Inside Outside (28 page)

It was foolish to imagine, of course, that I could pass myself off as an Australian in that society. I learnt very quickly that it was not prudent to say to people ‘I am Australian' or ‘I come from Australia'. They would invariably look at me with surprise and bewilderment. ‘But you don't look Australian,' they would say, quite accurately. ‘And you don't sound like one,' many would add. I soon became cautious, and adopted the formula ‘I live in Australia' as a way of overcoming these difficulties. That, in turn, caused even more problems. People would begin to wonder what I was: Indian? Egyptian? South African?—everything, anything, but never Hungarian, or even Austrian, Czech, Polish or Romanian. The closest anyone ever got to my origins was the woman who was convinced, no matter what I said, that I came from Italy; and from the tone of her voice it was obvious that she had somewhere well south of Rome in mind.

And yet I never felt more acutely, even at times embarrassingly, Australian than in those years in London. The way I walked, the way I wore my clothes (despite the three-piece suit and the furled umbrella), the way my skin had taken colour from the strong Australian sun, all brought Australia to mind, no matter how hard I tried to mimic the life I saw around me in the streets, in the Underground, or in the foyer of the Royal Opera House, where I went whenever I could afford to, and sometimes even when I could not. More curiously still, I began to experience a certain nostalgia for a place that had always seemed to me alien and hostile, despite my feverish attempts in adolescence to become a part of it.

My first Christmas in England, despite the illuminations in Regent Street, despite the brief flurry of snow that fell decorously on Christmas Eve, made me yearn for the long days and intense heat of those Australian Christmases when my parents and I used to swelter in our Epping flat or enjoyed the bright sunshine and cool breezes of Mt Kosciusko. Whenever I caught sight of an Australian scene in a film or on television, I would experience something of the sensation my parents used to feel on the rare occasions (apart from a couple of notorious weeks in 1956) when photographs of Budapest appeared in a newspaper or magazine. The day the afternoon papers featured a large picture of the Harbour Bridge, to accompany a story about a severe earth-tremor that, according to them, caused widespread panic in Sydney, I felt a curious satisfaction that my little corner of the world had at last gained the recognition it deserved.

Even more curiously, I began to read and to develop an interest in Australian writing during those London years. Back in Sydney I had confined my reading, curricular and extracurricular, to English and European writers, with a very small sprinkling of Americans. I was, after all, a British Subject for whom only the best would do—and the best in matters literary did not include a few bushwhackers, which was more or less my notion of Australian writers. At school, it is true, I had read
The Fortunes of Richard Mahony,
which made a tremendous impression on me—I wrote a gushing essay on it, only to be reproved for not tempering my enthusiasm with judgment. Since I knew that Henry Handel Richardson had spent the greater part of her life in Germany and England, the trilogy seemed to me the exception that proved the rule I had invented about the inferiority of ‘home-grown' literature.

I came to Australian writing quite fortuitously by way of
Riders in the Chariot
. I saw a copy modestly displayed in Foyle's window in 1961. On impulse I bought it and found myself, as did so many others, both enthralled and profoundly disturbed by White's vision. Here was something I had not experienced before: a book that spoke about a world I knew, and even more significantly a book which articulated my doubts and misgivings about that world. I knew Barranugli and Sarsaparilla—those dusty semi-rural suburbs around Baulkham Hills and Castle Hill which we passed every time we drove to the Blue Mountains by what was known in Epping as the back road. I fancied that the model for Xanadu must have been that crumbling baronial estate (later to become the new site for the King's School) on Pennant Hills Road which we passed every time we went to Parramatta. Beyond the piquancy of these moments of recognition—when literature no longer dealt with the distant and the unknown, but with the immediate and the familiar—lay the thrill of finding an assessment of life in Australia which was very far removed from the smug self-satisfaction of the citizens of Epping (and also in a way of the more sophisticated denizens of Wahroonga) and much closer to the anguish and dismay that my parents and I had experienced. As the novel laid bare the hypocrisy and pretentiousness of the Mrs Flacks and Mrs Jolleys of that society, as it tore to shreds their suburban proprieties and snobberies, I felt that White was speaking to me, in the soft English light, about a world where I had experienced much of the distaste he seemed to be expressing towards such a life and towards such people.

Within the rich texture of the novel I found something else that surprised and delighted me as much as its bleak vision of the awfulness of Australian suburbia. I was not ready yet to consider sympathetically the plight of the dispossessed as it is reflected in the terrible figure of Himmelfarb. But I was more than ready to respond to White's venomous portrait of people I thought I knew only too well: the Rosetrees of Paradise East. The dreadful irony of this escaped me entirely at the time. I recognised the gesticulating world of the espresso-bars in Harry and Shirl; but I did not realise that White was also describing people like myself, people who thought that they could refashion themselves, in the same way that Harry and Shirl had tried to transform themselves from Rosenbaum to Rosetree.

Riders in the Chariot
kindled an interest in White. Instead of attending to
A Study of the Life and Works of James Shirley,
the verbose doctoral thesis I was writing, I read as much White as was available in England in those years before the Nobel Prize. His appeal was intimately connected with the fact that he seemed to me to be looking at Australian life from the perspective of a European. The ubiquitous sense of alienation—which I later learnt was perhaps more immediately the product of White's personal difficulties in what he saw as a bigoted and unrelenting world—appealed to my sense of alienation from Australia, despite the fact that I was beginning to experience in my London life a certain nostalgia for things Australian. White, like Richardson before him, seemed, once more, an exception. I did not recognise, or was not willing to concede, that despite his jaundiced and despairing view of Australian life, he represented something fundamental to the Australian psyche, not merely the point of view of someone as alien as myself.

