But there could be no question about the scholarly effort involved. It was taxing. Hope spent a lot of time doing what no poet should ever do: reading uninspired stuff because he had to. As a corollary, there was a lot of inspired stuff that he ignored. His reasons for ignoring it were not as good as he thought, or said he thought. It was true that most poets who wouldn’t write in forms couldn’t really write at all, but some of them could. In Australia, in the long run, the informal poets won out. Les Murray writes almost nothing in regular stanzas. A poet who does – Stephen Edgar is the most accomplished current example – faces the general opinion that an adopted discipline is a restriction on poetic invention, rather than a stimulus to it. Hope’s later achievement was strong enough to ward off that general opinion in his own case, but there should never have been a contest. He should have been powerful enough to settle the argument in his favour before it began. Why wasn’t he?
I can think of three reasons. The first is that his use of traditional mythology was subject to the law of diminishing returns. Pasiphae could present herself to the bull only so often before she had to yield her place to a more obscure temptress with a less fascinating sexual partner. To put it bluntly, Hope was simply bound to use up what Larkin disparagingly called ‘the myth kitty’. In an early poem like ‘The Return of Persephone’, Hope could count on his readers knowing roughly who Persephone was, or at least knowing where to look to find out: the age had not yet dawned when students would feel discriminated against if asked to pick the difference between a pard and a bard. But by the time of his book-length poem-sequence of 1985, The Age of Reason, he had scraped the barrel down to the level of Ophrys and Andrenus: hand on your heart and say you wouldn’t have to look them up.
The second reason is closely related to the first. Almost certainly, Hope kept talking about mythical figures because he thought it beneath his high calling to talk about contemporary events, a category in which he included his own personal history. By and large, he left himself out of it, when his range of subject matter could have benefited mightily had he brought himself in. As ‘A Letter from Rome’ proved, he had the chief weapon that would have allowed him to do so: humour. He could have been funny about growing old, with all his lusts intact in a body falling apart. It is, after all, a universal subject, and there is even dignity in it, if the narrator can admit his failings. But Hope chose to keep his dignity for himself.
The third reason is out on its own, and probably would have decided the matter even without the other two. His technique went haywire. Readers who start with Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by David Brooks in the year of Hope’s death, will find much to delight them, including a selection from Hope’s notebooks modestly presented with no mention of a rhizome. But there is no mistaking the fact that the poems near the end of the book lack the sure-footedness of the poems near the front. A late poem called ‘The Cetaceans’, an ottava rima extravaganza with an enchanting cargo of natural science fact, should have been one of his masterpieces, but there are too many awkward lines, and some of them are jaw-breakers. The days when he could substitute lavishly within a line and still hold it together with a conversational rhythmic impulse were gone. By the standards he had long ago set for himself, he was out of control. His air of authority, always his most precious quality, dissipated as his touch became less certain.
A critic who knew a lot about art and nothing about verse technique could say that Hope had developed a ‘later manner’, like Titian or Michelangelo, and that he was deliberately leaving undone what he knew too well how to do. But Titian, when he left things half painted, hadn’t forgotten how to paint, and Michelangelo, when he left the slaves stuck in the rock, hadn’t forgotten how to set them free. Hope either forgot how to compose a line or else he convinced himself that it no longer mattered. Either way, it’s a mystery. Luckily the comparative clumsiness of his later work didn’t erode the reputation he had already. But it did block off the extra renown he might have earned as a magician transmuting all the experience of his advancing years into poems that became steadily more rich and varied. Nobody can know just how good A. D. Hope was who doesn’t regret that his full greatness never quite arrived. He won plenty of prestige, but you can’t recite that.
TLS, May 19, 2006
Postscript
Every couple of years I read Hopkins again – if his musical influence were not so dangerously magnetic I would read him constantly – and wonder all over again how Hope could have dismissed him. The reason might possibly be that Hope couldn’t hear very well beyond the Elizabethan mighty line, which he always set himself to reproduce. Even early on, he would sometimes injure its rhythmic integrity when he put in too many hypermetric syllables, and later on he lost his grip completely. Some of the awkward lines in ‘The Cetaceans’ are too embarrassing to quote. It would be an ill service to show his later work in a bad light when the full measure of his early work has not yet been universally taken.
ROBERT HUGHES REMEMBERS
Things I Didn’t Know, by Robert Hughes (Knopf, 2006)
Among my generation of aesthetes, bohemians, proto-dropouts and incipient eternal students at Sydney University in the late 1950s, Robert Hughes was the golden boy. Still drawing and painting in those days, he wrote mainly as a sideline, but his sideline ran rings around his contemporaries, and his good looks and coruscating enthusiasm seemed heaven-sent, as if the mischievous gods had parked a love-child on us just so they could watch the storm of envy. He still looks the part, which is a bit tough on the rest of us. Unfairly, he still has a full head of hair, and although his once trim and elegant body is now held together with pieces of merely semi-precious metal, his aureate initial appearance has by no means been eclipsed.
