The Revolt of the Pendulum by Clive James
Whether he feels compassion for his late wife Danne is hard to guess. The safest answer is that he doesn’t know what to say. She was too much for him. I knew her too, back when we were all starting off in Sydney, and I had already guessed that she might be too much for anybody. She had a problem vis-a`-vis the reality principle that would later be echoed by the second wife of Paul McCartney, still fifteen years from being born when Danne Emerson’s tower-of-power beauty was in its launch phase. I can remember how Danne came striding with would-be magisterial slowness through the dining room of Manning House (the cafeteria of the Women’s Union at Sydney University) and Germaine Greer said, ‘Oh, come on, Danne, relax.’ Germaine was three tables away from me so you can imagine that the comment was quite audible. Danne wasn’t fazed. She might have been on something even then.
In London she was on everything and Hughes piercingly describes the consequences. By a paradox mercifully quite rare in the play-power, alternative, Sixties lifestyle, Hughes went and married someone who actually believed in the play-power, alternative, Sixties lifestyle. Why a man who had already had his pick of the world’s sane beauties should have teamed up with an insane beauty is a question he doesn’t put to himself here, and possibly once again the reason is modesty. Never having grasped the full measure by which he was initially blessed, he doesn’t see the irony in how he was subsequently cursed. Anyway, the long episode makes grim reading, and is climaxed by Danne’s untimely death and the subsequent suicide of the couple’s son, occurrences noted with a lack of comment that surely only permanent and irresolvable bewilderment could make possible. It was tragic fate on a Greek scale, and his benumbed registration of these personal disasters makes it very plausible when he advances the proposition that it takes art to make life bearable.
There is a lot about art here, and politeness demands that we should note the abundance before complaining that there might have been more. Before Hughes left Sydney, he already had an appreciative eye for the Australian art that he would later rank and classify in his pioneering critical work The Art of Australia (1966). One of his enthusiasms was for the reclusive genius Ian Fairweather. From an exhibition in Sydney, Hughes bought one of Fairweather’s key paintings, Monsoon. ‘It cost all of three hundred pounds, and I secured it by queuing all night, accompanied by Noeline and ahead of eight or ten other impassioned fans, on the steps of the gallery, with a thermos of rum-laced coffee, blankets, and a sleeping bag, in order to get first pick . . .’ Note the excitement, which, as always with Hughes, is closely accompanied by powers of definition that can evoke even the indefinite. ‘It was a large abstraction, predominantly black, brown, and grey, traversed by a violent yet exquisitely harmonious net of swiftly daubed, creamy lines. It gave a sense of lightning flashes piercing tropical darkness . . .’
You will find passages like that all through Hughes’s writings (The Fatal Shore is especially rich in verbal landscapes of gallery quality) but the thing to grasp here is that he not only felt like that when he was young, he could say it like that when he was young. Saying everything as if he still has the young energy of discovery is what he does. The excitement and the powers of evocation were what Hughes took abroad with him, and his continuing wisdom has been to know that neither works without the other. In this book you can see them working for Duccio, Cimabue, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Goya, Bonnard, Sidney Nolan, John Olsen, Robert Crumb, Robert Rauschenberg and others. But not enough others. We would have liked the whole catalogue, because the story of such a brilliant critic’s steadily accumulating and interacting enthusiasms, their ever-intensifying interplay of nuance, is his real autobiography. Those were the most important Things He Didn’t Know.
Once again, it might be a case of Hughes not quite knowing how rare his gift is. He is ready to risk opprobrium by calling himself an elitist. ‘For of course I am an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense.’ Elitists, however, even such large-minded and non-snobby ones, are never in short supply. What you hardly find anywhere is someone who can do for art what Leonard Bernstein did for music: go on television and become a fisher of men, hauling the general viewers in the direction of a new life. Hughes did it with The Shock of the New.
In America the series was successful enough, but from an American viewpoint it is probably hard to estimate the impact that it had in Britain and Australia, where it was shown on the mainstream channels. Here was the kind of survey that the BBC used to be able to do when it still commanded the services of resident grandees like Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski, but now it was being done by an Aussie who had based himself in New York. (Hughes went there in response to a telephoned invitation from Time magazine. Immured in his London flat, surrounded by the ruins of his marriage, Hughes was so stoned that he thought the CIA was after him.) He was a new breed: a breed without a readily traceable bloodline. His background invisible in the far distance, he exemplified the biggest advantage the new wave of Aussie expatriates had: they inhabited the cultural world as if they had been born in it, and nowhere else. Culture was their country.
