns with as few cosmopolitan overtones as possible. They are complex, many-layered books, but with rare exceptions they are not many-layered in the social sense, and even his sole truly large-scale work, The Great World, has not much in it of Australia’s actual social workings. As in a film script, there is a high-concept contrast between rich man and poor man, but there are no real social divisions, and to carry on as if Australia does not possess social divisions is worse than uninformative, it is sentimental.
*
In Australia, as in America, there is a world where money grows old, power is preserved, and customs are refined beyond the easy reach of the common people. Australia isn’t England, but it isn’t Illyria either. Though democratic, prosperous, and egalitarian beyond all historic precedent, it is still a complex society, with highly sophisticated, self-protecting elites that Malouf in his years of success has learned a lot about. That there could be startling results if he puts this knowledge to use is proved by ‘Great Day’, the last and longest story in the new book, in which the members of a distinguished family gather at their country seat, where the patriarch, an erstwhile political grandee called Audley, is living in the afterglow of his influence on public life. He is still consulted as an oracle by the media and the new crop of politicians, but his children, all grown to adulthood, have their own ideas about his infallibility, and are working out their destinies according to their own desires.
The women’s roles are particularly finely detailed – a new departure for Malouf. Audley’s daughters could be Russian sisters longing for Moscow, except that they are already there, and find themselves unsettled. For tone, pace, and sense of nuance, a comparison between ‘Great Day’ and a Chekhov long short story – ‘Anna Around the Neck’, for example – would not be too far-fetched. And as with Chekhov, the reader finds the end of the story looming far too soon. ‘Great Day’ cries out to be a novel: the novel Malouf has not yet tried, the novel about now.
Malouf has a reason for disliking the present: it wants to murder his memories. In ‘Great Day’ a folk museum – one of those typically Australian amateur collections of bricolage and natural wonders – burns to the ground, obviously as a symbol of the modern world having its way. In ‘Jacko’s Reach’ he is explicit about what he has spent so long saying goodbye to:
The last luminous grains of a freer and more democratic spirit, that the husbands and wives of my generation still turn to dreams. . . . It is this, all this, that will go under the bars of neon lights and the crowded shelves and trolleys of the supermarkets, the wheels of skateboards, the bitumen walks and solid, poured-concrete ramps.
It would be a more persuasive threnody if he could first persuade himself, but there are encouraging signs that he can’t, quite. Australia’s future is unlikely to be settled on such predictable lines, and one of the reasons is the country’s by now firmly established status as a creative powerhouse. Though the Gold Coast of Malouf’s beloved Queensland looks more like Las Vegas every year, Australia is not in much danger of becoming too Americanized while there are writers like him around. Its cosmopolitan artists, of whom some of the most prominent have spent their lives abroad, have served their country well by pursuing their own ends. An insulated nationalist culture would have been no culture at all, and very easily displaced by the American mass-media influence that Australia’s intellectuals, with some reason, fear can leap oceans at a single bound.
Instead, we have been given what we scarcely expected, or we would not have hoped for it so vocally: a world-embracing cultural identity, stated in our own version of the English language, with a vocabulary enriched by the collective memories of a population that came from everywhere, the earliest part of it across thousands of years of time. This is the uniquely vivid language that David Malouf speaks with such fluency, although I wish, when he so deliciously evokes the mid-century childhood some of us shared with him, that he wouldn’t say ‘all over’ to mean ‘everywhere’. We used to say ‘everywhere’. ‘All over’ – he may remember – is what the Yanks said.