The internally-worn pins and bolts that slow his latter-day progress through airport security were made necessary by the celebrated 1999 car-crash in Western Australia that should have written him off. Instead, he writes about it. Evoked with characteristic vividness, the car-crash is the first thing that happens in this autobiography, which thus shares the form of the Ambrose Bierce story about the incident at Owl Creek, whereby the hanged man, after the rope snaps, goes on to be the hero of an escape saga. At the end, we find out that the rope didn’t snap at all. But Hughes’s rope did. Though he was so badly smashed up that by rights he should have been buried in several instalments, he survived to tell the story of his life.
So now we have the Owl Creek incident plus a long flashback: a brand-new form of autobiography, typical of him in its casual boldness. It is not yet a full account of his life as the leading art critic of his generation. We’ll need another instalment for that. This instalment, broadly chronological, traces his Catholic upbringing in the Sydney of the 1940s and 1950s, shading into his university years and his early career as a freelance journalist, first in Australia and then in Europe. The book concludes with his departure for America in 1970. Thirty years into a career spent in that country, he still lives there today. His account of those three decades is going to be the story of an intellectual adventure, so let’s hope he is already working on it. But it should still be said that, even though this volume is only a preliminary, it is still detectably sparing with the main drama of his life, which has to do with how he reacted to art with his whole soul, and how the soul became richer because of it.
Mainly because the most thrilling part of his personal odyssey is largely left out, I would place this book only among the second rank of Hughes’s achievements as a writer, but that still puts it in the first rank of almost anybody else’s. There is a paragraph early on, concerning one of his great-aunts who became a nun, which might have been designed to remind any fellow writer among his readers that the champion is still in town. Try just one sentence of it: ‘At the end of these audiences I would be expected to kiss her, which meant craning my neck to get my lips inside her elaborately starched and goffered ruff, its hive-like cells prepared, no doubt, by some wretched, rosary-clicking slavey of a postulant sister with
the kind of iron last manufactured in the 1920s.’
Not just a ruff, but a goffered ruff. Nobody since Patrick Leigh-Fermor in his precocious youth has packed in quite so much precisely registered and lexically specified visual detail as Hughes does when he is on song. Although, in this book, he is not on song always, its average of readability would raise it high anyway, and there is more than enough opinionated reflection and generous regret to make the narrative unusual for its scope. If only, instead of just sketching it, he’d put in the full story of his developing response to art, he might have written a stand-alone masterpiece. But perhaps he was too modest, and figured that we could deduce all that from his rack of critical works.
Well, so we can, but that’s exactly why we would have liked to hear the personalised version of his early critical career right here and now. The unstoppably voluble Hughes – among a bunch of great Aussie talkers, he looks like being the last one who will ever learn to listen – might seem an unlikely candidate for shyness, but he has been a bit shy on this point, as if he wanted, when it came to questions of the mind, to forgo the heroics. But that’s where the heroics are that interest us most. The rest, after all, is just given to us.
About what he was given, Hughes is either compelled to be modest or else he still doesn’t realise just how gifted he was. The second thing, I think, is more likely to be true. In Australia, class divisions, though widely believed not to exist, are certainly present to the extent that there are people who feel superior. Very few people, however, feel inferior: a pretty good measure of the prevailing egalitarianism. But Hughes and his background might have been designed to remind his less glossily reared fellow culturati that there was a privileged order.
Hughes emanated from a grand Catholic family far enough up the ladder to inhabit a large house in Rose Bay, one of Sydney’s inner eastern suburbs, where the people in the social pages came from. While being careful to point out that his dynastic line was flat broke by the time he came into his share of the inheritance, Hughes is honest enough not to underplay his advantages. His father had been a World War I fighter pilot who later became a papal knight. Hughes was sent to school at Riverview, a scholastically distinguished and spiritually intense little Alcatraz on the harbour foreshore where Catholic boys were expected to get into training for great things. Hughes duly learned his Latin, but in emphasising the formal structure of the system that launched him he rather downplays his inbuilt fitness for his role, a range of qualities which, when he arrived at university, marked him out among the common run of students as if he had a neon halo.
He admits that he had a good memory, for example, but should have said that it was photographic. He admits that he was active as an illustrator for the student magazines and stage productions but should have said that his speed and skill left us flabbergasted. He admits that he flourished as a student journalist but fails to add that the downtown editors stormed the university walls and kidnapped him. He admits that he did all right with the girls but forgets to say – ah, this is the unforgivable malfeasance – that he cut a swathe without even trying.
Brenda, a British ballerina from the touring Royal Ballet, at least gets a mention. I remember her: she was so graceful that you went on seeing her with your eyes closed. The gorgeous Australian actress and future television star Noeline Brown gets a longer mention, as well she might: I knew Hughes well enough to see him in her company many times, and there wasn’t an occasion when I didn’t whimper from envy. But there was another one, called Barbara, who looked as if she spent her spare time standing in a sea-shell for Botticelli, and she doesn’t even get a sentence. I several times sat with her for hours while she waited for Hughes to come out of the school of architecture, where he was staving off expulsion by turning out fifty drawings in a single afternoon. Considering the number of poems I wrote for her without copping so much as a compassionate touch on the wrist, Hughes’s omission of her name defies justice. And there were plenty more.
