Craft: Clive James Study #8: In Munich

The movement of Clive James' "Postcard from Munich" (available for free here) involves a brilliant series of transitions, from James’ sensory perceptions of the city, to illustrations of two of its histories (the Nazi history and the influence of the Wittelbachs), to the authors’ personal response to Munich (as a culture-conscious Australian, and as an Australian, recall, who travels with a keen sense of history as series of debt-creating relationships). Running gags about Wagner, opera, Ludwig II, bad hats, and beer, and sustained visual allegories based on the presence of light and water in the city further help to unify what might otherwise be a piece straining under the density of its content.

A list of quotes from the piece helps to illustrate what I mean, and also, I think, something of the point that Clive James makes about style and content in Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, mentioned in the last post before this one. Like Hughes, James doesn't put content ahead of form. The two must go hand-in-hand, because their combination creates the basis for James' particular mode of analysis:

• “Narrowly personal though it might sound to say so, the Nazis have always got on my nerves."
• “Ludwig II, as well as his demented castles in the environs, built a winter garden on the roof of the Residenz and in full regalia looked like Oliver Hardy wearing a Gobelins tapestry topped off with a dead polar bear.”
• Of Nymphenburg: “The landscape flows through the main building like a lake, lakes glitter in the landscape like mirrored floors, and there are pavilions full of mirrors like frozen waterfalls.”

The last of these three quotes reminds us that, for James, landscape and history are almost the same thing:

• “In the winter sunlight the lakes around the city shone like silver paint. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned himself in one of them, impelled by a potent cocktail of schizophrenia and undiluted Wagner.”
• “I left Nymphenburg walking on air, which was bad training for where I was going next. The Amalienburg epitomises 1,000 years of Munich’s history. The concentration camp at Dachau does the same for the Thousand Year Reich, which luckily didn’t last the advertised distance, although it contrived to express itself memorably during the short time available. Dachau is a whole district, so the answer to the question why they didn’t change the name is that it would be like changing the name of Clapham. But Clapham never had a concentration camp in it.”
• After visiting Dachau: “Hitler’s sole lasting positive achievement was to cure the old Right of its opposition to democracy.”

And that reading landscape as history is one way of better understanding culture:

• “What haunts Munich, as it haunts all Germany, is the presence of an absence. There is continual talk of Kultur."
• “The Allied air raids reduced it to a sea of rubble, but much of it has been rebuilt with the special care lavished on the past by those who have been injured by the present.”
• “The strange feeling that you’ve seen it all before is not quite accurate, since even the Tsarist summer palaces outside Leningrad aren’t as exuberant as this. You haven’t seen it all before, you’ve heard it all later – in the music of Mozart, two of whose operas were premièred in Munich, one of them in the Cuvilliés theatre attached to the Residenz.”
• At a portrait gallery: “Carolina Countess von Holstein aus Bayern, we may now note, had a waist the size of a wedding ring and shoulders like a Green Bay Packers linebacker, but her breakfast television pout still rings bells.” [Here, James showing off that, culturally, he knows how to slum it.]

As I discussed in my post about James' poem "Occupation: Housewife", he travels as the indebted Australian, and I think one of the reasons his travel writing is so densely packed with history and culture is that he is always accumulating, his learning and breadth of experience a part-payment for his parents' sacrifice:

• “Having worked out which of the Führerbau’s windows must belong to Hitler’s corner office, I tried to look like a music student, walked confidently up the monumental interior staircase, and pushed open the door of room 105, in which the Munich treaty was signed. There was nobody in there except a Canadian girl called Monica practising the piano. Once the room had contained Mussolini along with Goering: a tight fit. Born in 1959 (‘that’s the year when all the stars were right’), Monica was ready to suspend her studies while I fossicked in the distant past. I stood on the balcony and reviewed a big parade of strutting spooks all wearing the same sort of hat. The door to the left must lead to Hitler’s office. I eased it open and found a string quartet playing Schubert.”
• “But the important lesson has already been learned: once power has been seized, it is too late to protest, even for the heroic – and most people are not that. Most people are not imaginative either, and can’t be blamed for it. How much atonement is enough?”