For many years I read few other Australian writers, at least until 1967 when I published an essay on
The Tree of Man
in which I played language games with the text of that novel, trying to cram as many analogies with European ‘high culture' (Jung, Shakespeare, the medieval mystics, Wagner) as that ‘bucolic' Australian book would bear. To my surprise I found that the novel could bear quite a lot, and that people took note of what I had to say, even if they disagreed with it wildly—as White did, in his characteristic way. After that I began to develop a genuine interest in a number of other contemporary novelists and poets. To this day, however, the literature of urban Australia speaks to me much more eloquently than what is, arguably, the literature of the ‘real' Australia. Despite my admiration for the skill and wit of Les A. Murray, I have to admit that his verse celebrates a world that I do not understand or like very much.
Such Is Life
interests me as a curious development of the chivalric and pastoral romances of the sixteenth century—it has, after all, both horses and sheep in it—yet as a document of human life, the reason why so many people whose judgment I respect are drawn to it, Furphy's book remains, unfortunately, closed to me.

At the same time as I was discovering a tentative and provisional Australianness within myself, quite different from my deliberate programme of assimilation of earlier years, I began to experience a pull in the other direction—towards Europe, towards that part of my heritage which I had attempted strenuously to suppress. Like all but the most English-obsessed of the young Australians living in London at the time, I discovered the joys of Continental Europe, at least as far as it was possible within my limited financial means. That was the beginning of a tentative, evasive and entirely devious journey that was to take me back, thirty years later, to the place where I was born, to the perspective—much as I am reluctant to admit, even now—from which a part of me will always look at the world.

In the early sixties I went to Paris several times with groups of friends. Getting there was a curious adventure in itself. We took a bus from the station at Victoria to one of the wartime airfields near the Channel; then flew in a shuddering and probably entirely unsafe DC-3 to Beauvais; finally another bus dumped us in the Place de la République. We usually stayed in a small and not entirely clean hotel near the Panthéon, where a notice in the dark entrance passage (you could not call it a lobby) respectfully requested patrons to give forty-eight hours' notice if a bath were required. I looked for that hotel on a recent visit to Paris: it is still there, but its entrance is now surrounded by a facing of marble, and you can just catch sight of a rubber plant through the glass door plastered with recommendations from various tourist organisations and the emblems of credit cards.

We explored the many delights of Paris from that seedy little hotel where Madame poked her head angrily through a contraption (not unlike the servery-hatches in the dining rooms of our parents' houses) whenever we rang the night-bell after the official and much publicised locking-up time. We sat in the gods of the Opéra and inspected the wigs of the singers and the floorboards of the stage. Dutifully, we shuffled past the Mona Lisa. We watched while a film was being made on the banks of the Seine opposite Notre Dame. Afterwards we climbed one of the towers of the cathedral to marvel at the panorama below us. Like my grandmother years before, I refused to go up the Eiffel Tower—vertigo runs in my family. One evening we ignored the whistles warning us that the gates of the Tuileries Gardens were about to be locked, and were obliged to clamber over the stone balustrade above the Place de la Concorde, under the suspicious gaze of the gendarmerie, much to the amusement of a busload of Algerian tourists. One golden afternoon, as we sat, happy and exhausted, outside a down-at-heels cafe, we noticed the banner headlines announcing the death of Marilyn Monroe.

Two or three times in the course of those years I took longer trips with a friend, nowadays a respected federal politician who, in those days, proved an invaluable guide to the glories and quirks of things English, as well as a patient and sympathetic audience for my many alarms, uncertainties and confusions. He was also the fortunate custodian of a company car. We meandered through France and Italy, crisscrossed Germany and Switzerland, and saw the midnight sun in Norway. But my most significant visits to the Continent were those I took alone: to Italy, sitting up all night in a train, as my father had done decades before, arriving exhausted and red-eyed; to France and to Germany. But I never went anywhere near the geographic (if not spiritual) world that had bred me. Going to Hungary in those years of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis was out of the question. It strikes me as curious and significant, though, that I always avoided Vienna, the city which was home for my mother's family much more than Budapest—nominally the capital of the nation whose citizens they became after the Great War—had ever been. I thought I had found, instead, a spiritual home in Western Europe. On those solitary visits I could somehow merge into a world that was comfortingly familiar and entirely exhilarating, even though I was seeing these places for the first time in my life.

I responded instinctively to European cities. Their vistas, the way of life their inhabitants led (even if, as in Italy, my understanding of their language was very limited) were strangely familiar and sympathetic to me. I came to think that this life, centred on the great public spaces from which dwellings, shops, offices and theatres fanned out in broad avenues or snaked in crooked lanes, was somehow my true heritage. I had no memories of a peaceful or affluent city of the kind that I found in Paris, Milan, Amsterdam, Munich and Stockholm or even in a delightfully messy and chaotic Rome. My memories of European city-life were entirely those of cities under threat, as Budapest had been before the worst of the bombing, or else cities which had been gutted by the obscenity of war, as we found during the few days we spent in a ruined Vienna in 1946. And yet these sparkling cities, with their traffic jams, their cafés, the glimpses of domestic life you could catch behind the windows of a first-floor flat at dusk, before the owners had thought of drawing the curtains, the Sunday ritual of walking in parks and municipal gardens in one's best clothes, were familiar, comforting and desirable. My responses during my first hours in cities I had never previously visited were the direct opposite of my parents' alarmed disorientation as we drove through Sydney on that February day in 1947.