Mug Shots (16 page)

Refuses to get off butt

Here we go again: the Melbourne Theatre Company decides to do my latest effort—
Marsupials
, a four-hander, with Carol Burns, Sean Scully and Max Gillies, with Matthew King condemned to the kind of role actors hate—a walk-on part as an estate agent near the end of the play.

The quartet sit at a trestle table in the rehearsal room and read the script, while there's frantic thumps and shouts from next door—John Bell's directing Shakespeare, and their ranting invades our humble space. I time the reading. To my horror it only lasts sixty minutes. ‘Business, old chap,' says Bruce Myles, the director, ‘stage business. We'll plump it up.'

A month later, there's a technical rehearsal at the theatre in Russell Street. The lighting designer, a legendary figure, sits slumped and abstracted, a finger deep in a nostril—then becomes suddenly alert, barking instructions to a nervous assistant. Larry Eastwood's swinging wall panels are too heavy, and threaten to revolve unstoppably when the actors push them to enter or exit. Myles curses and blames the production manager, a large, balding man who trips over a briefcase each time he comes down the aisle.

On the Tuesday
Marsupials
opens, I ask Carmel if she'd mind if I sat alone up the back. She's pleased, having had to sit next to my neuroses all her married life. Will the jaded first-night audience laugh at the punchlines? They do. Do they notice the pale backstage arm that sneaks out at every entrance, to stop the revolving wall in its tracks? They don't.

Afterward is always the hardest, enduring the half-truths of family and friends (‘loved it'), but this time praise is drowned out by drama. Barry Dickins rushes into the foyer and lunges at me with an upraised bottle of wine. ‘You put me in your bloody play!' he shouts. But no way is ‘the gummy little poet with the pudding-basin haircut', I insist, him. He's calmed down, lowers the bottle from over my head, I buy him a drink, and we all move on to a supper at Clare and Cameron Forbes's.

But what of Len Radic, Mr Weights and Measures? In the
Age
, Len puts
Marsupials
on his beam balance and finds it lacking in avoirdupois, but audiences didn't agree with him. Then, halfway through the season, when box offices sometimes flag, a gift: ‘Denizens of “the end of the world” savage playwright', ran the headline in the
Age
. ‘In his latest play', the report continues, ‘Barry Oakley calls Carnegie “outer Mongolia”, and, in a slightly more charitable moment, “a mean little wooden suburb”.' The reporter makes the journey to the end of the world herself and interviews a few unhappy locals. A local real-estate agent is pointed: ‘Oakley might have seen more if his nose had not been in the air. Maybe he never got off his butt and made the effort.'

I admit to the reporter that I might have been jaundiced by the fact that my wife and I spent years there bringing up five kids in a cold-water weatherboard, but the publicity is priceless.

Monster escapes

One January day in 1981 Angela Wales, director of the Australian Writers' Guild, rings to say she's worried no one's going to turn up to meet a visiting Yugoslav playwright—could I help? So I go in to the Guild office: a handful of us around the table, with cheese and cask white. The guest is a worn-looking man with a large ginger moustache. With him are two apparatchiks—one suited and smooth, the other with a boxer's face.

The phrase ‘cultural exchange' comes into play a lot and our local Marxist playwright is all over them, telling them what a boring middle-class theatre we have here—‘a cash transaction, nothing more'. The apparatchiks nod approvingly, but not the man they're minding, whom I'll call Victor, who gets more and more irritated: ‘Don't you think you pay to go in in Yugoslavia?' The local Marxist playwright, taken by surprise, digs himself deeper. ‘The law of competition dominates everything in this country. We've got to get rid of the operators and the bureaucrats and get to the people. Get them on side! Show them the realities! Help create socialism!'

‘Listen!'—Victor is angry now—‘Socialism
is
operators! Socialism
is
bureaucrats! I live under it!'

‘That is not necessarily the case,' says the smooth one. ‘Victor is getting excited.'

‘I am not excited!' shouts Victor. ‘What I say is true!'

‘Every society has its faults,' says the smoothie, now getting to his feet. ‘You must forgive us, but it is time to go home.'

There was more to come on the international front. Soon after, the Goethe Institute, Germany's cultural arm, announced that there were to be ‘German–Australian Writer Meetings'. Some German ones, including the patrician Hans Magnus Enzensberger, would be joining their Australian equivalents ‘in a live-in symposium in Kallista, in the Dandenong Ranges, to discuss common problems'.

