A Writer's World (42 page)

I admired him immensely. He hardly ever fell over, he seldom missed, and he did everything with a dexterous assiduity. When I asked him his name he spelt out GORGE with his finger on the rail of the rink; when I asked him if he was enjoying himself he just nodded grimly; and in my mind’s eye I saw him thirty years from now, exploding into a company meeting perhaps, with an irresistible take-over, or relentlessly engineering the resignation of a rival under-secretary. I kept my eye firmly on him as I walked out of Iceland, for instinct told me he was assembling slush for me.

Australia was not built by kindness, nor even by idealism. Convicts, not pilgrims, were its Fathers, and Sydney remains rather steelier than it looks. It is not a very sentimental city, and not much given I fear to unrequitable kindness. There is a certain kind of Sydney face, especially among women, which at first sight looks altogether straight, square and reliable, but which examined more carefully (surreptitiously if possible, over the edge of a newspaper from the next table) reveals a latent meanness or foxiness inherited surely, I tell myself in my romantic way, from the thuggery of the penal colonies.

Behind the pleasant façade of this city, harsher things are always happening. Inexplicable political scandals excite the newspapers. Numberless Royal Commissions investigate improprieties. Through this apparently egalitarian society stalks a handful of gigantic capitalists, with tentacles that seem to extend into every cranny of city life, and make you feel that whatever you are doing, whether you are buying an ice-cream or booking an airline ticket, you are making the same rich Australians richer yet. Immigrants say that your older Ocker is a terrible bigot still, and even now they tell me a foreign accent often gets snubs and indignities – and not only a European accent, for the favourite Sydney witticism of the day is
the New Zealand Joke (‘How d’you set up a New Zealander in a small business?’ ‘Give him a big one, and wait’).

Sydney people strike me as essentially cautious or suspicious in their social attitudes. They lack the gift of spontaneous welcome or generosity. They are too easily embarrassed. Invariably smiling and helpful though this citizenry seems, and quite exceptionally polite, I sometimes think that if I were in real trouble, friendless, destitute and passport-less in the streets, I might feel less abandoned in Manhattan. I considered making the experiment as a matter of fact, and presenting myself on the Circular Quay to beg passers-by for my ferry fare: but I remembered that look in the eye of the ladies at the next table, and lost my nerve.

Even now, two centuries after the event, a streak of bad origins is still apparent in Sydney. Truth will out! It has been smudged in the historical memory – if you can believe the Australians, none of the transported convicts ever did anything worse than poach a squire’s salmon, or tumble his daughter in the hay. It has been romanticized, too – in the figure of the larrikin for instance, the Sydney street urchin of ballad and anecdote who used to strut picturesquely about these streets in bell-bottom trousers and pointed shoes, fighting merry gang wars and picking pockets. Today it has been varnished over with layer upon layer of gentility and sophistication, but it is there all the same, and if you want to see it plain, try going to the park on a Sunday afternoon, when the Sydney soap-box orators give vent to their philosophies, and the hecklers to their interruptions. In most countries I love these arenas of free expression – they are rich in picaresque episode and eccentricity, and sometimes even in wisdom. I left Sydney’s Speakers’ Corner, though, with a shudder. The free speech was too grossly free, too crudely spiteful, sexist and foul-mouthed. The arguments were bludgeonly, the humour was coarse, and all around the soap-boxes there strode a horribly purposeful figure, wearing a beret tipped over his eyes, and holding a sheaf of newspaper, whose only purpose was to shout down every speaker in turn, whatever the subject or opinion, with a devastating loutishness of retort – never silent, never still, hurling offensive gibes at speaker and audience alike with a flaming offensive energy.

Now where, said I to myself, have I seen that fellow before? And with a pang I remembered: GORGE the indefatigable ice-slosher, up at the ice-rink.

Away to the west of Sydney, over a long innocuous hinterland of suburbs, neither ugly nor beautiful, neither poor nor rich, with Lebanese laundries,
and pubs with names like the Gladstone Arms or the Lord Nelson, and ladies in flowered housecoats exercising their dogs at lunch-time, and pizza houses with blown-up pictures of Vesuvius behind their counters, and streets called Myrtle Street and Merryland Road – out there beyond the western suburbs you can see the outline of the Blue Mountains. Snow falls up there sometimes, and log fires burn in resort hotels: and beyond them again, beyond Orange and Dubbo, there begins the almost unimaginable emptiness of Australia, extending mile after mile after mile of scrub, waste and desert into the infinite never-never of the aborigines. Nearly all Australia is empty. Emptiness is part of the Australian state of things, and it reaches out of that wilderness deep into the heart of Sydney itself, giving a hauntingly absent sense to the city, and restraining the responses of advertising executives in elevators.

