The Complete Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James
When Richard and I flew back to Australia to do the actual programme, my idea about Les Murray writing us a poem was still being considered, but nobody at command level of the huge show could get past the idea that Colleen McCullough must be a greater writer than Les Murray because everybody had seen The Thorn Birds. I suppose there was something to it. Anyway, the amount of airtime given to Colleen McCullough’s assurance that only Australia could have given birth to her unique vision made me feel less wretched at having so much of my own prose cut from the script during rehearsals. Visiting my mother in a spare hour, I warned her that her beloved son would be making only a token appearance. She always had radar for any hint of discontent on my part. Having provided biscuits with the cup of tea, she could tell by the way I bit through a custard cream that I was ‘in strife’, but really that was too brave a term. There is such a thing as a level at which you can’t compete. Besides, all the anchors, including even the mighty Ray Martin – justly revered for his ageless hair arrangement and his mastery of the uniquely Australian media attribute which might be defined as sparkling social concern – had to be cut to the bone to make room for the ‘throws’ from which the marathon running order was largely assembled. At this point I should explain what a ‘throw’ is. Look away if you already know. If you do, you probably work in Australian television. Nobody else cares, but everyone in Australian television persists in the belief that a throw is the most exciting thing that can happen on screen, the essential technical trick that defines the medium.
In the throw, the studio anchor hands over to the roving reporter on the spot, saying something like, ‘And now, to give us a close-up of how the Prime Minister feels about these new allegations, let’s go back to Mike Treadwell at Kirribilli House. Mike?’ At which point, Mike says something like, ‘Well, Ray, the Prime Minister hasn’t come out of the house all morning but I gathered from the milkman earlier on that the general atmosphere in there is pretty subdued, pretty gloomy, pretty depressed.’ In a more elaborate version of the throw, the person who has been thrown to does not throw back to the studio at the completion of his spiel. Instead, he throws to someone else who is also out on location, perhaps standing in front of a stretch of ocean which yesterday had been lashed by a freak storm. ‘It might look calm here now, Ray, but yesterday it was a seething cauldron that spelt deadly danger to Steve Hewitt and his visually impaired brother-in-law Hugh Stewart. Yes, this is where two men and a dog met their fate.’ As the reporter turns to look at the stretch of ocean where nothing is happening except water behaving normally, we go back to Ray in the studio. ‘And we’ve just heard that those two men are still weak from exposure but ready to be interviewed. We’ll be going to them later. But for now, the dog is with me in the studio. Bluey, how did it feel when . . .’ Multiply that whole rigmarole by a hundred and you will have some idea of the pace, structure and lexical ambition of the achievement in which I was now involved. The gigantic, hideously expensive, technically epoch-making and potentially identity-creating Bicentennial TV spectacular consisted almost entirely of throws. We threw to Kakadu, to Kalgoorlie, to Wagga Wagga, to Woop Woop. We threw to a hut in the Antarctic where three huddling meteorologists assured their watching countrymen that their indomitable Australian spirit was proof against snow, ice and the inability to view Neighbours on the day of transmission. There was meant to be a satellite dish parked somewhere near Uluru so that a nationally famous television correspondent – every reporter out in the field was more recognizable to the Australian viewing public than Her Majesty the Queen – could expatiate on the mood of the Aboriginals, this mood being detectable mainly by telepathy through the walls of dwellings from which the indigenous people, understandably cheesed off by the idea of celebrating two centuries of white domination, sensibly declined to emerge. The satellite dish was mounted on a truck, the truck had fallen sideways off the road, and the dish was damaged. The correspondent was there anyway so that he could report on the condition of the dish. ‘I’m afraid it’s out of action, Ray.’
At this point I looked at Jana Wendt – never a hard task – and could tell she was thinking exactly what I was thinking. Well informed and highly cultivated, Jana is one of those beautiful women who become even more beautiful when they concentrate, and right then she was concentrating hard on the mystery of how, while not having heard from a single person of imaginative achievement in any field, we had managed to throw to every ephemeral television personality in Australia in order to be told, in most cases, next to nothing. Watching the monitors with a growing sense of dread as one fatuous episode after another swam into view, I was unable to exclude myself from the category of well-known faces with nothing to contribute. My last remaining mini-monologue, the one about Australia in war, had been reduced to a paragraph in order to make more room for Colleen McCullough’s gruff assurances that Australia’s barren interior landscapes had somehow got into the rhythm of her prose. Well, that was believable, but why were we listening to her when we could have been listening to Joan Sutherland telling Jana abut the richly sophisticated Australian musical background that had launched her on her flag-carrying international career? What was Jana doing there, she who had interviewed every prominent creative figure in Australia and was now allowed to mention none of them? And what was I doing there, saying nothing, when saying things is the only thing I know how to do? The lady in the desert let off her sparkler. That had been my idea, and the only one to have reached the screen intact. Otherwise, there was nothing of mine on view except my grimly eager face. Eventually, after several different kinds of eternity – there was a short speech from Prime Minister Bob Hawke that was a killing reminder of how a boring speaker needs only two minutes to evoke the concept of geological time – the thing was over. Respectful of my hosts, who had paid me well, I was careful never to be drawn on what I thought of the show. But now that a full twenty years have gone by I think I can risk saying that I was less than proud of having been in it. If we Australians couldn’t do better than that then we had an identity crisis indeed, but not of the kind that the intelligentsia was complaining about. Australia’s creative and scientific life was teeming with specific voices, but what was missing was the general voice to place them in context. The general voice is the historic voice, and in Australia historic voices were in thin supply, despite the fact – or perhaps because of the fact – that the whole of world history could be viewed as having taken place precisely in order to bring about a society so prosperous, multicultural, egalitarian and politically well equipped to deal with even its most intractable anomalies.
