Cultural Cohesion (34 page)

Shannon might think he's got hold of some kind of horse, but as far as Daisy's concerned she's a species of cetacean. “It was she who guided his hands down the length of her body, she who touched him wherever she could reach, as playfully as a dolphin, until he realised that her fragility was strength, and that she wanted him without reserve.”

Daisy is so moved by this belated but shatteringly complete experience that she can be forgiven for what she does next. “Afterward, as they lay together, half asleep, but unwilling to drift apart into unconsciousness, Daisy farted, in a tiny series of absolutely irrepressible little pops that seemed to her to go on for a minute.” It takes bad art to teach us how good art gets done. Knowing that the dithyrambs have gone on long enough, Mrs. Krantz has tried to undercut them with something earthy. Her tone goes wrong, but her intention is worthy of respect. It is like one of those clumsy attempts at naturalism in a late-medieval painting—less pathetic than portentous, since it adumbrates the great age to come. Mrs. Krantz will never be much of an artist but she has more than a touch of the artist's ambition.

Princess Daisy
is not to be despised. Nor should it be deplored for its concern with aristocracy, glamour, status, success and things like that. On the evidence of her prose, Mrs. Krantz has not enough humour to write tongue-in-cheek, but other people are perfectly capable of reading that way. People don't get their morality from their reading matter: they bring their morality to it. The assumption that ordinary people's lives could be controlled and limited by what entertained them was always too condescending to be anything but fatuous.

Mrs. Krantz, having dined at Mark's Club, insists that it is exclusive. There would not have been much point to her dining there if she did not think that. An even bigger snob than she is might point out that the best reason for not dining at Mark's Club is the chance of finding Mrs. Krantz there. It takes only common sense, though, to tell you that on those terms exclusiveness is not just chimerical but plain tedious. You would keep better company eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in a launderette. But if some of this book's readers find themselves daydreaming of the high life, let us be grateful that Mrs. Krantz exists to help give their vague aspirations a local habitation and a name. They would dream anyway, and without Mrs. Krantz they would dream unaided.

To pour abuse on a book like this makes no more sense than to kick a powder puff.
Princess Daisy
is not even reprehensible for the three million dollars its author was paid for it in advance. It would probably have made most of the money back without a dime spent on publicity. The only bad thing is the effect on Mrs. Krantz's personality. Until lately she was a nice Jewish lady harbouring the usual bourgeois fancies about the aristocracy. But now she gives interviews extolling her own hard head. “Like so many of us,” she told the
Daily Mail
on 28 April, “I happen to believe that being young, beautiful and rich is more desirable than being old, ugly and destitute.” Mrs. Krantz is fifty years old, but to judge from the photograph on the back of the book she is engaged in a series of hard-fought delaying actions against time. This, I believe, is one dream that intelligent people ought not to connive at, since the inevitable result of any attempt to prolong youth is a graceless old age.

London Review of Books
, 1980; later included in

From the Land of Shadows
, 1982

POSTSCRIPT

John Gross did me the honour of reprinting this piece in the closing pages of his
Oxford Book of Essays
. Some of the reviewers of that excellent anthology thought that it tailed off pretty sharply when it got to me, not so much because my prose was ill-behaved as because my subject was inherently trivial. But there were ample precedents. A good proportion of the most pertinent criticism in the language has been written in the form of book reviews that attack a supposed success in defence of a value. My only shame is that in all such cases, the destructive piece was made constructive because something had been taken too seriously, and needed to be demoted. Nobody except her investment bankers had ever taken Judith Krantz seriously. But there had still been a false estimation that needed to be opposed: a false estimation not about her book's place in culture—which was transparently the same as the place of a garbage scow in a yacht club—but about culture itself.
Princess Daisy
's gargantuan commercial success had been condemned as meretricious. I thought we had more important cultural distortions to worry about than that. I also thought—why not admit it?—that Judith Krantz had turned out a masterpiece of unintentional humour, and that there were possibilities for intentional humour in analysing how she did it. The challenge was to be as funny when I tried as she was without trying at all. But if there had not been a serious point to be made, it wouldn't have been worth the effort.