The scrub is always near. The splodges of green everywhere make this metropolis feel, even now, like an interloper in the wasteland, and people commute daily into Sydney from country that is almost virgin bush. Only just outside the metropolitan limits, up on the Hawkesbury River, are communities that still cannot be reached by road, to which the mail goes out each day on a chugging river-boat, nosing its way among the creeks and channels, between woodlands where wallabies leap and koalas ruminate, to be unloaded on rickety wharfs at hamlets of shacks and bungalows, and hobbled away with by aged oystermen – the air-conditioned towers of Sydney itself barely out of sight, beyond the gum trees!

The sea everywhere, insidiously entering the city in a myriad inlets, seems a vacuous kind of ocean, which seldom brings the tang of a salt breeze into the downtown streets, and often looks to me indeed like fresh water all the time. The history of Sydney, like the history of Australia, is essentially blank, very little of interest ever having happened here, and there is a sort of bloodlessness even to the very success of the place, and a pallor to its style, and a curious suggestion of muffle even at rush-hour, which reminds one repeatedly of that immense desolation beyond the hills.

This sensation preoccupies many Australian artists, and affects me very strangely. Sometimes in Sydney I feel I am not looking directly at the city at all, but seeing it through glass, or perhaps reflected in a mirror. Its edges seem oddly ill-defined when I am in such a mood, its pellucid light is lacking in refraction, without the opacity of dust, breath, history and regret that hangs on the air of most great cities. The wind seems to have been filtered through some pale mesh of the south. Even the seafood,
however imaginatively garnished with strawberries or avocado, seems to lack the tang of the deep sea and the tides. Even the Australian language sometimes sounds to me echo-like, as though it is reaching me from far, far away, or out of another time.

Sydney can be exhilarating, but it is a
moderate
exhilaration. It can stir the heart, but not quite to the point of ecstasy. You do not dance along these streets, or thrill to the beat of the place. Its faces, in repose, are neither kind nor cruel, but just expressionless. People seldom seem surprised in Sydney, and for that matter they are seldom very surprising themselves: though it is astonishing that so grand a place should exist down here at all, so handsome, so complete a metropolis on the edge of nowhere, still it never gives the impression, as other young civic prodigies do, that it has burst irresistibly out of the sub-soil into life.

Here are two old Hungarians walking on a Sydney beach. They wear hats, camel coats and signet rings. They came here half a lifetime ago out of the shambles of Europe, and they have lived happily ever after. They escaped the murder of war and the miseries of communism to prosper in this peaceful haven of the Antipodes. Their wives are taking coffee at the Cosmopolitan – remember the two in furs, silent over their Camparis? Their sons, daughters and grandchildren are probably out in their boats. They are very lucky, and know it. ‘We are very lucky,’ they say. ‘Sydney is a beautiful city. Australia is the Best Country in the World.’ They do not say it
con
amore
, though, or even
cantabile
. They seem unlikely to kiss the soil they walk on, or raise their hands in gratitude to the Australian dream. ‘Let us hope the world stays in peace,’ they simply conclude, as if to say, let’s hope our luck lasts out – just give us ten more years, O God of the Southern Sun!

Most people like Australia, but in this city of the numbed reflex, the blank eye, few will open their hearts about the place.

Far up the coasts of Sydney, north and south of the Sydney Heads that form the spectacular portal of Australia, comfortable villas of the well-to-do lie encouched in fig trees, gums and lawns of buffalo grass. They are seldom ostentatious houses. They are not like the garden palaces of Cap d’Antibes, or the monastically enclosed pads of Hollywood. Though it is true that the Sydney
jeunesse
dorée
is given to things like flying by seaplane to take lunch in suburban restaurants, or giving birthday parties for favourite Ferraris, still history, temperament and politics have combined to ensure that this is not a city of conspicuous consumption. Its extremely
rich are seldom visible, if only because they are in Europe or California; and its glossiest mansions cannot be seen either, because they are country houses set in 25,000 acres of sheep country somewhere over the hills. All this gives the city an air of calm stability: the very idea of economic collapse, still less revolution, seems preposterous, as I look out of my hotel window now to see the white yachts at play in the harbour, yet another laughing horde of schoolchildren storming the terraces of the Opera House, and Kev at his window in his shirt-sleeves, preparing himself psychologically for the long jog home.