New York Review, 21 December 2000
Postscript
Critics can’t influence the course of artists, and look foolish trying. There is no magnet that powerful. If I could alter the course of an artist like David Malouf, however, I would bring the focus of his attention closer to here and now. His historical novels and stories are richly imagined, but they are all too easily employed as referential ammunition in sterile battles fought about the supposedly formative experiences of colonial Australia. The experiences undoubtedly did happen, but it was minds, not events, that were formative. It didn’t take unusually sensitive young men on the land, for example, to realize that there was something wrong about killing Aboriginals: Governor King knew it before he arrived in Sydney, and one of his first initiatives was to post a law that said so. There is an element, in much of Malouf’s work, of being mired in Arcadia. Imagine, for an equivalent, a modern American literature in which Saul Bellow wrote about General Custer, Philip Roth wrote about the Gold Rush, and even Gore Vidal wrote less about Lincoln and Aaron Burr than about the Lewis and Clark expedition. The mismatch of time and attention is made all the more piquant by Malouf’s startling gift for talking about the complexities of modern history. If I were to say that he was hiding in the far past, however, it might well be an impertinence. A talent does what it must, and Malouf is as talented as a writer need be. His memory, in particular, is a poetic instrument which I tried to praise in this piece but still didn’t praise enough. In my own book Unreliable Memoirs I thought I had done something to evoke the house I grew up in. Then I read Malouf’s 12 Edmondstone Street and realized I had got no further than the bricks and mortar. Malouf gives you the feeling of the carpet under your sunburned bare feet, the itch of blistered skin about to peel. I think it fair to say that
he would have been less sensitive to these nuances if he had not had an immigrant background, and that the emergence of the post-World War II multicultural Australia, with all its new concentrations of power and social prestige, is the even greater tale that remains for him to tell. There are touches of it in his short stories, especially the autobiographical ones, but so far the novels have been informed by it more in the rind than at the core. There is always the chance, of course, that Malouf’s next book will render this footnote nonsensical at a stroke. I look forward to that.
THE HIDDEN ART OF BING CROSBY
From its bare billing in Radio Times, Bing, the Greatest of Them All doesn’t sound like the kind of event that might win gangsta rap fans away from their alleged interest in gun crime. But for anyone who has ever wondered how a simple-seeming song lyric can invade the mind with such poetic force, here is some essential listening. Going to air in three parts on BBC Radio 2, the series manages to raise most of the issues about what happens when a superficially ordinary, non-operatic voice shapes and guides the words of a song so that they get into your head and stick there. The most niggling issue of all is raised by the choice of presenter. In the enforced absence of the actual Bing, his story is told by Pat Boone. It would be fair to say that Boone himself is by now heading for the last round-up, yet his voice still sounds young. It always did. When he was on top of the hit parade half a century ago, his voice spelt unspoiled youth. It was pure and pretty: far prettier than Bing’s. So what did Bing’s voice actually do, if it couldn’t do the whole job just by itself ?
The answer is that a popular singer’s voice should have a lot more going for it than just its quality. Too much natural beauty, indeed, can get in the way, flooding the aural reception system of the listener before the actual song gets a chance to register. Pat Boone was lucky with his biggest hit, Friendly Persuasion: the archaic diction (‘Thee I love’) injected some aural roughage into his usual effect of squirting the audience with perfume. Leaving even Boone sounding rugged was Johnny Mathis, who made angelically soaring journeys up the charts in the fifties with the kind of big ballad that enabled him to show off his effortlessly gorgeous upper register. (In its land of origin, the Mathis approach fell into the category of ‘make-out music’, meaning that it could be safely left to sound vaguely romantic in the background without diverting any of the attention necessary for the unhooking of a bra.) By the time I was old enough to be in control of the Bakelite knobs on our lounge-room radio in Sydney, Bing, across the Pacific in Los Angeles, was getting into his next to final phase. After more than twenty years of averaging three movies and forty records a year on top of a radio show every week, he was finally slowing down enough to look like the lazy son-of-a-gun he had always cannily pretended to be. But I didn’t have to do much research to find out what he had that the newer fellows hadn’t: or, rather, what they had that he wasn’t burdened with. They were doing it the pretty way. He was just doing it, although ‘just’ is a word we will need to dismantle with care.