Even as We Speak (41 page)

A conspicuous example of that same tendency is Jill Neville, enrolled among the expatriate writers. By a rough calculation she gets three times as much space as Patrick White. No doubt she had a
magnetic personal attractiveness. Unduly given to the bad journalistic practice of name-checking his way through networks as if that did something to illuminate the individuals caught up in them,
Alomes makes much of Jill Neville’s role in Peter Porter’s life and in the circle that formed around Charles Blackman and Al Alvarez in Hampstead. Alvarez wasn’t Australian but he
liked Australians. His recent book
Where Did it All Go Right?
shows how much he liked Jill Neville. If not precisely a
femme fatale
, she certainly had the knack of making grown
male intellectuals fight like schoolboys. By the time I met her, she had been brought low by illness and the familiar cumulative effects of a career in which literary ambitions do not fulfil
themselves, to an extent that makes the income from ordinary journalism matter significantly less. To be trapped in Grub Street and sick too is a hard fate. But even in the early grip of the cancer
that took her away, Jill Neville still had charm. The question was whether she had any talent. My own assessment would be that she more or less did – her fiction, without being incandescent,
retains something better than documentary value – but Alomes doesn’t say whether she did or she didn’t. He just parades her along with all the other expatriates as if she had the
same rank, and pays her more attention than almost any of them because she happened to know so many of them personally.

The matter of talent becomes an embarrassment when Alomes gets to what he calls the Megastars, because if he can’t talk about what they have to offer, then he can have no reason for being
interested in them apart from their celebrity. The usual four suspects are rounded up. Robert Hughes gets fleeting treatment because he settled in New York instead of London. Germaine Greer, Barry
Humphries and myself are worked over at length. I wish I could say I felt flattered to be included, but flattened would be more like it. Ian Britain started this Gang of Four caper with his book
Once an Australian
, which at least had the merit of crediting his individual subjects with a vestigial inner life that might yet survive somewhere inside the airless perimeter of their
fame, in the same way that the presence of water on Mars cannot yet be ruled out. Britain was able to contemplate that his chosen specimens might have become famous
for
something –
if only their way of putting things – rather than just through wanting to be famous. But Alomes has gone beyond that. With his innovative and new filing system, he has no need to form a
personal estimation of anything that his Megastars might have actually done. He can just trawl through the press coverage.

Let me start by getting myself out of the road as quickly as possible. I only wish our author had done the same, but it all goes on for pages. A detailed case study is built up of what Alomes
calls a ‘professional Australian’, smarming his way upwards in the capital city of imperialism by shamelessly peddling his colonial identity to con the Poms. For all I know, and in
spite of its plethora of factual errors, this dossier fits the culprit: it takes a saint to be sure of his own motives. All I can say in rebuttal, if not refutation, is that I can’t remember
the Poms being as easy to con as all that. Even for Rolf Harris, the didgeridoo and the wobble-board weren’t enough by themselves: he had to sing. And as far as I can recall after almost
forty years, I had to compose a few ordinary, unaccented English sentences before I could get anybody’s attention. My freckles were already fading fast, and putting zinc cream on my nose
would have looked like frost-bite.

If it was conceited of me to expect some attempt at assessing the way I write – if only to demonstrate how I worked the scam – such an attempt was the least to expect when it came to
the case of Germaine Greer. If you leave out her way of putting things, all you are left with is the things she puts. Her various attitudes have been shared at one time or another by many, and
there might even be some who share them all. Perhaps somewhere, gathered around some dusty well, there is a group of women farsighted enough to perceive that clitoridectomy is a breakthrough for
feminism. But it would be even more amazing if they could write. Germaine Greer can write, often amazingly. Her distinctiveness is in her style, where all she feels, observes and believes adds up
to a passion. It might be better if it added up to a position, but it would take a fool to deny its power, and a dunce to ignore it. Alomes ignores it. Instead, he applies his method. What she said
to the media, or what the media said she said, is sedulously quoted. The contradictions and anomalies that emerge are marvelled over, as if consistency had ever been among her virtues. Deep
thoughts that various mediocrities have thought about what she thinks are duly shuffled into a heap, which you would have to set fire to if you hoped for any illumination. But at least obfuscation
is not the aim. In the case of Barry Humphries I’m afraid it is. The stuff about him is a scandal.