Short of another world catastrophe, I think, this place has reached its fulfilment. This is it. It will probably get richer, it will certainly get more Asian, but aesthetically, metaphysically, my bones tell me I am already seeing the definitive Sydney, the more or less absolute Australia. A few more tower blocks here, an extra suburb there, a louder Chinatown, more futuristic ferry-boats perhaps – otherwise, this is how Sydney is always going to be. That bland pallor of personality will survive, that seen-through-a-glass quality, and visitors from the north will always be able to fancy, as they look out at the harbour’s odd foliage and wide skies, that they have been deposited upside-down on the obverse of the world. The strain of shyness, the old streak of the brutal, will be held in balance still: another zealot will always be collecting slush at the ice-rink, another generation of satisfied entrepreneurs will ask destiny for just another decade of happiness, just long enough to live out their lives in the Best Country in the World.

I have been at pains to draw the warts of Sydney in, but on the whole, I have to say, few cities on earth have arrived at so agreeable a fulfilment. Those old Hungarians are right – they are very lucky people, whose fates have washed them up upon this brave and generally decent shore. But just as no man is a hero to his valet, so no city is a paragon to its inhabitants, especially at the end of a hard day in the office, and by 5.30 Kev’s morning euphoria has long worn off. The ferries down there are jammed to the gunwales with commuters. The bridge looks solid with traffic. It is drizzling again. Bugger it, Kev remembers, tonight’s the night for Andrew and Marge – avocados again, you can bet your life, and they’ll probably bring that snotty brat Dominic to crawl around the table. ‘Night, Mr Evans.’ Night, Avril, silly cow. ‘Night, Kev.’ Night, Jim, you pot-bellied Ocker. ‘Just before you go, Kev, heard this one? There’s this New Zealander …’

Jeez this rain is miserable. Get out of the road, you silly sod. Christ, who dreamed up that Opera House? (We all know who paid for it, don’t we?)
Avocado and prawns, you can bet your life. What was that woman on about in the elevator? Warm Salad! Shit! Look at that traffic! Look at that madman in the Fairmont! Who’d live in a town like this, I ask you. Warm Salad! We must all be bloody loonies …

‘Kev! Kev, is that you? Marge and Andrew are here, dear, and they’ve brought little Dominic with them.’

At first, with its spiked and stippled towers above the ice-cold river, Ottawa reminded me of Stockholm. Then on a windy Sunday afternoon I caught the savour of frying potatoes from a chip wagon in Confederation Square, and was transported for a moment to Aberdeen. And finally I found myself thinking ever and again of Cetinje.

Cetinje? Cetinje was an obscure mountain village of Montenegro until, in the nineteenth century, the princes of that country made it their capital, supplied it with palace and opera house, stately mall and proud memorial, and summoned to it the emissaries of the Powers. In no time at all it had legations on every other corner, while its rulers married so successfully into better-known monarchies of Europe, and implanted their personalities so ornately upon the little city, that in the end Cetinje found itself immortalized in
The
Prisoner
of
Zenda
as the capital of that indestructible kingdom, Ruritania.

I am not suggesting, dear me no, that there is any element of comic opera to Ottawa. No capital is more innocent of foolish pomp and feathered canopy. But often enough the city does seem to me, in its own self
deprecatory way, almost as exotic as Cetinje – almost as deeply in the middle of nowhere, almost as fiction-like in its nuances, just as well equipped with the metropolitan trappings, as well supplied with home-grown heroes, and embellished at least as adequately with halls of government and diplomacy.

Consider, before we go any further, a few improbable facts. In Ottawa mankind ate its first electrically cooked meal. In Ottawa one of the world's first bi-directional elevators takes visitors slightly askew up the parliamentary tower. In Ottawa I was offered one day, without a smile, pears poached in Earl Gray tea. Ottawa mints the coins of Papua New Guinea. Ottawa is inscribed all over with logos, acronyms and cabalistic initials, and is dotted with buildings named for dead knights – the Sir Richard Scott Building, the Sir Guy Carleton Building, the Sir John Carling Building … An eminent prime minister of this capital maintained spiritualist contact with his departed terrier, Pat. The head of state to which Ottawa now owes allegiance lives several thousand miles away across an ocean, but its first presiding authority was the Great Hare of the Ottawa Indians, lop-eared creator of all things.

Isn't it a bit like Ruritania? I felt repeatedly in Ottawa that fantasy, or at least originality, was trying to break through, kept in check always by the Canadian genius for the prosaic; and I was gratified to discover not only that the distinguished Ottawa law firm of Honeywell and Wotherspoon actually lists a partner named E. Montenegro, but that the Anglican cathedral in Sparks Street, believe it or not, was designed by King Arnoldi. Could anything be more Cetinje than that?

