Roth emerged from his borough as a full-blown sophisticate, and it is hard for the sophisticate to look back on his origins without looking down. Porte-Noir can’t lust after his button-nosed ice-skater without tacitly conceding that a standard marriage to a nice Jewish girl is beneath his ambitions. His irrepressible schlong is a rock drill to a higher stratum. The price of rising in the social world is an apparent alliance with the prejudiced; to prove that there is no alliance is a constant battle; and the result is a torn conscience. In Roth’s case, the torn conscience has been the motor of a steadily accumulating literary achievement without parallel in his time – an achievement whose resonance reaches far into Europe and the Middle East, making even the most illustrious of his American contemporaries look comparatively provincial. He is aware to the point of self-laceration that he was born in the right spot: he was probably already aware of it when he put his childhood pennies into one of the Blue Tins that helped to build Israel. But he is stuck with the anguish of an insoluble paradox. As an individual, he rejects the role of being a representative: but he is bound to be a representative when he fights prejudice.
As a man of reason, Roth must have figured out early that it has always been even worse for blacks: any photograph of Duke Ellington taken late in his life shows the accumulated effect of what being cast as a representative can do to the face of a genius. Ellington was too polite to say that an invitation to the White House was no full consolation for all those times he would have liked to sleep in the kind of hotel that wouldn’t have let him past the front desk. There was never a hotel that Roth couldn’t get into, but he can be excused for inventing an alternative and worse American past in which his father would be told that the room he had been given was unavailable after all. It’s an understandable bad dream. But it hasn’t led to a good book, and couldn’t have. The United States will never be free of racial prejudice for the same reason that it will never enshrine racial prejudice in anything like the Nuremberg Laws: it’s a free country. Being that, it is bound to be full of things we don’t like, but the federally sanctioned destruction of a racial minority isn’t among them, and hasn’t been since Wounded Knee. As Roth must have realized long before he finished writing it, the insuperable problem with The Plot Against America is that America is against the plot.
Postscript
Not long after completing the above piece I belatedly read Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein and wondered whether I had been right in implying that Roth has the greater cosmopolitan scope. Trying to rate Bellow and Roth in order is an occupation for someone who shouldn’t be reading either of them. But there can’t be much question about their relative standing when it comes to international politics. Bellow’s writings on the Middle East bring all his rhetorical power to the task of defending Israel against its external enemy. Roth deals with the internal enemy as well. In non-fiction at least, he has the full range of tragedy. In fiction, both of these majestic writers give us so much that it is often easy to forget how all they do depends on the shape of a sentence. Each is a bewitching example of the individual voice that starts, as Roth once put it, behind the knees. In the case of Roth, I am sometimes reduced to a childish longing that he would write books to order, so that I could telephone for a take-out. There are subjects that demand his voice, and only his. For instance, I would like him to write a book about how, in 2004, the Red Sox came back from nowhere to take the pennant from the Yankees, and went on to bury the Cardinals in the last game of the World Series. But he might not do it. Great writers write what they must, not what we would like. Their voices do not belong to us. We get that illusion only because they sound the way we do to ourselves, in those interior flights of eloquence that never reach the page.
THE MIRACULOUS VINEYARD OF AUSTRALIAN POETRY
Poetry and glamour don’t usually mix, but Australian poetry is starting to look like a special case. True, there is not yet much of a chance that Les Murray and Peter Porter will be asked to pose for photo spreads like Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman. But in the rest of the English-speaking world there is now a general agreement among the literary tipsters that poetry is something the Aussies do with an extra zing: the way they do food, wine, bush hats, satyromaniacal cricketers, telegenic crocodile-wrestlers and insatiable media tycoons. The general agreement, admittedly, is still a bit simple-minded, but it is steadily moving up-scale. If it ever catches up with the abundant reality, however, the word ‘miracle’ will have to come into play, and for once it will almost fit. Australian poetry is a thing for awe, for dropping to the knees and giving thanks. Pinch me if you see what I see. Whence came this abundance?
Before we trace the abundance to its historical origins, we should be aware of its true scope, which is even more extensive than we might think. Take a look at Best Australian Poems 2003, edited by Peter Craven. It’s the first volume of a new series that from now on will come out annually. There are forty poets represented in it, nearly all of them with something substantial. (‘Substantial’ meaning that you can’t ignore it, even when you don’t like it.) If you already know something about the Australian literary world, you will recognize the names of David Malouf, Les Murray, John Tranter, Fay Zwicky, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Peter Porter, Bruce Dawe, Alan Wearne, Peter Rose, Thomas Shapcott, Geoffrey Lehmann, Geoff Page, Dorothy Porter, John Kinsella, Bruce Beaver and probably several others. But then there are names that are only now making their first impact; and then, a long way back, trailing along with his fractured Globite portmanteau spilling manuscripts, there is Clive James, who is very glad to be included. For a long time I have worked offshore, but now I have been brought home, and am mighty proud to be included in this number, because the number is select, even though it is dauntingly large. Mere quantity, of course, is no proof of fertility. We must not forget the Soviet cultural commissar who boasted that his district had 167 registered writers, all members of the Writers’ Union. ‘A hundred years ago, there was only one.’ The one he meant was Tolstoy.