There were nine of us facing six of them across a huge table. Alarmingly, a microphone was set up in front of each speaker. Every banality was to be recorded. At the warm-up drinks, one of our group asked Professor Reinhard Lettau, a myopic blinker in gold-rimmed glasses, if he'd met any poets during his recent stay in California. ‘Perverts?' he said. ‘Did I meet any perverts?'

This sounded promising, but it didn't last long. Soon a ­novelist was inflicting on us a long monologue (translated by Beate Josephi, one of the organisers) about the treachery of writers who give us gratuitous consolation by offering the illusion of order in a chaotic world, which we should be trying to change.

This had been preceded by a frightening morning where each of us had to explain, to the tape and the table, what we do and in what context we do it. Context was the big German thing, so if one wrote novels one was expected to give a brief history of Australian fiction. Since drama sounded easier, I focused on that, because there wasn't all that much of it.

The next day we were permitted to stop worrying about literature and go on a bush walk instead—though this was objected to by a tubby, bearded anarchist playwright called Federspiel, who seemed to be here on sufferance. ‘Fuck Nature!' he shouted, and stayed behind and sulked. The rest of us set off into Sherbrooke Forest in search of lyrebirds. The Germans, their well-cut overcoats draped over their shoulders, proceed carefully (snakes? spiders?) in a blue haze of Gauloise smoke, and relish the crystalline purity of the air. Our guide creeps forward through the bush, holds up a hand, and we pause—to take in, right on cue, a lyrebird's lilts, leaps, cascades and gurgles, as every bush bird is mimicked.

That night, songs around the piano, with the poet Fay Zwicky at the keyboard, ‘Waltzing Matilda' is played and sung, and its status as Australia's unofficial national anthem explained. ‘Now it's our turn,' says Lettau, whose complexion has become inflamed after a couple of drinks, and he sits down and plays ‘Deutschland Über Alles'.

‘That is ours,' he says.

‘Many people'—I had also drink taken—‘don't like that song.'

Lettau looked up at me, face and gold rims gleaming. ‘I yam sick of professional anti-Germans.'

‘I don't like the words.'

‘You don't know what they mean.'

‘A lot of people in the last war,'—it's out! It's mentioned!—‘knew only too well what they meant.'

Beate taps me under the table to desist, and I do, but the monster has been released, and I feel as if I'm dragging the whole conference down around me, though we shake hands and the subject is changed.

Then it's open day, and people come up from Melbourne and gather on the lawn in the sun, including the reporter Jan McGuiness who, to my horror (the monster has escaped the building!) puts the little upset in her
Age
diary the next morning. It has become The Incident. Then a man called Benno comes up and says, ‘I hear you are an outspoken Australian writer. Can you answer zeez questions please for ze German press agency?' (The monster has left the country and is heading home!) I tell him there's no story—simply a misunderstanding—a nothing.

‘A mountain, how you say, out of a dunghill?'

‘Quite.'

On the last morning, I apologise to the gathering. ‘A misunderstanding,' says the novelist Judah Waten, repository of Jewish wisdom.

Judah Waten ponders a takeover at the German–Australian Writers' Meeting. (Photograph John Tranter)

‘No, no,' says Hans Magnus, the prince in the cream linen suit. ‘You took us from the said to the unsaid, which is where these conferences should go.' Enzensberger, who's deferred to by his colleagues in a way unimaginable in this country, has spoken, and that's that. Federspiel, the fat anarchist, who's been bored the whole time, is now more bored than ever. ‘I haff a question,' he says. ‘Ven iz lunch?'

Censorship is back

Can you discuss literature out of existence? Workshop plays to death? Soon after this Teutonic talkfest, there's a playwrights' conference in Canberra, where promising plays are workshopped, with professional actors, directors, and curmudgeons called dramaturgs, whose job it is to make script suggestions that the writer almost certainly won't like.

As a dramaturg I scored, amongst others,
The Butterflies of Kalamantan
. The problem was that its author, Jennifer Clare, was a highly experienced actor who knew more about the ­business than we did, and didn't hesitate to let the actors, the director Alison Summers, and me know it. During the first rehearsal she leans over to me and says, in a stage whisper, ‘That's not the way I want it done, darling.'

The deficiencies in the script seem obvious, but Clare can't see them. Alison Summers—‘you're obviously new to the business, darling'—becomes upset and leaves the room afterwards in tears. A reconciliation meeting is arranged in the bar, but Clare, in black top, black slacks, dark glasses and resplendent silverware, represents unanswerable experience, against which both Alison and I seem powerless, and the play's problems are never sorted out. Give me a theatrical naif any time.

