Inside Outside (27 page)

A writer whose work I discovered only recently, which made me recognise very clearly these potentialities and dangers, and also the implicit freedom in such uses of language, did not write in English but in French. I find disturbing and curious analogies between my life and that of Georges Perec, the author of the highly-esteemed
Life A User's Manual,
who died in 1982. Perec and I were born within a few days of each other. Like me, he was a remnant of the polyglot Habsburg world, though his forbears had lived a thousand kilometres or so to the east of mine, on the borders of Poland and Russia. Like my family, Perec's was uprooted by the threats and alarms of the thirties—though unlike my parents, his had the good sense to get out in time. They did not, it is true, go far enough. Perec's parents settled in France; his father died defending it against the Boche, but that act of patriotism didn't prevent his mother from being put to death at Auschwitz.

Perec was born in France. Nominally, therefore, French was his native language, though he was no doubt obliged to learn it in a way entirely different from that of ‘native-born' French people. It was probably easier for him to learn French than it was for me to learn English, but he had to acquire it as an alien, foreign tongue. His great novel, as well as his other writings (for instance an extraordinary novel,
La Disparition,
written entirely without use of the letter ‘e') are notorious for the outrageous liberties they take with the French language, that revered institution seemingly enshrined by the decrees of holy writ.
Life A User's Manual,
his masterpiece, is a dazzling display of the most elaborate word games; its structure is based on an abstruse mathematical formula; it is, in essence, a layered series of puns, or conceits within conceits, which dazzle, disconcert and violate, but they also celebrate the language with which Perec plays in the manner of a true virtuoso. Everything was grist to his mill. When he spent a few weeks in Australia in 1981 he jotted down the names of several Sydney railway stations—Redfern, Tempe, Rockdale, Sutherland, Jannali—and appropriated them for the names of characters in a novel he was writing at the time. Brilliance and virtuosity there are in plenty in Perec's work, but to the unsympathetic, his high-handed manipulation of language seems altogether lacking in respect. It is an outrage, perhaps, against an instrument that should be treated with courtesy and ceremony.

I was attracted to Perec's work as soon as I began reading the English translation of
Life A User's Manual
in 1988. Only gradually did I come to learn, though, the curious ways in which our lives paralleled each other. I kept on discovering odd bits of information well beyond the time I thought I knew the major facts of Perec's life. I was astonished to learn, for instance, that a small hotel in Paris, in a quiet street near the Botanic Gardens, where I recently stayed for a few days on the recommendation of an accommodation guidebook, was situated next door but one to the house where Perec had lived for several years, the place where the bulk of
Life A User's Manual
was written. I am not much given to thinking about the supernatural; I have never seen ghosts or received visitations. But I am disturbed and fascinated by the way I have been drawn, quite fortuitously at times—or so it seems to me—to a writer whose predicament I am able perhaps to understand a little better, certainly more poignantly, than many other people. I feel a particular kinship with a man I never met, whose life was lived in an entirely different part of the world; a man whose intellectual capacity and literary gifts far outweighed mine, and made him one of the most significant figures of my generation.

People like us find it very difficult to write ‘straight'; our attitude to language, no matter how adept we may be, must remain to a large extent provisional and jesting—it is not ours in the most intimate or fundamental sense, even if we have no other language to call fully our own—which is certainly the case with me and was also with Perec. We are attracted to the structures of that learnt language, we are infatuated with its suppleness, its capacity to be twisted into surprising and unexpected configurations, but we are, to a considerable extent, emotionally isolated from it. It does not speak to our heart so much as it appeals to our intellect, to that part of our personality which revels in games, puzzles and brain-twisters. We are tempted to use it in an irreverent way.

In some respects Perec must have encountered greater difficulties than those of us who learnt English in Australia, or perhaps even those who learnt French in places like Quebec, Tahiti or Noumea. He lived in a metropolitan culture—one, moreover, which regards its language as a treasured historical monument, not to be tampered with or altered lightly. English has never, at least in my experience, been held in such respect in Australia. In Britain—and especially in the Britain of the early sixties—it was otherwise: the common attitude to English was more respectful, conservative and much more sensitive to its traditional associations. It was not merely that the British were more careful with grammar, syntax and spelling, though that was something I noticed very soon after I arrived in London in 1960. Rather, I began to find that many words and expressions—often to do with the world of nature—carried nuances and distinctions which had been largely discarded in Australia. In the English I learnt in Hurlstone Park and Epping there was precious little difference between paddock and field, creek and stream. I noticed, after I returned to Australia some years later, that a long, straight street in the western suburbs of Sydney is called Railway Crescent. Such oddities made me realise that for Australians English is also an alien language, even though most of them have spoken it all their lives. It is, for them, fundamentally foreign because it encodes experiences and natural phenomena to which they have no access in their daily lives. Someone like me, who had to learn English as a matter of conscious choice, is therefore not entirely isolated from the linguistic experience of ‘native' Australians, thereby providing something of a contrast to the predicament of a person like Perec, who was obliged to make his way in a culture which knows that it is the custodian of its language.

Australians are also mimics and parodists; they too—except for those words and expressions which have emerged directly from the experience of living in this land—are given to twisting and altering the language of a distant and increasingly alien culture. Australian English is, in a way, just as much a mixed language as the Hungarian my parents spoke in the last years of their lives, when they had allowed all sorts of English words and expressions to creep into that language to denote experiences for which it had no equivalents. The mimicry Australians practise is, however, largely unconscious. In the course of my golden years as a student at university, when I was beginning to experiment with the capacities of language—though mostly in the secondary or parasitic field of literary study, not in any serious attempt at writing fiction or verse—I, the outsider, was already conscious of the mimicry or tendency towards parody, which is both liberating and highly perilous, that several of my contemporaries were to discover and to exploit once they arrived in England, the end of their particular rainbows.