Still, there is no free country that doesn’t churn out trivia, and it might even be possible that the liberal democracies – of which Australia is among the most advanced examples – are fated never to reach a true estimation of their own stature. To do that, they would have to be fully aware of what it is like not to be free, and it is hard to reach such a harsh awareness without being born and brought up in a country that isn’t free at all. To that extent, a liberal democracy is dreamland. Most of the people engaged in public argument have no real idea of what it might be like to be officially persecuted for holding an opinion, instead of being merely vilified by those whose opinion is to the contrary. As a student of history, I had at least some idea, and was able to keep my head when I was attacked for being a monarchist. Knowing that there had been a day when you could have your head cut off for being anything else, I was able to be grateful that I had only paper darts to dodge, instead of the axe. The matter had already come to a point before I went out to Australia to make the Bicentennial programme, because Prince Charles’s staff had roped me in as one of his Australian advisers on the matter of whether his Bicentennial speech, to be delivered in Sydney, should mention the Aboriginals. The Foreign Office, with what I thought to be typical stupidity, had advised him to make no mention of the subject. I advised him to mention it. I doubt if I was alone in this. I imagine Barry Humphries, to name only one other Australian with his name in
But she was doing it to me, and I was immediately on her team. In mitigation, I can say that she and Charles still had, or appeared to have, a team going too, and it still looked as if their team were playing for Britain at world-championship level. On that basis, I thought that the future for the monarchy looked secure for a couple of generations at least. But even with a less promising couple waiting in the wings, I would have been in favour of the monarchy anyway, because of my conviction that the United Kingdom – and, by extension, my homeland – benefited from having a head of state from a family which had no interests beyond preserving its own continuity. Charles was going to be that head of state one day; he had few disqualifications beyond an excess of thoughtfulness and concern; and I was for him. It was an opinion shared, tacitly at least, by a great majority of the British people, but there were penalties to be paid for endorsing it. At some awards ceremony or other, when I followed Charles to the microphone and complimented him on what he had just said – he had indeed said it well, but he seldom gets high marks for doing that, especially from professional commentators who would say it worse – Auberon Waugh was in the audience and immediately decided, doubtless prompted by a gift for mind-reading, that I was a raw colonial truckling for honours. He went into print with this opinion as often as possible and included me on his list of Australians who should be sent home. Bron (everyone called him that, even his victims) either didn’t see the historical irony involved in recommending that a miscreant should be forcibly transported from England to Australia, or else he did, and promoted the idea in order to further his reputation for outrage. He was a fluent, original and funny journalist but the shadow of his great father Evelyn might have frozen him into a mental condition of self-contempt by which he thought it didn’t matter what he said because it was only him saying it. Certainly he was not one of those journalists who, lacking the means to make reasonable opinions interesting, must resort to unreasonable opinions in order to get the reader’s attention. He was more talented than that, so it must have been from some reservoir of anger that he wrote articles attacking the author rather than the work. My friend Lorna Sage – dead before her time, alas – suffered for years from his calumnies. It could be said that she should have known how to defend herself in print, but there was no prospect of self-defence for the British and Australian prisoners of war who had suffered so cruelly in Japanese hands during World War II. Bron said, in cold print, that their sufferings had been exaggerated, and that the survivors, and the families of the dead, had been making capital out of stoking the memory of an event that had been largely the creation of Allied propaganda. As the son of an imprisoned soldier I found it hard to forgive Bron for that. But after his death I met one of his charming children and realized that he couldn’t have been all bad, if he had brought up his progeny so well: the failings of Evelyn Waugh as a father had not been echoed by the son, possibly because the painful memory was so acute. Anyway, to harbour a literary grudge is time wasted. Your opponent isn’t going to kill you, because he isn’t allowed to. He can write all the denunciations he likes and you will suffer nothing except the strain of raised hackles. In a society without laws he needs to write only a single denunciation, and you are a gone goose. Literary figures who question the value of a free society should try to spend some time in one that isn’t, in their imaginations if not in reality.