Boozing, backbiting and occasional bonking are normal at playwrights' conferences. What made this one special was a seminar on children's theatre, in which the woman representing Sydney's Nimrod Theatre formalised political correctness into commandments: you shall not show racism, sexism or classism in a favourable light; you may not reinforce stereotypes; you are not to write about issues (uranium mining, the killing of whales) unless you search for the causes behind them; you must not use outdated forms unless in a novel way. Worse, all this nonsense was corroborated by Alan John, Nimrod's reader of plays for adults, who warned that an author might be required to draw out the implications of his or her work.

The listeners, many of them writers, sat there and took it, which provoked me to launch an attack. Neither of you, I said, seem to understand the nature of imaginative writing: good plays tend to work by implication—bad ones are didactic. You object to censorship from the right, while applying it yourselves from the left. Ron Blair got to his feet and backed me up, but the rest remained mute. Maybe they were stunned (or wanted their work performed).

It got worse. We witnessed a performance of
Sex and Violets
, by a dapper and elderly Bob Herbert, which featured a ­skeleton, subtly called Deadie. Halfway through the interminable work, Deadie suddenly drooped forward, as if it too, like the audience, was falling asleep. It wasn't a success, but there was no need for what followed in the discussion. Neil Armfield announced that ‘the play embodied attitudes that were offensive and distasteful', which left poor Bob, up on stage, blinking under his black eyeshade. Then Armfield administers the coup de grace: ‘It should never have been put on.'

The Australian National Playwrights' Conference of 1981 spelt out what many knew implicitly: the days of censorship were back, but now they entered stage left.

Writer disappears

Meanwhile up north, at Griffith University, Brisbane, another kind of miasma was descending on literature, its sinister messages encrypted in impenetrable jargon. Try to get to the end of this: ‘It is useful to consider that the laborious accumulation of currently possible signs of verisimilitude is always undertaken within the operative criterion of a regime of signification, that is within historically determinate conditions of intelligibility of these signs. However, the notion of conceptual paradigms raises questions in its own right, given its possible representations both as a deep structure of biography and as a totalising principle identified with some general cultural unity or mindset.'

This, and pages more like it, was written by David Saunders who, at the time, ‘lectured on text discourse' at the university, and it was he who met me at Brisbane airport when I was invited to be writer-in-residence there. It is taken from a collection called
Griffith Papers on Biography
, which I regretted not having read before accepting the appointment. I was going to a place infested by semioticians and deconstructionists, where the word writer was put in inverted commas.

Saunders, a tall and sombre South Londoner, explained to me as we drove to the campus that at Griffith they cut in sections across the disciplines, which seemed to suggest an absence of roots. Andrew Field (biographer and friend of Vladimir Nabokov) told me later the result was that there were no disciplines at all. The semioticians had left him isolated; the only communication between him and the rest (he was a professor there) was by notes left in pigeonholes. They theorised about biographies while he wrote them. He was working on one about the writer Djuna Barnes, and carried the manuscript around with him, hanging from his wrist by a leather strap, as if the semioticians might savage it.

I was given a comfortable office, and left to puzzle over why they would invite someone to take up residence whose creative function they didn't believe in. Field, whose isolation induced sensitivity to these things, warned me about the thinness of the office walls, and he was right. Frightening phrases from next door tutorials came through—frame analysis; proxemic behaviour; intransitivity—from my adenoidal English neighbour. I was trapped in a Malcolm Bradbury novel.

I was here, to use their jargon, to provide epistemic difference: a fall-guy in residence. Innocent biographers were also invited, including the American scholar Deirdre Bair, whose Beckett biography had only recently appeared. In a seminar, she told us that in the course of her researches she'd met a niece of Beckett's, who asked her if she'd clean out a cupboard, which was filled with rubbish she'd one day get round to burning. Bair unearthed a shoebox of Beckett's letters to his friend Thomas McGreevy at a crucially unhappy time in his life, and was so affected she ‘went into the bathroom and vomited'.

