Even as We Speak (38 page)

The moment when George said mass over his holy book has stayed with me ever since, and now, when I look up from the typewriter at the bookshelves in my office, I can see my own copy of
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
. Beside it is another book by Curtius, his
Essays on European Literature
, which includes the two important long pieces about T. S.
Eliot. Next comes
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Romanische Philologie
, which contains Curtius’s definitive review of Gianfranco Contini’s edition of Dante’s
Rime
.
I bought that one in Cambridge in 1968, before I could read any German. Then there comes Curtius’s pioneering little study of Proust, and then an authentic rare bird, the first edition of his
Balzac
, Verlag von Friedrich Cohen, Bonn, 1923. Where did I buy that? My inscription on the flyleaf reminds me: Staten Island, two years ago, in a house full of books bought from the
descendants of European refugees from Hitler. The thousands of abandoned books stacked two deep in the shelves were a whispering testimony to the cultural disintegration that Curtius first feared,
then experienced, and which gave
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
its pessimistic tone. I could write an essay on the subject. It might not be an outstanding essay, but it
would touch on the main points. It has taken a long time, but I am some kind of student at last.

Still not a good student, however. A writer can never be that: not this writer, anyway. Borges, book mad if anybody was, divided the two things neatly in
Historia universal de la
infamia
, when he said that writing comes before reading and is less considered. The same dichotomy is fundamental to Croce’s aesthetics, and I suppose Schiller’s celebrated
distinction between the naïve and the sentimental amounts to the same thing. But these are weighty names of learned men, and merely to adduce them is to concede that you can’t be a
writer without at least wanting to be a reader as well. A writer who took literally Schopenhauer’s imprecations against book-learning would not be concentrating his energies, he would be
inhibiting their renewal.

We would all like to set our minds in order, and that applies most to those of us who are obliged to lead disorderly lives. As I consume, in the TV studio, hundreds of hours that I might have
spent making yet another attempt to get somewhere with Greek, my great teachers are with me as an ideal. (Probably
their
great teachers were with
them
as an ideal, when they were
wasting their time reading my emptily fluent essays, and certainly when they became, later on, Professors with departments to run.) I remember George Russell standing at a lectern, silently reading
a photostat of a medieval manuscript, the hurrying world shut out. I remember H. J. Oliver, when I was in his office for the first time and transfixed by his collection of those first-issue
Everyman volumes with the gilt spines, pointing out gently, so as not to daunt, that the real collection was at home. Nowadays I have my collection too: books bought during assignments in Munich,
Vienna and Salzburg, in Tokyo, Peking and Hong Kong, in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv. Some of the books I buy I will have to wait to read until I can read the languages they are written
in. But at least I know what should be desired. I think it was while George was holding a seminar about the austere dedication of the Brethren of the Common Life that he first mentioned Rachel. She
wasn’t a real woman, she was a spirit – the spirit of contemplation. For the monk, to be denied her company was to be left desolate. To forsake Rachel was madness.

Expounding this concept, George spoke as both a man of religion and a humanist. At the time I had little idea of what he meant. A quarter of a century later I am still proof against religion of
any stamp, and will no doubt remain so until my pagan grave. But humanism, the thirst for concentrated meaning that turns a classic text into a fountain of refreshment, has by now become as vivid
for me as the river of light became for Dante. I wish I had good enough Latin to read the
Annals
of Tacitus as I can read his
Histories
, or to read his
Histories
as I can
read his
Agricola
. Yet after my first hour with the
Annals
, an hour spent sweating to unpick even a few of its compressed sentences – whose elliptical density, like that of
Shostakovitch’s string quartets, is the guarantee of their truth and of the truth’s private defiance of state terror – I could at last see our horrifying twentieth century for
what it has been, a time like any other: a time like
all
the others. When I closed the book I held my hands above it as if to touch it might burn them, and only later realized that the
gesture had been an echo.
Benedictus benedicat
. So George Russell has had his influence, beginning with a few words and coming to fulfilment far away, as an important part of his
pupil’s attitude to life. There are other, better pupils with less erratic tales to tell. But I was the test case, the one sent to try him; and he came through.

From a
Festschrift
for George Russell, 1984

By the time I at last met Robin Eakin personally, on the
sable d’or
of Biarritz in the early eighties, she was called Robin Dalton and had been one of the most
influential literary agents in London for half her career. We were introduced by our mutual friend, Michael Blakemore, whose talents as a director extend to real life: wherever he is, the stage
teems with creative people, and in those years, in Biarritz every summer, there was always enough prominent human material spilling out of his house and down to the beach for everyone present to
have begun a
roman-à-clef
except the novelists, who were already writing about what happened the
previous
summer. John Cleese and Michael Frayn came to the house to work on
films and scripts; Tim Pigott-Smith came there to be obscure for a while after starring as Merrick in
The Jewel in the Crown
; and that trim form under the big straw hat, watching the
children play in the shallows of the advancing tide, belonged to the exquisite Nicola Pagett.

But there was never any doubt who was the
grande dame
of the scene. It was Robin. She had a cut-glass accent that you would have sworn had been first turned and chiselled in the
nurseries of Belgravia. I was relishing her company long before I realized that she was Australian, that she was Robin Eakin, and that she had once written a classic book. I had never even heard of
Aunts Up the Cross
, which sounded to me like a feminist tract about capital punishment in ancient Rome. When I read it, I realized that it was a prize example of a genre I had been looking
for: the small Australian book that was better written than the big ones, the actual fragment of
echt
literature with a small ‘l’ that would make me feel less unpatriotic about
all those behemoths of Literature with a capital ‘L’ which had been failing to convince me for so long. My party-piece recitative based on the opening page of
The Aunt’s
Story
had been making me feel guilty for years. (I used to get a big laugh on the one-line paragraph ‘And stood breathing’ but I always felt ashamed: perhaps it only
sounded
ludicrous.) After I read
Aunts Up the Cross
the guilt vanished. Here at last was the living proof that a civilized, unpretentious, fully evocative prose style had been
available in Australia ever since the young Robin Eakin handed in her first school essay. All we had ever needed to do was look in the wrong place. As so often happens, the true art was filed under
entertainment.