Craft: Clive James Study #7 - The Metropolitan Critic

My seventh study of Clive James' writing takes me to his criticism and to his (early) self-identification as a "metropolitan critic", a job description that he used for the well-known American literary critic Edmund Wilson (in an essay published anonymously in the Times Literary Supplement), but which was also a role in which he "fancied himself", as he later put it.

Before I look at one of James' essays, I want to acknowledge James Shapiro's somewhat negative review (in the New York Times) of James' The Essential Essays, 1968-2002. Shapiro makes the important point that James' criticism will probably not stand the test of time, because James, like his hero Wilson, has not contributed a theoretical concept that can be useful to readers in future contexts.

We need to decide whether critical work which has plainly done so much to influence its time vanishes with its time or continues. To continue, it must have done something beyond maintaining or correcting taste, important as these functions are: it must have embodied, not just recommended, a permanent literary value. (James, "The Metropolitan Critic", 1974)

Shapiro suggests that it is just this "permanent literary value" that is missing in James' criticism, and that James is too concerned with the business of "correcting taste" to be able to develop a lasting (or essential) collection of essays. James' correction of taste seems often rather harsh, expressed in a style of sarcasm that buys laughs but not necessarily permanence.

I think Shapiro is right. While James' prose is faultless and his taste is often very good, he is too much at pains to prove himself as the critic at large. Thus, while his responses are generally the workings out of a sensitive, intelligent reader with a finer turn of phrase than most of us could manage, they are seldom the workings of a person with a lifelong commitment to challenging his first understandings of culture and and its meaning. But while this critical stance leaves the essays feeling transient - trapped in the moment when James got it, or got himself - it is a stance that doesn't necessarily detract from James' travel writing.

More on that in a post to come. Let's turn first to the James reviewing style, which if "against interpretation" is also intelligent, fast-paced, and driven by a commitment to his style. Take this passage:

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. ("A Death in Life", 1987)

What is the point of this paragraph? I suppose merely that good writing is humane, sympathetic, well-crafted - hardly a new or particularly insightful idea. But James has put a lot of work into getting the precise expression of that point right, especially in the note, the unimaginably inhumane is brought to book without making us give up on humanity. It is true, though, as James writes, that there are degrees of anguish which only style can make us contemplate, and so he is careful to show us his style credentials. Essentially, James is being a wit again, dazzling us not so much with the force of analysis as with the way its phrased. And this, he is adding in his comments about The Fatal Shore, is just as important.

Having now read much of James' non-fiction, I suspect he writes to lines, good sentences that he perfects in his mind and then builds paragraphs around. I don't think there's much wrong with this - from a pacing viewpoint, there is much right about it - but I have found myself becoming practiced at waiting for the beautiful phrase or thought, the one that James got right first and then built out from. Here are some from his 1986 review of Bob Geldof's autobiography:

Bob Geldof's autobiography could not be more personal if he had written it himself.

Geldof's sense of humour lacks the calculation to make you laugh.

When a pop act becomes successful there are only two kinds of money it can earn - not as much as you might think and more than you can believe.

Being such modern young people they had a baby to find out whether they wanted to get married.

He was precocious in a society where precocity was antisocial.

These are all great lines, but also perhaps a little too good: clever writing that reveals such a lot about the writing process. So what? Merely that James has it in mind to entertain his reader, and believes, like Robert Hughes, that good style is a precondition of a proper understanding. Perhaps one other thing: that good style matters if you're correcting others.

And so, I think, does openness, and the fact that Clive James likes books by Robert Hughes and Bob Geldof reminds us that one of the features of his critical oeuvre has been a willingness to move across the borders between popular and elite culture that constrain many critics. That wall came down early in James' writing, and, as we will see in his writing about Germany, helps him greatly when it comes to writing postcards.