What were these Griffith kids being taught? I went to a lecture by the professor of philosophy, another American, and was appalled enough to take notes. His subject was Institutional Determinants of Text Production, in which we got a cartoon version of the conflict between Galileo and the Catholic Church: ‘Galileo beat the pants off the Jesuit theologians, and then stuck his finger in the eye of Pope Urban VIII. So the Pope brought down the hammer quick smart … let me write some of those words up here for you—papacy, theologian, Jesuit …'

At another lecture, Herbert Grierson's famous
Night Mail
documentary was shown, with script by W.H. Auden (‘This is the night mail/ over the border/ bringing with it/ cheques and postal order'). The lecturer's theme was neither the visual nor verbal language, but how the production patronised and exploited the working classes. In literature, nothing was studied before the early nineteenth century, because that marked the beginning of working-class awareness. When I asked one student why she didn't do Shakespeare, ‘We don't do ­eighteenth-century writers,' was her reply.

In the words of another visitor, an engaging professor of literature called Callahan, from Portland, Oregon: ‘Man, don't talk to me about all this bullshit—I can't take another word of it. These kids are being sold a bill of goods.'

The students at the University of Queensland were luckier, and I escaped there as often as I could. The University of Queensland Press was my publisher at the time, and wanted Bernard Hickey, a visiting academic, to launch their edition of two of my plays. ‘Academic' goes nowhere near describing Bernard. ‘Manic leprechaun', Desmond O'Grady's phrase for him, is closer.

Bernard lectured in Australian literature at the University of Venice and approached his task like an evangelist. Everything, and everyone, was wonderful. There were the wonderful Oakleys, the wonderful Fosters, Tranters, O'Gradys, and anyone else connected with the subject.

Bernard's Venetian hospitality was indeed wonderful, as we discovered in 1975. He'd found us a pensione, taken us to regional restaurants and once to a party at a palazzo, where he'd rushed at various notables as if to attack them, and then finally cornered the hostess—‘The Countess Loredana,' he shouted at us, emitting a delighted giggle, ‘translator of Patrick White!' He was unfailingly kind to visiting Australian writers, who sometimes rewarded him by putting him into their fiction (or in my case, a play). He was irresistible material.

Bernard agreed to launch the book of plays, and didn't let us down. Dressed in an outfit of belted denim with flaps and buckles at the breast pockets, he resembled a portly package. He pronounced the slim volume unequivocally wonderful, and likened its author to the Latin satirist Juvenal.

Andrew Field, the author, and the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Queensland bemused by Bernard Hickey's garment.

Bernard, a man whom it was impossible to dislike, had developed an Italian attitude to what he called ‘the authorities', and made regular visits to Australia to cultivate them. He told me after the launch ‘it was of particular moment' that I'd had a conversation with the university's vice-chancellor, and that this at all costs should be followed up. Was it about your work? he asked. I told him that it wasn't. I'd learned that the vice-chancellor had flown in one of the ancient Swordfish biplanes that crippled the battleship
Bismarck
in the face of withering fire. His regard for me was as nothing compared with mine for him.

There had to be a confrontation with the Griffith semioticians, and it came near the end of my stay, when John O, another staff member, gave me a goodbye dinner. Mike Harris, my office neighbour, was there with his wife, one or two others and, fortunately, Callahan, so I wasn't totally outnumbered. We were three drinks in before hostilities commenced.

It was up to me to open the bowling. ‘These kids you're supposed to be teaching—they don't even know about the Renaissance—and one of them thought Shakespeare was an eighteenth-century writer.' Mike shook his head wearily and gave me a patronising smile. ‘We look at structures, not periods. It's not who did the writing—it's how it's constructed.'

‘Jesus,' said Callahan, ‘constructed. Are we talking building sites or what?' Mike was still smiling, but now it was an irritated smile. What tiny teeth he had!

‘Social forces construct the writer, and therefore the work. You're way out of date on theory.'

Callahan was getting angry too. ‘So tell me this—this writer here. Why'd you invite him, when you don't believe in writers?'

‘Yes, we do. Who's better equipped to explain the forces that shape him than the writer himself?'

The table had gone quiet, and they now looked at me. ‘You've got it all arse-up,' I said. ‘A good writer is exactly the opposite—someone who transcends these forces.'

Mike looked at me pityingly. ‘Bourgeois individualism I'm afraid.'

The bourgeois individualists left shortly afterwards. As we went back to our college rooms in a taxi, both of us a little the worse for wear from alcohol and argument, Callahan told me he'd had enough.

‘I'm getting out of here,' he said. ‘Man, you want to hole up in your room then do the same. Get out. Before you think and talk like they do.' (I survived, did my nine weeks, and
came home
.)