17. SHANGHAI EXPRESS
In Shanghai we spent only two weeks, which wasn’t enough. But it was a start. An ancient Chinese curse runs: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ June 1989 proved to be more interesting than even the Chinese leaders had bargained for. In Beijing, Tiananmen Square filled up with protestors, often billed in the Western media as students. The same sort of people filled the Bund in Shanghai and it was clear that they weren’t all students. Everyone who could read and write was out on parade. Had we been a news crew, we could have filmed nothing else all day. But we had a carefully prepared movie to make, so we knocked off the sequences one by one. We went to the circus and watched incredible feats of skill until our senses were numbed. How many people in silk pyjamas can stand on the head of the person below? The number is astonishingly high, but not as astonishing as the shape of the head of the guy at the bottom. Either he had been born with a cranium like a foot locker or, more likely, he acquired it under pressure. A fixed smile went with his flat skull but he seemed happy to be interviewed, although he would probably have seemed equally happy if we had set fire to his toes. We went to the opera and watched men pretending to be women pulling faces while other people of various sexes and sizes turned midair sideways somersaults to the rhythm of garbage-tin lids being struck with sticks. Our numbed senses were benumbed all over again. A man behind me in the crowded theatre blew his nose onto the floor in the standard Chinese manner and I lifted my feet so that the river of snot could slide by unimpeded. The river of snot wasn’t all his: a couple of hundred guys had contributed to it. As I sat there with my knees around my ears, I reflected that the commentary for this programme would be no cinch. A whole society was being shaken to its foundations in the streets outside and here we were, stuck with this stuff. Even when the topic had a bit more heft, there was a limit to the extent we could explore it. A woman at the music school told me what it had been like to be included in a representative sample when the Gang of Four sent people of suspiciously elevated accomplishments (the policy was called Three Famous, Three High) off to the fields to have their hands ruined and their pride broken. (‘They would lecture us all the time. That was the worst part.’) But she wasn’t allowed to say that it was all Mao’s idea. Nobody was allowed to say that. We talked to a young man called Yi Bin who had managed to assemble a small collection of ancient ceramic fragments and who had published a paper about them. He kept all his collection at one end of his parents’ bedroom, on shelves around ‘my little bed’. The bedroom was divided by a thin curtain. The thin curtain looked heavier to me than any iron curtain I had ever heard of. Yes, I knew what I would say when I got home: but there was small prospect of saying any of it on the spot, or even of setting up a scene that might imply it. The spooks were watching, or else listening to someone who reported to them, perhaps the guy that drove your van. They didn’t have to watch or listen very closely because everyone else knew they were watching or listening. This was a society that was censoring itself. Except, of course, for the demonstrators.
Every night we were in Shanghai, the crowd on the Bund grew bigger. Since the whole mile-long sweep of road was already jam-packed the first time we saw it, growing bigger was a hard thing for the crowd to do, but somehow yet more people were always managing to fit themselves in between the people who were already shoulder to shoulder. Many of the banners were decorated with little bottles. Our
Euphoria crashed when the manager of our hotel told us what would happen next. He was a Dutchman. Like everything else in the hotel except the service staff, he was imported. The hotel was the Shanghai Hilton. It was a modern building that had been dropped into the decaying city like a shining probe from space, complete with its own water-recycling system. Even the food was flown in from Hong Kong. (These were still the days when the last place you could safely eat a Chinese meal was China.) The standard of service in the hotel was fabulous. When I opened the door of my suite, there were always a couple of young ladies in black pyjamas crouched outside ready to rush in and change the flowers, the toilet rolls, the wallpaper. They called me, in their language, One Fat Important Man, and equipped me with a tiny cup of red wax and a jade seal (called a chop) on which the name was carved in Chinese characters. They also joined in the task, gladly shared by every local we met including senior members of the Communist Party, of teaching me quite a lot of the Mandarin dialect: a very pretty way of speaking Chinese, as opposed to the Cantonese dialect, which is impossible to mimic unless you have the vocal equipment of a dying dog. Today, if you’re asking, my Mandarin vocabulary has shrunk to the words for thank you, goodbye and One Fat Important Man, but for a while there, surrounded by these glowing sylphs as they corrected my grammar while rebuilding my room, I had visions of myself conversing fluently in their musical tongue. Alas, it never happened, but they behaved as if it was already happening. They were world-class flatterers, that bunch, and no doubt they went on to help organize the Olympics in 2008. But in 1989 all this Eastern-Western luxury was definitely a message from the far future. In the present, the manager told me, the demonstrations could end only one way. In Beijing, he said, Tiananmen Square would be cleared by force, and then everyone in Shanghai would go home. ‘There, they will kill a few people. Maybe not here.’ I was reluctant to believe that there would be a crack-down. But then the eerily lacklustre Li Peng appeared on television and started to speak. An hour later he was still speaking, even though he hadn’t said anything except that the counter-revolutionaries, if they did not disperse, would be suppressed by force. Next day, in Tiananmen Square, they were, and everyone in Shanghai did indeed go home. The Bund emptied in a matter of minutes.