Certainly, for a start, no half-mythical Balkan metropolis was ever more baffling in its arrangements than Ottawa, capital of the most famously logical and sensible of modern states. If you stand exactly in the middle of the Alexandra bridge, spanning the Ottawa River in the middle of this conurbation, you may experience a decidedly disorienting sensation – may well wonder indeed where in the world you are. Have a care, before you move an inch. Your left foot is certainly subject to the common law familiar to all English-speaking travellers, but in some respects your right foot is subject to strictures of the Napoleonic Code. If a policeman approaches you from the west, to charge you with improper loitering in a public place, he will probably charge you in French; if from the east, to make sure you are not planning acts of sabotage, probably in English.

Several separate legislatures are responsible for your right side, several others care for your left. Three different flags at least are flying all around you, and you stand simultaneously within the mandate, so far as I can
make out, of the Canadian federal government, the provincial governments of Ontario and Quebec, the National Capital Commission, the regional municipalities of Ottawa-Carleton and Outaouais, the city administrations of Hull and Ottawa, and for all I know half-a-dozen other boards and commissions that I have never heard of.

Outside Canada I doubt if one educated person in ten thousand could place Ottawa with the remotest degree of accuracy upon a blank map. Most foreigners might just as well do what Queen Victoria is supposed to have done when she chose this singular spot for Canada's capital, namely shut her eyes and stabbed the atlas with a hatpin. Even here on the bridge, if you are anything like me, you may feel hardly the wiser. You seem to be in a kind of extraterritorial limbo, swirled all about by overlapping administrations, rival bureaucracies, ambivalences of geography, politics, the obscurer reaches of history. Only the reassuring buildings of the Canadian confederacy, whose shape everybody knows from childhood stamp collections, make one moderately certain what city this is.

But ever-palpable is the immensity of the landscape all around – one of the most monotonous landscapes on earth, but one of the most challenging too. Bears sometimes turn up in Ottawa suburbs, beavers impertinently demolish National Capital Commission trees, the air is pellucid. Best of all, here and there around the capital you may see, as a white fuzz in a distant prospect, the fierce white waters of Canada – those thrilling hazards which have haunted the national imagination always, which have meant so much in the history of this wanderers' country, and which remind the stranger still, even when tamed with sightseeing bridges, picnic sites or explanatory plaques, that this is the capital of the Great Lone Land.

In some ways nothing is more dullening for Ottawa than being a capital. It has to reflect the mores, the aspirations, the styles of the country as a whole, and if there is one thing that is debilitating about Canada, it is the feeling that through no fault of its own this nation is neither one thing nor the other.

The British affiliations of Ottawa are fast fading, its citizens keep assuring me, naïvely supposing that I care twopence one way or the other. You would not know it in the church of St Bartholomew in New Edinburgh, a small and pretty Anglican church which has traditionally been the place of worship of Ottawa's governors general. This seems to me almost as much a shrine of monarchy as a house of God. The Governor-General has a crested pew, there are flags and escutcheons everywhere, generals and
noblemen are pictured all along the cloister, and there are signed portraits of royal persons, more normally to be found on the lids of grand pianos in ambassadorial residences, at the very portal of the sanctuary itself – as if to demonstrate once more that royalness really is next to godliness.

Still, despite those knighted office blocks there is a strongly republican feeling to this capital: even the royal crests on official buildings do not dismay me, for they seem to be merely expressions of constitutional convenience. If the old spell from the east is waning, the magnetism of the south is inescapable. Directly opposite the front gates of Parliament, like an ever-watchful command post, stands the United States embassy, flag on the roof, iron posts in the sidewalk to discourage suicide drivers who might otherwise be tempted to come careering down the path from the Peace Tower to explode themselves at the front door. The symbolism of the site is brutal, but not unjust, for there is scarcely a facet of this city, scarcely an attitude, an opinion, a restaurant menu, that is not recognizably affected by the presence of that vast neighbour to the south.

Ottawa first became nationally important as an
un
-American place. The Rideau Canal, around which the town coalesced, was built to give Canada a strategic route beyond the reach of predatory Americans. Today the US seems just down the road – if that. Nowhere in the world, of course, is now insulated against American culture. In Ottawa, though, there is no escaping the fact that the United States is physically close at hand too, almost in sight, like a huge
deus
ex
machina
just over the horizon. Working men in Ottawa have holiday homes in Florida – they call it simply ‘down south' – and half the people I meet in this city seem to have just come from, or be at that moment about to leave for, Washington, DC. They suggest to me pilgrims, coming and going always from a shrine, and some of them indeed speak of the experience with a solemnity almost reverential.