Hughes could, and should, have done a whole chapter about how he got The Shock of the New off the ground. Instead, he gives it a paragraph or two, and wastes a whole line recording (correctly, alas) that I warned him about how doing television would erode his reputation for seriousness. It ranks high among the least pertinent things I have ever said, because Hughes’s true seriousness is based on exactly that: his ability to transmit the highest level of aesthetic enjoyment through the popular media, one of which, of course, is the bestseller. This book will probably do all right anyway, but it might have done even better if a whole generation who were already grateful to him felt inspired to cram a copy into the hands of their children, saying: here, if you have to go crazy, don’t go crazy about Eminem. Go crazy the way this guy did – go crazy about Cimabue.
Hughes did go crazy about Cimabue, before Florence was flooded in 1966, and he went crazier still after the raging waters had done their work. The great Cimabue crucifix in the Museo dell’Opere of Santa Croce was stripped of its paint. At the head of his camera crew, Hughes arrived in time to gather up all the floating specks of pigment and put them in a jar, just in case the resulting mulch might be an aid to restoration. The possibility was never proved, because a workman threw away the jar. The whole episode is as riveting as that: one of the best bits in a book of best bits. But the bits are a bit like the flecks of paint: they belong on a more coherent structure.
There would have been more room for art if there was less stuff about politics. An even more awkward truth is that the stuff about politics could have been more worthy of that superior brain we have been talking about, the piece of Hughes that was left intact after he was comprehensively screwed by his own car. At the subsequent inquest, Hughes got into trouble with the Australian press by suggesting audibly that the proceedings were a circus. Suggesting things audibly is one of Hughes’s most endearing characteristics. When young he never had much idea of adjusting his discourse to the audience, and he still hasn’t now. But his disinclination to censor himself means that he can easily talk himself into trouble.
What he didn’t seem to realise, when the car-crash case was being heard out there in the sticks of Western Australia, was that the national press was already laying for him. Hughes favoured (still favours) an Australian republic, and had several times flown the Pacific to speak against those lingering ties with Britain that he holds to be obsolete. The overwhelming majority of Australia’s intellectuals are Republican like him, but they didn’t necessarily think he was doing their cause a favour. In the referendum of 1999 the Republicans failed to get their way. Some said it was because of the manner in which the question was framed, but there were others who thought that a glittering few of the more prominent Republican advocates had been counter-productive in their advocacy, simply because of their ‘silvertail’ (i.e. privileged) background.
More scintillating than any of these had been Hug
Almost anybody with a university degree in Australia was, and is, ready to call the common people a bunch of racists for electing John Howard. The contempt of the commentariat for a good half of the electorate is one of the wonders of modern Australia. (At this point, Americans might need to be reminded that in Australia voting is compulsory, so half the electorate means half of all the adults alive.) In theory, the republicans should have agreed with Hughes when he treated the rest of the Australian population as wrong-headed on the subject of the republic. But they preferred to think that the visiting fireman was patronising everybody, themselves included. This opinion of him was reinforced after the accident that turned him into Evel Knievel, when the press – never helpful to a celebrity on trial – gave him their standard bucketing and he reacted as if its personnel were out to get him. Undoubtedly some of them were, but in Australia it would be wise for even Shakespeare to have a fraternal drink with the Fourth Estate. Suddenly feeling the warmth drain out of his welcome, Hughes gathered himself up on his crutches, shook the dust of his homeland slowly from his shoes, and headed off to light up the metal detector at Sydney airport. In the book, he contemplates saying a defiant goodbye forever to the land of his birth.
The land of his birth is unlikely to let it happen. If Australia’s too-much talked-about National Identity – that metaphysical abstraction which for so long has been longed for, and longed for so pointlessly because it was always there – means anything at all, it means something that comes with you wherever you go. Hughes spends a lot of time in this book saying what his country never had, and still hasn’t got. Actually it’s got it, because it’s got Hughes. He should give his country a little more credit, if only because it still gives so much credit to him. Nowadays he gets quite a lot of curled lip from the media, but the bitchery is really praise: praise for the larrikin, Australia’s eternal prodigal child.
Hughes is the Bastard from the Bush dressed up as the Wandering Scholar. Thousands of bright young Aussies will want to be him, in the same way that thousands of slightly less bright Aussies want to be the cricketer Shane Warne. Hughes is quids in. All he has to remember is that his nation has got some credit coming for helping to form the best part of his brain, the part that wants to share any discovered joy. One doesn’t ask him to praise his homeland: just to be fair will do. He is very droll, for example, about the reactionary views of Robert Gordon Menzies, Prime Minister of Australia for most of our youth. But when Hughes accurately recollects the two scholarships he won to Sydney University, and that he wouldn’t have been able to go there without them, he neglects to say that his brilliant examination results would have secured him another scholarship, a Commonwealth Scholarship, had he required it: and that the Commonwealth Scholarship scheme – the chief reason why the Australian universities in the late 1950s were teeming with the names that have since become famous – was the invention of the Menzies government.