What grates on my nerves in this area is that he probably didn’t even have tabs on himself as a Lothario. Of all the young men I knew, he spent the least time glancing into mirrors. He must have just thought it was natural that all these unfeasibly lovely creatures fell into his arms. A certain unawareness of what life is like for ordinary mortals might have been detectable even then by someone suitably attuned, and is fully detectable now, like those pins of his going through the metal detector as he checks in at the airport for his latest flight to glory. The tendency on the part of the clever to imagine that less gifted people are being wilfully obtuse can have important political consequences, which in the case of Hughes we might keep in mind.
If Hughes nowadays sometimes behaves as if his own country has failed him, we should give him a break and not put it down to snobbery. Sooner or later a man as smart as that will end up believing that the whole world has failed him, unless he is made to realise that a superior intellect, if its owner is bent on assessing the life of human beings in the mass, is more likely to be a handicap than an advantage. There are signs that Hughes has been brought nearer to this realisation by the impact of a car coming in the other direction fast enough to break almost every bone in his body, but the job is not yet complete, perhaps because that wonderful brain of his came through in one piece.
Hughes is in no position to say how wonderful the brain was and is, even if he knows, which I suspect he doesn’t, quite. But the Australian expatriate writer Alan Moorehead spotted Hughes’s capacities not long after the art-hungry prodigy, no longer an artist but already causing long-distance ripples as a writer about art, went into self-imposed exile abroad. I should say at this point that the much publicised Australian Expatriate Movement gets far too much attention in Australia and is likely to be misunderstood elsewhere, because it’s one of those neat media stories that travel too well, like cheap wine.
In recent years, by media operators and academic drones in Britain and Australia, the story has mainly been written around the adventures, real and supposed, of the so-called Famous Four, a globetrotting group of celebrities comprising Hughes, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, and finally, shambling along far in the rear like Sancho Panza, myself. Nowadays the Famous Four get a good deal of approbation in their homeland, partly because of the questionable assumption that they have done something to raise their country’s previously supine international profile, and thereby helped to create the climate in which Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts can be appreciated in their full splendour, as fit female counterparts for the race of supermen represented by Heath Ledger and Hugh Jackman, not to mention Russell Crowe, who in Australia is written up as if he were a dinkum (i.e. genuine) Aussie unless he has recently thrown a telephone at someone, whereupon it is suddenly remembered that he was born in New Zealand. One way and another the expatriates are now, as the Australians say, quids in.
I can remember when it was different, and we were all regularly reviled for having turned our backs on our homeland. (Hughes still comes in for some of this treatment, for reasons we will get to.) But the point to grasp is that this whole thing about a specific expatriate generation is an illusion, because Australia has been producing expatriates since Dame Nellie Melba. It’s something that all liberal democracies do, especially in the first flush of their prosperity, when the amount of marketable talent is beyond the capacity of local metropolitan outlets. They start colonising the earth, and Australia has long been sufficiently in flower to spread its pollen on the wind. There were always the theatrical people and the painters, and then, during and after Word War II, came the writers, headed by the war correspondents, of whom the most prominent was Alan Moorehead. Quite apart from his famous books about the Nile, Moorehead wrote a shelf of considerable volumes that it would take a long paragraph simply to enumerate, but sufficient to say that he was ahead of his time in realising that Italy was a perfectly reasonable place for an Australian writer to set up shop, because Australia, which like America had been the product of many
of the world’s cultures, would inevitably produce cultural figures who were at home anywhere.
Back in Australia, there were still a couple of generations of intellectuals on the way who would be reluctant to agree with that proposition, because they thought that Australia – eternally stricken, poor mite, by its subservient connection to Britain – needed a national identity, which would be sabotaged if talented people opted out. Moorehead, who had just spent several years in a ringside seat as several different national identities tried their best to annihilate each other, knew all that was moonshine, and that Australia’s national identity depended on nothing but the quality of its culture, which was more likely to be enhanced than inhibited if some of its young exponents were to spend time abroad. Correctly assessing that Hughes was short of financial resources but was carrying the prose equivalent of what the Australian children’s radio programme called the Golden Boomerang, Moorehead invited the loping vagabond to stop by.
One of the many admirable things about Hughes is that he has always cherished his mentor as much as his mentor cherished him. Moorehead was the Virgil to Hughes’s Dante. The old hand didn’t just teach the youngster which local wine was which, he taught him the importance of not talking a book away – the most important lesson a writer can learn, and the harder to learn the better that he talks. The passages about Hughes’s creative sojourn with Moorehead would alone make this book worth the price. ‘I found Alan,’ says Hughes, ‘the kind of father I had never had.’ After the bungled operation that left Moorehead with a damaged brain, Hughes pushed his master’s wheelchair. Tears of compassion soften the tone, but the style, as always, stays firm. There is never any question about Hughes’s ability to find the perfect written equivalent for anything in his range of feeling. There is only ever a question about what he feels.