2003

20

A DEATH IN LIFE

The Fatal Shore
by Robert Hughes

For the longest part of its short history, Australia preferred to forget that it began as a penal colony. Australian historians born under the British Empire would accentuate the positive. When, in recent years, a new stamp of historians, usually harbouring no great love for Australia's constitutional ties with Britain, began to tell the real story of what the formative years of the white man's Australia had been like, it became apparent why forgetfulness had been so nearly complete. The story was horrible. Luckily, few of them were able to tell it with more than a modicum of evocative power, or the result would have been hard to bear. Now, in
The Fatal Shore
, Robert Hughes, an Australian-born critical writer of pronounced literary gifts, has summed up all previous efforts, exceeded them in force of expression and brought the whole deadly business back to life. The result
is
hard to bear—or would be, if it were not so clearly one of those rare achievements in the writing of history by which the unimaginably inhumane is brought to book without making us give up on humanity. Such redemptive work can't be done without artistry: there are degrees of anguish which only style can make us contemplate, since merely to recount them would leave us cold.

Hughes might have attempted this book in his youth, and got the story out of proportion, even if he had not skimped it. Fortunately, he has made
The Fatal Shore
the
magnum opus
of his maturity. By now his sense of historical scale is sound, as for this task it needed to be. It would have been easy to call the Australian system of penal settlements a Gulag Archipelago before the fact. The term “concentration camp,” in its full modern sense, would not have been out of place: at least one of the system's satellites, Norfolk Island, was, if not an out-and-out extermination camp, certainly designed to make its victims long for death, like Dachau in those awful years before the war when the idea was not so much to kill people as to see how much they could suffer and still want to stay alive. And, indeed, Hughes draws these parallels. The analogies are inescapable. But he doesn't let them do his thinking for him. He is able to bring out the full dimensions of the tragedy while keeping it in perspective. The penal colony surely prefigured the modern totalitarian catastrophe. Equally surely it did not. It was a unique event, with unique consequences: the chief consequence being Australia itself, which has come a long way in 200 years—a point sufficiently proved by its ability to produce a book like this. The literature of the totalitarian dystopias emerged in spite of them, and could reach only one conclusion. Australia is a more difficult subject, however damning the raw evidence.

To the penal colony, the cat-o'-nine-tails was a tool more basic than the hoe. On Norfolk Island, where the camp was commanded by a succession of sadists, there were other forms of torture as well, some of them as vile as could be conceived before the age of electricity. But flogging provided the steady rhythm of torment. What made the whipping on Norfolk Island unique was that it so often got out of hand. At Port Arthur, in Van Diemen's Land—now called Tasmania—there was less chance of the flagellator's ecstasy releasing his victim to a premature death. The idea was to impress the subject with the mechanical inexorability of his fate, even when he was being punished for nothing except the dementia or paralysis induced by previous punishment. Norfolk Island was the personal expression of whichever maniac was running the place. Port Arthur was impersonal, a research establishment where the machine that ruined you was run by technicians whose only concern was for its perfection: Kafka's penal colony, so often thought of as a harbinger, now turns out to have harked back.

But there are echoes of these things throughout history, in which the only reliable constant is the form taken by extreme cruelty when it is given absolute licence. Hughes, while aware of the general considerations, declines to lose himself among them. He keeps it specific. Enough to say that Norfolk Island and Port Arthur were there to inspire terror even in those convicts who were so recalcitrant that they were not terrified already by everyday life in the penal colony proper. The outlying camps were dumps for those who were held to be unassimilable elements in the main camp, where the city of Sydney now stands. But the main camp was itself a dump. Every convict sent there was held to be unassimilable in England. Whether he had stolen a thimble or forged £1,000 was immaterial. There was no notion that poverty might have created thieves: only that thieves might create revolution. They had to go. The colony was a way of getting rid of them without hanging them. It is a nice question whether transportation was intended as an alternative more humane than hanging, or less. Everyone knew what hanging looked like. But Australia was an unknown terror. So far away that no solid news ever came out of it, it was a black hole for facts. Dreadful stories percolated back to England of what went on out there, and there was always pressure from home to ensure that what went on remained so unattractive that any potential miscreant in the British Isles would fear it more than the rope and the hulks, and think twice before breaking the law, lest the law be obliged to break him, or her. There was thus a constant dispute between the liberal persuasion, which wanted Australia to rehabilitate criminals, and the illiberal persuasion, which wanted it to scare them. The first persuasion eventually won out, but not before the second had done its worst.