But the poets in Craven’s anthology all have a claim to the title, and you could make another anthology from the poets he has left out. (They would probably like to make a rissole out of him. I imagine the boiling fat has already started to fly.) Rivalry, and indeed outright bitchery, has always been inseparable from the Australian poetic scene, which, even as it booms like the Sydney Olympics, continues to work rather like world championship ice-dancing: agreement on technical merit is sometimes possible, but there is rarely much agreement about artistic impression. Also the judges, to go on with the metaphor, tend to do a bit of skating themselves. Most of our best poets have been among our best critics, and vice versa. Individualists who cling together only to get a fair share of the blankets, the poets are a family in which incest is functional, even when one of the results is casual murder. Poetry pays peanuts even when on a government subsidy, but the stakes are high: higher than ever, now that Australia no longer need look to overseas opinion for validation. For admiration, yes: but an extramural certificate we no longer need. Glory begins at home, and glory is the pay-off. (You’ve never really been flattered until you’ve been quoted.) Everyone would like a reputation. Speaking as the kind of poet who has usually had to do without one, I have to say that I am childishly pleased that a place has finally been found for me. My own sustaining belief has always been that poems matter more than poets; that no poet should write anything unless he feels an inner need; and that a life’s-work should be the accumulated moments of necessary expression. In other words, it shouldn’t be a career. My recently published book of collected poems, called The Book of My Enemy, has more than four hundred pages of work in it. They were written at a rate of fewer than ten pages a year, and there is not a line among them that I wrote to help keep up my reputation, because I didn’t have one. I’m glad to say that the book has already run through five printings in Britain alone, and been treated with respect by the critics even when they obviously thought it strange that a transplanted Aussie talk-show host should be d
riven to verse, instead of driven to the studio in the back of a large car with Margarita Pracatan at the wheel.
But having ploughed a lonely furrow, I am gratified to discover that it has led back to such a flourishing vineyard. Come to think of it, that might be the best metaphor of the lot. There is such a variety of wines, and not all of them are owned by Penfolds. You’ve got your Murray Hermitage, your Kinsella’s Retreat, your Beaver Creek, your Shapcott’s Landing . . . It even works by areas. Down there in Hobart, beyond the sweep of Craven’s purview, there is Stephen Edgar, for my money the most subtle vintage now on the market. I chanced upon my first bottle of Edgar Special Blend Grand Reserve only last year, and since then I’ve been drinking almost nothing else. Exquisite in the nose, and shattering in the follow-through.
Poetry, like the Internet, can make a connection from remote places. Stephen Edgar knew Gwen Harwood when she was alive and well in Hobart. Ever on the lookout for mother figures, I have always found it satisfactory that women should have been so important to Australian poetry. In the post-war boomlet before the boom, Harwood and Judith Wright were essential names, up there with A.D. Hope and James McAuley in the combined effort that prepared the way for the Poetic Nation. I thought Wright lapsed into the abstract in her later years, whereas Harwood always produced the full rich, considered, resonant artefact. If our rhythmic eloquence started with the Bush Balladeers, it smelled a lot less of horses after the women joined in. The days are over, thank God, when a full history of Australian poetry could be written. It has come too far: there is too much to it. But if there were such a thing as a full history, the housewife poets would have an assured place. They had time only to write what was essential. They never had one eye on their reputations: they always had both eyes on the Hill’s Hoist. Harwood practically dug her own potatoes. Now that it’s boom time, the danger is that every otherwise unemployable Australian youth will want a career as a poet, and produce unnecessary poems to stake his claim. But I started out as an otherwise unemployable Australian youth myself, so I can’t whinge, and a few other poets of my generation would be wise not to do so either. There’s another focal point for glamour, of course: the Generation. I can already see the movie that will be made after our lot have moved on. Some Heath Ledger of the future will play Les Murray, striding towards the breakers with his surfboard under his arm . . . It will be nonsense, but the movie-makers will be looking back on an enchanted time, and they will be right.