A serious fellow even while he was alive, the avant-garde novelist B. S. Johnson once informed a table and the people sitting around it – I was one of them, so I can vouch for this –
that he did not admire Shakespeare, because real people don’t talk in verse. Showing similar powers of insight, Alomes is able to detect that Dame Edna Everage, Sir Les Patterson and others
among Barry Humphries’ range of stage zanies do not correspond to any actual people in our country’s now advanced state of development. He further concludes that Humphries’
international theatrical success is therefore damaging to Australia’s image abroad. When Ian Britain favourably reviewed this book for the Melbourne
Age
, the strictures placed on
Humphries were too much even for him, and he tried to point out the obvious: that Humphries’ fantastic characters were found just as entertaining by an Australian audience as a foreign one.
More could be said on those lines, but I doubt it would be enough to convince Alomes, who is too hipped on his idea of the ‘cultural cringe’ (a term he employs interminably) to let go
of the possibility that large sections of the Australian audience look up to Humphries precisely because he looks down on them. Alomes wouldn’t put anything past the middle class. Like many
Australian soft-option academics who fancy themselves as radical political thinkers, he resolutely refuses to grasp that a middle class is the first article a liberal democracy manufactures, and
the last it can do without.

Of all the people in the book, Humphries is the one to whom the term Australian Expatriate Creative Artist applies most, and of whom its author knows least. You would never guess from what is
written here that Humphries, throughout his career, and in addition to commanding a mandarin prose that integrates the wild inventiveness of the Australian idiom at a level beyond the reach of even
his brightest critics, has devoted tireless energy to the study, rediscovery, preservation and furtherance of Australian music, literature, painting and architecture. Humphries is learned on a
world scale, but his learning began at home, and always goes back there. An expatriate he might be, but a patriot he has always been. Everyone knows that, except Alomes and the dunderheads in his
filing system, prominent among whom is Dan O’Neill, described as (and this is Alomes talking, not Sir Les) ‘literature scholar and radical academic at the University of
Queensland’. In 1983 Radical Dan apparently asked ‘How much longer can this curious ritual last, a Londoner with quick uptake, retentive memory and verbal flair coming over here on a
regular basis, to tear the living fang out of us for being “Australian”?’ I love that ‘verbal flair’: obviously a very compromising thing to be caught in possession
of, like a bottle of anabolic steroids.

Not all of the names brought in to help lynch Humphries are ciphers. One of them belongs to the gifted playwright David Williamson, whose towering presence in this shambling rank of irascible
homunculi is enough to prove that Alomes’s book is a more serious matter than it might appear, although never in a way that its author might like to think. Williamson is quoted as calling
Humphries ‘a satirist who loathes Australia and everything about it’. As it happens, Humphries is a difficult customer in real life and there are things about his stage act that some of
us find difficult too. I wouldn’t like to be in the first three or four rows when Sir Les is propagating rancid zabaglione from the dilapidated cloaca of his mouth, and I have always
sympathized with the country wife in the fifth row when Dame Edna asks her what she had to do to get the pearls. Without question there is an implacable animus boiling somewhere behind the
personae. But to discern in Humphries ‘almost a total hatred of Australia’ (Williamson again, apparently) takes something more than a lack of humour. It takes nationalism, which is
where we get down to the nitty-gritty.

For any free nation, an upsurge of nationalism is something it needs like a hole in the head. The holes are usually provided by whatever force emerges victorious from the resulting turmoil, and
the heads by its innocent citizens. If the history of the previous century taught us anything, it taught us that. But one of the charms of the Australian intelligentsia is that the generality of
its members aren’t bound by an historical context. Unfortunately they aren’t informed by one either, a deficiency which makes innocence less cute when it comes to politics. When the
Australian Republican Movement gave itself a name, it was merely naïve in supposing that the concept of an historically predetermined
Bewegung
would fail to arouse bad memories. But
there was nothing naïve, and much that was nasty, in the ARM’s collective fondness for wondering whether Australians who questioned its visionary mission were quite Australian
enough.