As the boat train rattled its way from Southampton to Waterloo through the endless suburbs of South London, I did not imagine that England, the land of heart's desire, the country that had become a mystic birthright for people of my generation through our sentimental education into things English, would be the place where the question of my identity would be most severely tested, where I would have to ask myself who I was and what I hoped to become. I thought I had come ‘home', in the way that the people of Epping had dreamt of going ‘home'. I imagined that the facility I had acquired in my years in Australia, my ability to mimic the speech, customs and rituals of the land, would make me welcome in the Mother Country as a worthy representative of
my
nation. I felt more Australian as the train pulled in at the station than I had ever felt in my life—especially since I knew that there was little danger here of being stopped by someone in the street who would say to me: ‘Andris, how
arr
you? How's sings goink wiz your dear mozer and fazer?'

My self-confidence reached a climax as I took my place in the taxi queue outside the station. Here I was, with my suitcases and cabin-trunk, waiting for a London taxi among genuine English people—though as I listened to the conversations around me I became aware that many fellow-queuers spoke with suspiciously Australian and South African intonations. At length my turn came; I gave the driver the address of the bedsit a friend had found for me near Marble Arch—he didn't call me ‘Guv', but I let that pass—and off we went. The London that unrolled in front of my eyes through the murk of an October afternoon had the familiarity of an old friend you hadn't seen for a long time. Now we were on Waterloo Bridge. There was Big Ben, and over there the dome of St Paul's. Here was Buckingham Palace, with The Mall stretching away towards what must be Trafalgar Square; surely if I craned my neck I could catch sight of Nelson on top of his column. The London of the books we had read, of the games of Monopoly we had played, of the verses about Christopher Robin and Alice my friends had remembered from their childhood, was revealed in its full three-dimensional substance through the window of a London cab. I had come home.

That confidence and elation were to take something of a battering in the weeks that followed. I discovered that living in a bedsit had its curious and nagging miseries. It was difficult to sleep, work, cook and wash in the one room. The gas meter was constantly hungry for shilling pieces in the course of an increasingly cold autumn, at a time when the Royal Mint had somehow managed to underestimate once more the demand for those coins. I missed home—without quite realising what that implied. Yet I was, and remained for the next two and a half years, on the crest of a wave; the joys of living in London far outweighed its irritations and inconveniences.

I spent far too much of my scholarship money on theatres and concerts, and had to be bailed out by my parents with bank drafts. The British Museum Reading Room, especially that holy of holies, the North Library (recently commemorated by A. S. Byatt in
Possession),
widened my circle of acquaintances beyond the expatriate community in which anyone like me—without family connections in England or introductions to the sort of people that might ask you to stay for the weekend—was forced to move. It provided, moreover, a passing parade of notabilities: celebrated scholars to whom you were sometimes introduced; an angry-faced Russian count who claimed to have been connected with Ottoline Morrell; and one day I saw a frail figure in an over-large topcoat and homburg hat shepherded into the North Library by respectful officials to inspect a large folio waiting for him on a stand at the back of the room. That mournful figure turned out to be T. S. Eliot. There were many other delights. Walking at weekends on Hampstead Heath was a joy in almost any kind of weather. In summer I used to go for day-trips with my friends affluent enough to own motor cars to Winchester and Salisbury, to Bath and Tintern Abbey. All in all, life was good; my progress towards fulfilment that had begun as soon as I had left the Faculty of Medicine in Sydney (or to put it more accurately after it had decided it wanted no more of me) continued on its apparently predetermined path.

Yet all was not well. I fancied for a while that my life of mimicry would reap considerable rewards. There was no need in London to attempt to refashion myself in the way that I had tried so desperately and unsuccessfully in Epping in earlier years. I had become, I convinced myself, an educated and reasonably cultivated Australian. Part consciously, part subconsciously, I attempted nevertheless to adjust my behaviour—as did most of my Australian friends and acquaintances—to what we imagined would be more acceptable to a British way of life. There were, in those years, considerable numbers of Australians living more or less permanently in Earl's Court (known to all as Kangaroo Valley) who seemed intent on giving exaggerated displays of those national characteristics which were soon to be immortalised in Bazza McKenzie. We wanted nothing of that. On the contrary, we tried to model ourselves on those people we knew or knew about in Sydney who seemed to us particularly ‘British', even under the fierce Australian sun: people like Sir Stephen Roberts, the vice chancellor of the university, who always wore striped trousers with a black jacket and spoke in well-rounded vowels. We, too, tried to adjust our accents, not realising that we fooled no-one, or that our vocabulary gave us away almost instantly, no matter how posh our accents might have sounded to our own ears. I also bought a three-piece suit from a bespoke tailor as well as the first umbrella I had ever owned.

Some of my friends could, after a few months of living in London, give a passable imitation of Englishness, which they managed to sustain for an hour or two before the truth became apparent—‘Oh, you're from Orstralia, are you?' I had no such luck. The first words the supervisor of my doctoral thesis spoke to me, after looking at my curriculum vitae, were to ask whether I thought I would be able to manage English. We became close friends in later years, especially after he took up an appointment in an Australian university. But he never lost, I think, his sense of mild surprise that my university should have considered me a proper incumbent of a travelling scholarship to undertake research in English literature, of all things. That was the first warning of difficulties to come, just as it was my first inkling of the essential insularity of English people when it comes to the question of non-English-speakers' ability to learn the nuances and subtleties of their language. Perhaps they are right to think this; I am in no position to judge. In Australia, nevertheless, I had been able to get away with it more easily than English people were willing to allow me on their home ground.