Weekend Australian, 6–7 March 2004
Postscript
Beyond its obvious purpose of barking for my own act, the above piece had an ulterior motive, which was to help make a fashionable talking point of the Australian poetry boom. Joe McCarthy taught us a valuable lesson in PR. One day he would say there were 167 communists in Government service, and the next day he would say that there were 293. Thus he changed the question of whether there were any to a question of how many. By talking about whether the Australian poetry boom was international or merely national, I hoped to get the idea of an Australian poetry boom, of whatever kind, into the general cultural discussion. I hope my manoeuvre had some effect, but the awkward truth is that Australian poetry, regarded as a commercial proposition, still rates as a field in which the publishers take a loss, and even the best poets must wonder whether they wouldn’t be better off chalking their work on a brick wall. The only independent Australian publishing house for poetry, the excellent Duffy & Snellgrove, has since gone out of business. The void will leave the serious poets trying to sell themselves to the major publishers, who are bound to be at least as impressed by media glamour as by real achievement. Australians are great book-buyers per capita, but the total market even for prose is small, and when you consider that the market for poetry is necessarily a lot smaller, you are looking at a very slim return on the dollar. What to do about that is an abiding question. Nor are there many outlets among the magazines and upmarket newspapers. As a result, the jostling for position among the poets is much more fierce than I dared to make out. In the long view of history, I am convinced, ours will look like a golden age, but for those of us actually there it looks more like the first week at Ballarat. Who stole my shovel? You’re digging on my claim, you mongrel. And where did you get those canvas pants?
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE HOLOCAUST
For the Israelis, anti-Semitism is merely a nightmare. For the Palestinians, it’s a catastrophe. If you believe, as I do, that the Palestinians’ cause is just, nothing could be more depressing than to hear them spout the very stuff that guarantees they will never get an even break. The mad idea that the Jews have no right to exist is a potent intensifier of the almost equally mad idea that the State of Israel can somehow be eliminated. I say ‘almost’ because a friend of mine in Australia recently presented me with a plausible case that the Middle East would probably be a more peaceful area if the State of Israel had never been founded. Like her argument that the Aborigines would have been a lot happier if the Europeans had never shown up, this contention was hard to rebut, except by rudely pointing out that we were both sitting in an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, history having happened.
But history might have happened otherwise, although in the case of the Jewish presence in Palestine you would have to go back beyond the 1850s (when the Jews were already a majority in Jerusalem) to somewhere near the beginning of the Old Testament, and equip the Canaanites with grenade launchers. To the perfect madness of the first idea, however – the idea that the Jews are candidates for extermination – no concessions are possible. Anti-Semitism is so obviously insane that no refutation of it should be necessary, and indeed after the Holocaust the feeling was widespread throughout the world that the whole demented notion had at last become an historical back number, like phlogiston or the belief that mirrors could leak lightning. Throughout the world: but not, alas, throughout the Arab world.
Why this should have been so is hard to unscramble at this distance, but briefly, and without too much distortion, it can be said that the Arab nations never studied at the University of the Holocaust. Their interests lay, not in Europe, but in the area containing the nagging presence which was already threatening to become a Jewish state. The Arab nations on the whole concurred with the British mandate’s lethal reluctance to admit Jewish refugees into Palestine, and several of the Arab leaders saw nothing wrong with Hitler’s determination that as many potential colonists as possible should be dealt with at source. One of the leaders, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, spent time in Berlin urging Hitler to get on with it. We should hasten to remember that another of the leaders, King Abdullah of Transjordan – grandfather of the future King Hussein – was always a model of far-sighted tolerance, and quite saw the possibility of fruitful coexistence with the infidel incursion. But we should also remember that Abdullah paid for his liberalism with his life, in an early version of the price exacted from Anwar Sadat for even entertaining the idea of peace. It was the choleric Grand Mufti who set the tone. He had been reading the same Koran as Abdullah, but had reached different conclusions. Our own best conclusion should be that the Koran was not the book to blame. There were other books, borrowed from abroad, and one of them was that putrid old Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Remember the name, because it goes on cropping up throughout the bloody history of the area. (In Egypt, supposedly the most enlightened of the Arab nations, the state television system recently dramatized it as a TV serial.) The historian Golo Mann once said that Nazi-style anti-Semitism was a crime encouraged by bad literature, and literature doesn’t get any more bad than The Protocols. But before we get to the written word, we should look at more substantive phenomena that might account for intransigence among Israel’s enemies. There are plenty to consider. A year before he declared the Israeli state, David Ben Gurion was ready to accept a partition of Palestine: even though his resulting portion would be tiny, at least it would be independent. But when he realized that the Arab states would not recognize a Jewish
state even if it were the size of a tennis court, he was ready for what was bound to happen when he made his unilateral announcement. The State of Israel was declared, and the Arab nations immediately combined to attack it.
*
One of the consequences was the flight of the Palestinians. In fairness to them, we should not mince words: the flight was an expulsion. The instrument of expulsion was terror. The nascent Israeli state already had an unfortunate heritage of terror, much of it due to the initiatives of Menachem Begin, a University of the Holocaust alumnus armed with the inflexible conviction that the only answer to the threat of overwhelming violence was to get your retaliation in first. When the tiny new state was attacked from all sides, his brainchild, the Irgun, teamed up with the Stern Gang to massacre almost 300 Arabs at Deir Yassin, and the exodus of the Palestinians understandably ensued. Though their disappearance suited Ben Gurion’s purposes – already embattled on half a dozen external fronts, he would probably have lost the war if he had been forced to fight on an internal front as well – the Jews were suitably sorry at the time. But the Palestinians were sorry forever. We should not forget their grief.