There was no need to give the place a bad name. It did that well enough by itself. Female convicts were forced into concubinage on the voyage out. Their sluttishness having been thus established, on arrival they were sorted like cattle, with officers taking the first pick. There were never enough women, so sodomy was rife among the men. Boys were initiated by rape, but to become an adult convict's punk at least ensured some protection against the others. Nothing except unquestioning docility could protect anyone against the lash. Male convicts on the chain gangs, flogged perpetually as they did one-tenth of the work they might have done willingly for a pittance, could have been excused for wondering if Norfolk Island could be worse. It was, because there the work was entirely pointless. Around Port Jackson and the country opening up westward towards the Blue Mountains, the road cutting and stump grubbing had some purpose, no matter how inefficiently it was done. Despite itself, the slave-labour camp grew into something better than that. Most of the convicts were put out to assigned labour, with the prospect of working their way to rehabilitation; the chance of freedom proved to be a carrot more powerful than the stick.

One of Hughes's best gifts is his ability to analyse the way a social order arose out of a disciplinary regime. It wasn't much of a social order to start with, because even the free settlers were not the most imaginative of people, and the convicts, far from being instinctive exemplars of the democratic spirit, were mostly so ignorant of where Australia was that they thought China was next door; escapees would set out to walk there, and eat each other on the way. Students of the American Revolution, accustomed to the mental capacities of the nascent superpower's founding citizens, will search Australia's early history in vain for a comparable group of visionaries. The Rum Corps, a cabal within the garrison, deposed the governor only because they wanted the free exercise of their monopoly in booze; it was scarcely the Boston Tea Party. Hughes is well aware that the resemblance ends almost as soon as it starts. Nevertheless, a nation emerged, and did so partly because men like Governor Macquarie—no Thomas Jefferson but no fool, either—were determined that it should.

Hughes is careful not to romanticize the convicts. The thief who stole a loaf of bread didn't always steal it from someone who had a hundred loaves. He might have stolen it from someone who had one loaf. To have grown up in the prisons and the hulks was no education for anything except crime. The few literate convicts—counterfeiters, and, later on, Chartists and Irish separatists—were cut off from home by their sentence and cut off from each other by the system. Isolated, they lost heart. Yet, on the whole, the convicts represented a lot of energy going to waste, and it was necessary only to release that energy in order for them to turn their new country, which none of them had ever wanted to come to, into a place from which most of them did not want to go home. The gold rush in the middle of the nineteenth century brought the transportation system to an end, because no incipient felon could be made to fear a place that so many free men were booking their own passage to reach, often selling all they had. The bad dream was already over—for the white man, at least.

For the black man, the disaster was unmitigated. Here again there is a parallel, but it is more with South Africa than with the United States, unless we try to keep Wounded Knee in mind and forget Harpers Ferry. The Australian Aborigines were never a
casus belli
between white men, not even as a pretext. Instead, the white men united against them. The revisionist who would like to pin another mass atrocity on the occupying power, however, will get no quick help from Hughes. In Van Diemen's Land, the soldiers might have driven the Aborigines like game, but on the mainland it was the convicts who posed the greater threat to the native population. The brutalized convicts had to feel superior to someone, and the Aborigines were ideal casting. They toiled not, and were hated for it. When the Aborigines helped the troopers track escapees, the convicts hated them even more. The troopers could offer their black collaborators no reward that did not corrode their tribal ways and make them less fit to survive. What the Aborigines needed was their land, untouched. They would have had to fight for it, and for that they would have needed solidarity. But on the day in 1788 when the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Harbour the tribe on the north shore spoke a language that the tribe on the south could not understand. The Aborigines were not one people. It is racism to suppose they were. There was not, and could not have been, an Aboriginal general. They would have needed an Eisenhower, and couldn't produce even a Crazy Horse. There had never been any need to, until we got there.