Beginning with the discovery by Paul Keating that Australia’s destiny was to Stand Tall, it was suggested, with progressively increased intensity all the way to the eve of the recent
referendum, that anyone who believed otherwise was guilty of standing short. Nationalist rhetoric was off and running like one of those bush fires that burn down whole states. It was too late for
anyone to say, without risk of being fried to a crisp in the media, that Australia already
was
a nation: that it had thrown off the shackles of British imperialism even before the
federation of its constituent states; and that it was much envied in a world which had seen many other nations with older names smashed to pieces and forced to start again – or, like
Argentina (a country directly comparable to Australia up until the end of World War II), remaining intact only at the cost of being consumed with grief as their natural blessings, social cohesion,
public benefits and civil rights were irrevocably frittered away in one constitutional crisis after another.

It was too late for anyone except the Australian public, who declined to vote for the republican proposal as it was put to them, and might well do the same again even if the proposal is
different. It should be evident, indeed, that unless all the proposals are the same – i.e. unless there is an agreed republican model – then the republic will remain merely a nice idea,
like a popcorn mine or the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Personally I hope that the republicans
can
agree on a model: firstly because we might need it – the Royal Family might decide to
give up – and secondly because, during the necessary discussion, the intelligentsia will be obliged to examine what it did wrong last time, and might reach the salutary conclusion that its
propensity for questioning the loyalty of its ideological enemies came home to roost.

Whether a wise expatriate should come home to roost is another question, especially if he has been tagged as a conservative. But it probably wouldn’t matter much if he stayed away. I
called Alomes’s book ‘timely’ because in the débâcle of the lost referendum it should teach his fellow savants, simply by its grotesque example, that the nationalist
line of thought, especially when applied to culture, is a busted flush. But I fear it could still take many other books to teach them that the ideal of cultural autarky has always been a
pipe-dream, in whatever country the pipe is smoked. Heine, without whom German poetry would be cut in half, spent two thirds of his life in Paris. He was sheltering from repression and prejudice,
but Thomas Mann, even after Hitler’s death, never came home to Germany, because he doubted whether Germany was ready to come home to him. Stravinsky operated on the principle that Russia went
with him wherever he went, which was everywhere except the Soviet Union. Picasso was Spain in spite of Spain, and for James Joyce the condition for returning eternally to Ireland in the circulating
river of his work was never to set foot there again.

An artist is the incarnation of his country, wherever he might happen to hang his hat. And as for those countries that have never had direct experience of what tyranny, repression or officially
imposed obscurantism are, they have always exported cultural figures as copiously as they have taken them in. Why William James stayed in the United States and his brother Henry never came home is
a question open to a hundred answers, but sensibly the Americans long ago gave up on wondering which of them did their country the bigger favour, because it became evident that they both belonged
to their country only in the sense that their country belonged to the world.

A nation’s culture either joins it to the world or it is not a culture. Although Australians should try to be less impressed with the size of their country on the map, and remember that it
contains far fewer people than Mexico City, they are right to be proud of how large their little nation looms in the world’s consciousness. The expatriates have played a part in that. It
might not be the biggest part, or even a necessary one – Les Murray got the whole of the modern world into his marvellous verse novel
Fredy Neptune
without ever leaving home for long
– but they have certainly played a part. Which is not to say that a nation’s expatriate Creative Artists need always be thought of as ambassadors, or think of themselves that way. The
place they came from, even if it is the first thing in their hearts, might be the last thing on their minds, and they might remain convinced that they came away only to commit what Franc¸oise
Sagan once called the crime of solitude. But if they commit it with sufficient grace, their homeland will claim them anyway, in the course of time.