The Commonwealth Scholarship scheme educated the very generation of intellectuals who were to spend much of their lives vilifying the government that made their education possible. Such ironies are what Hughes should be reporting. I can’t believe he misses them out deliberately. I’m afraid they count among the small number of Things He Still Doesn’t Know. But they are far outweighed by the Things He Found Out, and he might consider putting a few more of those into a second edition, in the space left when he removes an elaborate, pages-long confusion between the F2B Bristol Fighter and the SE5. A stickler for accuracy in aeronautical matters – he was a mighty aero-modeller in his adolescence – Hughes will be horrified when he Googles the designations and sees the trick that his magnificent memory has played on him. The better the memory, the bigger the trick: it’s a rule in life.
But he can always fill the freed-up space with just one more radiant observation about his field of study and arena of true passion. I drafted this piece in the cafeteria across the street from the Glasgow School of Art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s great masterpiece. It was registration day, and there were all those young students. I could remember when, in faraway Sydney, they used to be us; and I couldn’t look at any of that wonderful building’s details without being grateful to Hughes for helping to open my eyes, in those years when I still knew nothing except that I wanted to know everything. He didn’t have to find the language for being thrilling about the serious: he had it from birth, which is probably why, in this fine book which should be even finer than it is, he can treat his unrelenting adventure in the arts as incidental. But it’s fundamental, to him and to the whole bunch of us: surely he knows that. And as I sit typing this last paragraph in my London apartment, an email from a mutual friend tells me where Hughes is right now. He’s in Australia, promoting this book. The Japanese say it every day: I go and I come back.
New York Review of Books, January 11, 2007
Postscript
Naturally gifted critic though he was, Hughes left Australia before he had had time to make a full estimation of how thoroughly the influence of the European refugees had changed the modern culture. His early cartoons were notably influenced by Molnar, a Hungarian immigrant who dominated the Sydney Morning Herald in the same way that Osbert Lancaster dominated London’s Daily Sketch. The European influence was already everywhere. For us natives, it was a matter of seeing what lay too close to be noticed. Later on, with the benefit of exile, Hughes got things in perspective, but by then his early remarks about Australia’s isolation had been published and taken hold. A star critic will always need criticism in his turn, but Hughes was so brilliant that no modifying voice could be heard against his own. It was a pity, because the full story of the modern Euro-Australian interchange was one he might have told earlier, and thus helped to save a generation of Australian cultural pundits from a career spent gazing into their own navels. But he had other stories to tell, and they changed the world. The Shock of the New was an Australian expatriate achievement on a level with Rod Laver winning Wimbledon five times, Dame Joan Sutherland singing the title role of Lucia di Lammermoor at Covent Garden, and Sir Jack Brabham designing the car in which he won the World Championship.
MODERN AUSTRALIAN PAINTING
Delivered as a National Trust Lecture at the State Theatre in Sydney on June 27, 2006, and later published in a shortened version
by the TLS, September 1, 2006
One big advantage of having your name attached for long enough to Australia’s inexorably spreading wave of cultural world conquest is that you eventually get to meet everyone else. Throw another launch ceremony on the barbie! Prizes are awarded, exhibitions are opened, movies and plays are premiered, and sooner or later even the most dedicated creative loner is flushed out of hiding to loom within reach of your extended hand. A characteristic sight at any big-time Australian cultural get-together is two life-long recluses falling into each other’s arms. Last time I looked, I was personally acquainted with at least three of the most illustrious Australian painters of the post-war generation, the gang who really and undeniably put the Australian branch of their art-form on an international level.
Admittedly I had met Sidney Nolan and Charles Blackman only once, and Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd not at all. But Margaret Olley? Jeffrey Smart? Not only mates of each other, but mates, to a certain extent, of mine. John Olsen? Last had a drink with him at a big fund-ra
I could have wished that there was rather more sotto and rather less voce, in fact. But I was to discover that in the finished portrait none of these personal details would matter very much. The main study drawing was done in the painter’s studio in Tuscany. I thought the drawing of my head rather heroic, with something of a Roman senator about the proportions of the skull, although he would have had to be a Roman senator with an ear-alignment problem. But I didn’t see the finished portrait until some time after it arrived in Sydney. I visited the gallery expecting to see a larger version of the drawing, and indeed it was: far larger, as big as a small Paolo Veronese. The actual figure representing myself, however, was extremely small, a dot in an urban landscape, and obviously present only to give scale to the vast buildings. Bending close, I saw with some compensatory benefit to my self-esteem that there was now nothing at all anomalous about the ears: which meant I could have been just about any man my age with small eyes and a neck thicker than his head. And that – on the face of it, as it were – is the evidence of our acquaintance. But if journalists like to conclude that Jeffrey Smart and I must be bosom buddies, who am I to say them nay?