Craft: Clive James Study #6 - TV Diarist

Not once did he lapse into a repetition of the unforgettable moment when he predicted that an athlete would shortly pull out the big one. He left that to Alan Weeks, who on the evening of the pairs figure-skating final duly delivered himself of a classic. ‘This might well be the night,’ mused Alan, ‘when Rodnina pulls everything out.’ Thereby confirming our suspicions about Russian female athletes. ("Unintelligibühl", 1976)

Early on in his career, Clive James attracted attention because of his sharp and very funny television criticism, typically presented as a diary column of his recent watching. The form allowed him to jump across stations and programmes with great freedom, and also to centre his criticism in terms of his own (however eratic) viewing patterns, crucial for James' comic style - a mix of light sarcasm and wit (classically, humour that comments as much as it produces laughter). The form of the diary permits James to make what are, after all, rather cursory and summary judgments of what he sees, just as tends to be the case when we watch television. (I know that, for this very reason, it is infuriating to watch TV with me.)

The big deal of the week was nude bathing at Brighton. The sky was the colour of washing-up water, the sea was the colour of what floats on top of washing-up water...

He was about a mile and half from the camera, but you could tell he had no pants on, unless some manufacturer has recently come up with a line of trunks in subdued shades of potato juice blotched with purple.

Somewhere in the middle of a marathon Agatha Christie mystery called Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (LWT) I had to go to Paris. Arriving in my hotel room just in time to switch on the American Grand Prix live from Long Beach, I watched the cars fall apart while the French equivalent of Murray Walker did his chose. But all the time a question was nagging me: Why didn’t they ask Evans?

 ("Nude Bathing in Britain", 1980)

Whatever Olivier had done to his front teeth left his long top lip curving downwards in a fulsome volute on each side, producing a ducky look to go with his quacky sound, since for reasons unknown he had chosen to use a speeded-up version of his Duke of Wellington voice. ("A Pound of Flash", 1974)

The last quote comes from James' viewing of Jonathan Miller's Merchant, which is perhaps given a firmer pounding than other shows because of its own underlying assumptions about being good. And, like good-for-you art, good-for-you politics is set for ridicule.

One of the leading characteristics of the not-quite-bright is their disastrous over-estimation of the role of intellect in political reality. This stricture applies full force to Women's Lib, which seems intent on supposing that unintelligent behaviour is an aberration, and that naught but a male chauvinist con­spiracy stops Miss Australia realising the desirability of being Germaine Greer. ("Liberating Miss World", 1972)

And, in fact, I like James' television writing best when he is, despite himself, liking something that isn't very good, perhaps because that's when I'm most happy in front of the TV.

A monarch operating within understood limits, Hadleigh (Yorkshire) is the perfect squire, paternalistically careful of his tenantry’s welfare, beloved in the village, respected in the council, savage with the stupid, gentle with the helpless, gorgeous in his hand-made threads. In the current series, which in my house is watched with a pretence of scornful detachment somewhat nullified by the size of the bribes offered our elder child to hit the sack before it starts. Hadleigh has taken to himself a wife, played by Hilary Dwyer – one of those leggy jobs with Botticelli shoulders and no bra. ("Squire Hadleigh", 1973)

At some point, no matter how smart you were, it became okay to like television, and not merely in an ironic way. But TV remains a site of scorn, maybe because, at the same time as it seduces and hypnotises, it also presents a total institution (to borrow Foucault) of absurdity.

Gallantly providing David with the appropriate provocation to eloquence, a condom-clad competitor got his skis crossed at 100 m.p.h. and rammed the snow with his helmet. ("Quite Slim Indeed", 1979)

Sex changes and organ transplants dominated the week. I gave the sex changes a miss, on the grounds that what’s right for some of us leaves others of us crossing and uncrossing our legs while whistling nervously. Organ transplants, however, are of vital interest to all. ("Donor Kebab", 1980)

The Nine O’Clock News (BBC1) featured a gung-ho American officer talking of ‘the capability to project Marines ashore in a hostile environment as the case may be.’ His name was Colonel Looney. On Nationwide (BBC1), Frank Bough interviewed the man who pulls the ugliest faces in Britain. His name was Ron Looney. I merely present these facts, without comment. ("Snow Job", 1981)

Sometimes, television criticism is just television description, and there's a skill in not commenting too much. James understood this when he made his own television show, predictably enough about television. But it's an understanding that also comes through in his travel writing, which is where I began these studies and where I eventually hope to return. Description is often comment enough, especially if your default mode is a rather sharp one.