By “we” I mean Australians. All of us now feel the force of the plural personal pronoun. Some of us feel it so strongly that we move national self-consciousness to the forefront of the political agenda, often with tiresome results. Touchiness, however, is inevitable. Australian writers, painters, singers, actors, film directors, scientists, sportsmen and tycoons make a disproportionate bang in the world. The outsider could be forgiven for thinking that everything must be for export. But in all these fields there is quite a lot going on at home as well. The Australian can get a bit impatient when he hears his country judged according to what its expatriates are up to, even when the judgement is praise; and when the expatriates do the judging, especially if it is dispraise, he is likely to become inflamed.

But, with due notice that the case is being put broadly, what has happened is this. Up until the late 1960s, Australia undervalued itself as a country, or anyway its intelligentsia thought it did, giving this alleged Cinderella complex the unlovely journalistic title “the cultural cringe.” But the vogue for self-discovery, felt in those years throughout the Western world, was a passion by the time it reached Australia, rather as the Depression in the 1930s struck harder and stayed longer there than it did anywhere else. With the advent of Gough Whitlam's government, in the 1970s, Australia had begun to esteem itself at what its social commentators—an increasingly numerous and vociferous class—thought was a just valuation. Diffidence had turned to self-assertion. The change was welcome, but there was an obvious danger of hyped-up expectations, to which some of the country's more stentorian promoters duly succumbed. The cringe became a snarl. Tub-thumping was heard in areas where a reasoned tone might have been more suitable. Hughes's excellent book on Australian painting,
The Art of Australia
, adumbrated this new confidence but proved to be atypical in its tact. While analysing, appraising and ordering the Australian painters with an authority that no indigenous critic had achieved before, Hughes was careful not to tear his country's heritage loose from its world context, and made it clear that it was only because he
had
a world view, gained during his travels, that he was able to come home and see clearly what the Australian painters had achieved.

Australian defensiveness about the success of its expatriates was not to be allayed, and probably won't be by
The Fatal Shore
, either. Here again, political zeal inevitably distorts the picture. Ardent republicans would like Australia to be self-sufficient in the arts the way that it is in minerals. The idea that any one country can be culturally self-sufficient is inherently fallacious, but in the forward rush of Australian confidence during Gough Whitlam's period of government, when grants were handed out to anybody with enough creative imagination to ask for one, reason was thrown into the backseat. For the last fifteen years, Australian artists in all fields, supposedly free at last from the imposition of being judged by alien—i.e., British—standards, have been judged by their own standards, and almost invariably found to be the authors of significant works. The glut of self-approval has been most evident in literature, which in normal circumstances customarily produces a strong critical movement to accompany any period of sustained creativity but in Australia's case has largely failed to do so. The undoubted fact that some very good things have been written can't stave off the consideration that many less good things have been given the same welcome.

A consideration is all it is. Creativity can get along without criticism. When Pushkin—who was in the position of having to think what form a national culture might take—called for a dispassionate criticism, he wasn't calling for help in writing poems, which he could do by himself. He was merely stating his wish to write them in a civilized atmosphere, whose absence was reducing him to isolation, and thereby damaging his individuality. The individual needs a community. In Australia, while literature is rapidly becoming a cash crop, a literary community has been slower to emerge. Criticism is too often, in the strict sense, tendentious. Scale is duly hailed, ambition lauded, but the direction of the book—does it point the way? does it give us purpose?—is usually the basis of assessment. There are not many critics detached enough to quibble over detail, and ask why so many great writers have produced so little good writing.