To say that
Aunts Up the Cross
is beautifully written risks making the book sound like a filigree. It is anything but. Social information, moral judgement, comic action and tragic
incident are all packed into sentences which have the density of uranium and would also have its weight, if they were not so proportionately constructed that they take off from the page like
gliders picked up off a hill by a thermal from its face. Soon you, the lucky first-time reader of this marvellous little creation, will be in the light yet firm grip of its opening paragraph.
Before that happens, let us analyse its first two sentences, because there will be no chance to do so once the third sentence reaches back to draw you on. Study this, you upcoming, unreliable
memoirists: study this and weep.

It’s the gift that money can’t buy and no amount of literary ambition can ever find a substitute for: the prose that sounds as if it is being spoken by the ideal speaker. Yet the
spontaneity is all designed: ‘very slowly’ is exactly balanced against ‘fairly fast’, ‘right direction’ against ‘wrong direction’, and the impetus
would be ruined if an editor – as almost any magazine editor nowadays would, especially if asked not to – were to insert an otiose comma after ‘right direction’. The whole
book is as precisely calculated as that, with the result that calculation scarcely seems to enter into it. When you get to the end, however, you find that Aunt Juliet and the bus make contact
again, and you realize that you have been led a dance – a dance in a circle that might have been choreographed by Poussin, if Poussin had ever lived in the Kings Cross area of Sydney.

Robin Eakin did live there, in that unlikely Arcadia. When I was growing up after the war, Kings Cross was featured in the newspapers and magazines – not yet subsumed under the collective
name of The Media – as Sydney’s Montmartre, Schwabing, Soho and Greenwich Village, a reputation which seemed mainly to be based on the occasional appearance in the streets of Rosaleen
Norton weighed down by mascara, sometimes as late as 11.30 in the evening. When Robin Eakin was growing up there before the war, Kings Cross, for her family at any rate, spelt something more
interesting than any Bohemia – gentility in reduced circumstances. She grew up in a house full of life; a house full of lives. In that nest of gentlefolk – Turgenev is one of the many
names with whom she can be mentioned in the same breath – there was drama on every floor.
The Madwoman of Chaillot
was being staged on the mezzanine.
Les monstres
sacrés
inhabited the verandah. No wonder she has spent so much of her time in and around theatres: she was born in one. She revelled in it. For her, Heaven was other people. She shames
me in that regard. When I look back at my own book of memoirs, I see that its first critics were right: there is only one character in it, and everyone else is a walk-on.
Aunts Up the
Cross
is just the opposite: its only half-realized character is the author herself.

If the book has a fault, that’s it. When she casually lets slip that she had read all the major novels of Meredith before she was twelve years old, you want to know everything else about
her education, and there is nothing like enough about the young love life of a woman so striking in her maturity. Though her evocation of Sydney in the war years ranks with the on-leave passages of
T. A. G. Hungerford’s
The Ridge and the River
, you can’t help feeling that her American service personnel are miraculously well behaved. But the book was written in what was
still an age of reticence, and the upside of that is better than the downside: where tact rules, frankness really startles, and no text of such brevity ever had so many flashpoints of shock. Aunt
Juliet making contact with the bus is the very least of them. I mention no more because nothing should be allowed to dissipate the economy with which every telling vignette and intermezzo is
prepared and resolved. I only say that the moment when the author’s mother causes the death of the plumber is one of the great throwaway paragraphs in modern Australian letters. Read it, and
then imagine how Xavier Herbert would have thrown it away. He would have thrown it away like an old refrigerator full of house-bricks: it would have taken him a hundred pages plus.

Aunts Up the Cross
is all over in two hundred pages minus. A fan’s foreword should show the same regard for brevity, so I will back out with one last unreliable memory before her
reliable ones begin. I think it was while we were walking along the esplanade of the Côte des Basques (by which I mean we could equally have been in the drawing-room of her holiday-home
maisonette, but I would rather you heard waves in the background) that I upbraided her for having written no more than this one perfect book. She fobbed me off with another drink – all right,
it
was
the drawing-room – and politely neglected to state the obvious, which was that she had written something so sensitive to its own past, and so responsive to its own present,
that it contained its own future. All the books she might have written later were already in it. What she was too modest even to think was that all the books the rest of us wrote later are in it
too.

From an introduction to the reissue of
Aunts up the Cross
, 1997

One tries not to fall for the lure of the freebie, but when an Australian national hero offers membership of his gymnasium in return for a preface to its prospectus, it
would be a churl who turned him down
.

Having run 5,000 metres against Ron Clarke on several occasions and matched him shoulder to shoulder in the home stretch, I can give other distance runners of our calibre the
following tip for defeating him tactically: start ten minutes earlier. If you and he are both running on adjacent treadmills at Cannons gym, it can be done. A lot of things can be done for the
human body at Cannons. Things have been done even for my body, which was probably the nearest to a total wreck that ever stumbled out of the locker room in baggy shorts and a too-tight T-shirt. I
didn’t get back my youth. I didn’t get back the full splendour of that original V-shaped figure that stunned the beach so long ago. But I got my weight reasonably under control,
regained the habit of exercise, and above all rediscovered the pleasure of a healthy sweat.