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Craft: Clive James study #5 - The Sentimental Son

Of course, there is more than one kind of travel, and I suppose one of the reasons we like to travel physically is because it enables a more ambitious journey of the mind to take place: our thoughts, which shouldn't really be hostage to stillness, are nevertheless liberated by physical movement and by encounters with the new, or, more relevant for this post, new encounters with the old.

James' poem "Occupation: Housewife" (available for free here) relates the poet's return to Sydney, the town of his upbringing and, in a way, the source of the debt that made it necessary for him to leave his hometown and make a name for himself as a writer living abroad - the "books, degrees, the money" that proclaimed his success. Now he is returning to visit his mother, to wait with her, "to what end we know". But, before the end (termed at the close of the poem as her going "out of this world"), James and his mother recall the Sydney of World War 2, when his father was serving abroad and his mother was "waiting for when / The Man Himself came back from Overseas".

For personal reasons, I find this poem a moving one - as for James, my father was absent from my life, and I think I understand something of the debt to that absence that James describes. But perhaps what is more interesting than me being able to relate to this work is the broader question of how James evokes a sense of nostalgia and time travel: it is not, after all, possible to rely on the readership consisting of those with absent fathers.

Instead, he begins the poem with two symbolic images that he will return to at the end. The first is the "Toni", a cheap perm that in the poem's first temporal setting (the War) is being advertised in "paragraphs of technical baloney" as an alternative to the "Expensive Perm". (Throughout, James uses capitals to signal the higher, unquestionable status attached in the mindset of the day to certain objects.) The "Toni" fails, and within two hours the perm is as "limp as the spear-points of household germs". The second symbol of the age is home brewing, "another false economy" but also a source of humour - we get the story of "one mum" whose "copper blew its lid / Like Krakatoa". The resulting foam "murdered her hydrangeas at a stroke".

Relating these two symbols are the twin War concerns of going without and waiting. You went without real perms and real booze, and made do with the "Toni" and the home brew kit, no matter the consequences, in part because you were fortifying yourself to go without "The Man Himself", with "only the Yanks to offer luxuries / At a price no decent woman thought of then".

"She who had kept / Herself for him for so long" is the one whom James now visits, and together they trade "stories of the way things were" - the "Toni" and the explosion in the backyard. And the reason that this poem can be emotionally meaningful for all readers is that the moment of James' return to Sydney is laden with the symbols of the past - the material markers of time passing establish the sense of loss. We understand now that there is more than one journey being made, most significantly for James the one that relates all of his travels to his mother's staying home, her waiting.

I have recently learnt, from reading Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), that a common characteristic of grief is expecting the lost one to return. This, of course, is not altogether the same as waiting. But grief, going without, and waiting are linked. In the case of "Occupation: Housewife", they are linked by the journey back.

Deep & Deeper: A Letter from Brisbane

We’re drawing to the close of a day when, thankfully, the water level has peaked lower than earlier forecasts had predicted. There is some reprieve for at least those who are on the margins of the floodwaters, where it is still lapping against front doors. In the most extreme emergencies, homes have been picked up and washed away. Today, one hopes, marks the end of such disasters and so the end of the first climax of the crisis as a whole, the flood peak. But immediately another story begins about the extent of the damage and its future impact on Brisbane life. The climax of that story is a long way off.

I went down to Rosalie and Milton today, well-known parts of the inner suburbs of Brisbane. From the University of Queensland campus at St Lucia through to Toowong, Auchenflower and Lang Park, a large football stadium, homes and business have been inundated. Like everyone, I’ve followed this on the ABC’s 24-hour coverage, but more urgently on Facebook, where my friends and colleagues regularly post pictures and videos of lost University streets, the parks and cafés of my student life, and most depressingly their own homes under the watermark. There’s a grim sequence to the status updates: losing power; the water is close; being told to evacuate; staying with friends; have heard my street is going under.