Not that Ottawans are at all American. They seem to me by and large quite particularly Canadian – in bearing, in manner, in response.

I went one evening to a public citizenship court, at which newcomers to the city, having completed the necessary preliminaries, were sworn in as Canadian citizens. The ceremony took place in a cavernous echoing hall, like the most gigantic of all parish assembly rooms, beneath the stadium of the Civic Centre. Was there ever an odder affirmation? At one end the great room was laid out with café tables, and among them Turkish children romped, Croatian musicians rehearsed national melodies, a Tibetan bistro offered brick tea with meat dumplings, and ladies in peasant aprons stood about
munching hereditary sandwiches. At the other end, upon a stage, a solitary Mountie in full
Rose
Marie
gear provided a lonely and slightly self-conscious element of pageantry, while an almost excessively benign lady dignitary, in gown and white tabs, welcomed the new Canadians to their fulfilment.

One by one those fortunates stepped to the rostrum, to swear allegiance to the monarch-over-the-ocean. The Croatians swung into another verse at the far end of the hall, and the Mountie shifted his weight, poor fellow, surreptitiously from one foot to the other. There were immigrants from fifteen countries, Poland to Hong Kong. To me it seemed, like all processes of naturalization, somehow a little degrading, but to those actually undergoing the experience it was evidently an occasion of pure delight. There were smiles in every row, and enthusiastic applause came from mathematicians and housewives alike. Eager children examined the documents their parents brought back from the rostrum, which looked to me suspiciously like income tax forms, and when everything was done, and all were, as the lady said, ‘fully fledged members of our Canadian family', and the Mountie had stood at the salute without a tremor throughout the national anthem – when all the formalities were over, the new citizens settled down with happy anticipation for the ultimate test of Canadian aptitude, a multi-ethnic folklore performance.

I laugh at it – I have an ironist's licence, not being Canadian myself – but I was touched really, and slipping hastily off before the first clash of Lebanese cymbals, from my heart wished all those hopeful people well. One of the true pleasures of Ottawa, actually, is its gentle cosmopolitanism. This really is a bi-cultural capital now, and when I went to the closing night of the Ottawa Book Festival in the National Library, to my delight it turned out to be a bi-literary occasion. Two literatures were being honoured side by side. True-blue Anglo matrons launched into painstaking French before my eyes, gaunt and furious Quebecois relapsed without complaint into English. The winner of the non-fiction prize was one of God's own French Canadians, a handsome, merry, and amiable man who told me he had spent much of his life either in jails or escaping from them, but who did not even bother to inquire if I spoke French – such a relief, I always think, when conversing with francophone bank robbers of literary accomplishment.

Shortly before that event I developed a snivelling cold, and finding myself short of handkerchiefs I took along to the National Library a face flannel from my hotel instead. What fun it was to observe the good Canadians
when, feeling the need to blow my nose, I produced this huge yellow square of absorbent fabric! One or two of them paused for a moment, but only a moment, in their conversation; some could not resist nudging a neighbour; most of them resolutely looked in the opposite direction, willing themselves not to notice. Blowing one's nose with a yellow face flannel is not, it seems, altogether the done thing in Ottawa.

Quite right too – it is not a pretty habit. Still, the reactions of those party-goers did entertainingly illustrate Ottawa's public personality. After a century of capital status, this is still on the face of things a decorous, tentative, discreet, conventional, sensitive and charming city. It is by no means lacking in fun, but is rather short of panache. Its humour is leisurely. It is very kind. It is incorrigibly modest, and it bears itself with such careful dignity that even its flags seem to fly undemonstratively. Inevitably security is tighter than it used to be, but even now it is mounted in a familial, almost apologetic way. A woman in yellow taking pictures at a political demonstration readily identified herself to me as a member of the police, collecting identity photographs for the files, and her male colleagues from the plain-clothes division, with their gunslinger stances and high CIA-type collars, might just as well have come wearing policemen's helmets. (‘You guys are hiding everywhere today,' I overheard a uniformed officer tactfully remark to these less than indistinguishable operatives.)

The demonstration, as it happened, turned out to be a very Ottawan spectacle – there is a demonstration every ten minutes on Parliament Hill. This one was protesting against American policies, but it was not terribly savage, and was easily confined by the police to the opposite side of the street from the United States embassy. When four or five protesters peeled off from the others and tried a flank approach, I heard the following exchange.