Common to a great many of the accounts that I’ve heard is the feeling that this is too surreal for words. I wasn’t entirely sure what people meant by this until today at Rosalie village, one of the worst-hit areas in my part of town. I go there all the time: my two young sons love the playground at Milton State School and the other parents there are easy to chat to—recently, I bumped into Matt Condon, the author of Brisbane, a memoir about the city that suddenly needs another chapter. There are two ice cream shops close by, and after ice cream you cross the road and pick up a loaf of bread at the bakery and a hot beef panang at Sing’s. It’s a rather too-fashionable area, yes, but in an Australian way: I’ve seen Darren Lockyer, a footballer, and news reader Andrew Lofthouse picking up their lattés there, but nothing more than that.

We lived there for six months after we first got back from Iceland. Finnur, my older son, had just had his first birthday. Each morning, we walked through the shops, at the bakery bought a biscuit for Finnur and a sausage roll for me, and then spent an hour in the playground before returning to our apartment, the sun normally becoming too strong by nine or ten.

And here, pictured left, is what we found this afternoon. A pond formed in among the shops, fitting perfectly and seemingly turning the village into props, water features.

Unheimlich, I thought, is what people mean when they say it feels surreal. Or at least that is the feeling that I experienced down at Rosalie village this afternoon: the uncanny sense of seeing a world as familiar as this one turned into a different world, with all the qualities of its former incarnation still present.

And the uncomfortable strangeness of it was very present in the small groups of sightseers that gathered at the police parameters. It was carnival, certainly, if without the sense of celebration or abandonment then with all its bemusement and upsidedowness. And it was this spirit of good-willed, quiet bemusement that suddenly, for me, made true the ceaseless media claims that have inevitably followed the flood, that tell us that the flood will make us stronger, draw the community together, help us to re-asses what really matters in our lives. Actually, the flood has brought out the quiet irony and good will of Brisbane people, to me ever-present qualities.

Paddlers outside F Gate at Lang Park Stadium

The pool hall next to Lang Park

What is the deeper meaning of a flood? My first impulse over the last three days has been to answer that there is no deeper meaning. A flood is a body of water that disrupts our lives, while a body of water that doesn't disrupt our lives is merely a river, a lake, an ocean. But this evening I'm not so sure. The erasure is incomplete, and the familiar remains alongside the foreign. It's disquieting, uncomfortable, but it also brings a strange sense of recognition.

Visitors and Waterways

A little while ago, my mother, who babysits for us a couple of days a week, noticed that we had a visitor. In the afternoons, when the light on the tall grass behind our townhouse in Brisbane begins to brown and soften, a small wallaby with auburn fur appears and makes a snack of something that lies about ten feet from our clothes line. What is that Robert Frost line? – something there is that doesn’t love a wall; in this case, let’s say that something there is that loves our clothes line.

And we love him (I call it a him, although I don't really know). My young sons, of course, are completely entranced, but dare I say that they don’t appreciate the magic quite as much as us adults, who’ve become accustomed to not seeing wildlife in such close proximity and with such confidence about us. I suppose he has been checking us out for months, because now that we have finally noticed him, his body language expresses a kind of about time attitude.

And suddenly the same hill that we back onto is the source of a seemingly endless torrent of rain water, which swells at the base of our townhouse and eventually makes its way into the garage: something there is that doesn't love a wall. Water does not like my garage wall.

Perhaps predictably the papers have called the last weeks of flood biblical, and it doesn’t help that we know that the worst (for Brisbane) is to come on Thursday, when the flood waters will exceed the records set in 1974, when the city had its last great flood - it is coming, predicted. Are the papers asking whether we are somehow at fault? Or is it just that there isn't another way of describing a really, really big flood.

And, anyway, Noah probably had more to worry about than God’s judgments. He also had a boat full of animals, who, if not entirely spared the condemnation, were at least permitted coupling survivors. I have been wondering whether our visiting wallaby has a mate in the hill behind us, and whether they have heard me digging out the clay detritus behind my garage wall, the sludge that comes down the hill and raises the water levels.

The story of the arc is, I suppose, the story of how human and animal pathways meet. I am waiting for the wallaby to reappear after the floods have subsided and the grass is again faded by the harsh Brisbane sun.

A flooded sign: "Please do not feed the animals"