The Meaning of Recognition (13 page)

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Banishing one of the mysteriously entwined partners to the wings can be seen as a Maloufian device for ensuring that they don’t have to strike up a conversation. From the
reader’s viewpoint, a less frustrating stratagem is to deprive one of them of the powers of speech, thus leaving the way open for a
visione amorosa
pure and simple, as the man of
order is transfigured by the contemplation of feral beauty. Malouf tried this in his early novel
An Imaginary Life
(1978). The poet Ovid is in exile in a rough country, where he takes a
consuming interest in a wild boy known as the Child. The reader can’t fail to be reminded of
Death in Venice
, in which the aged Aschenbach is convulsed in spirit and prepared for
death by his vision of the beautiful boy Tadzio paddling on the Lido. Ovid’s Child paddles in less gentrified waters, but to the same effect:

But the reader can easily fail to be reminded of the Roman world. From what we know of Ovid’s eight years of killing time at the mouth of the Danube, the man at the center of
Malouf’s book is hard to recognize. It is true that Ovid eventually set about learning the local language, but the suggestion that he had put the old world behind him and was ready to embrace
something new is absurd: the
Tristia
and the
Epistulae ex ponto
are complaints, not letters of acceptance. The
relegatio
imposed on Ovid by Augustus was only the mildest
form of exile, but was still meant to be a savage punishment, and it worked. Ovid ached for Tiberius to bring him back to Rome – to bring him back to life. Malouf’s Ovid hardly has Rome
on his mind. His attention is fully occupied by the Child. Nothing happens, but one can’t help thinking that if the author of the
Ars amatoria
had had a telescope available it well
might have.

The same
enfant sauvage
theme works much better in
Remembering Babylon
, Malouf’s justly praised novel of 1993. The setting is Queensland in the 1840s, and this time the
wordless child is a white castaway ship’s boy who walks out of the bush to join the white settlers after sixteen years with the Aboriginals. With only a few words of English, the boy is
effectively a white black. In America, Mark Twain pioneered this transracial device with
Pudd’nhead Wilson
, and variations on it have proved usable all the way through to Philip
Roth’s
The Human Stain
; but in Australia it has rarely been exploited, not just because the country has a much smaller culture by volume but because Aboriginals, until very recently,
were thought marginal if they were thought of at all. This latter point has always ranked high among Malouf’s preoccupations, and through his misfit bush boy he gives us his most thorough
treatment of it. The wild child ought to be a bridge between cultures, but the self-elected representatives of the dominant culture don’t want a bridge; they’d rather have the river
they can drown him in:

Touch by touch, a picture of inevitable tragedy is built up which would look very like despair if there were not also, at the centre of the story, the usual unstated mutual attraction, this time
between the settlers’ boy from whose viewpoint we see the action and the boy from the bush whose mere existence is its principal cause.

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Attraction might be the wrong word for what goes on between Malouf’s male principals. The lack of warmth might not just be due to the invariable obliqueness of the
expression, the thoroughness of the ellipsis. Perhaps what we are shown is a kind of dependence. In Malouf’s Australia, the man of sensibility is walled in. He is not necessarily in a closet,
but he is certainly in a cell, and without his yearning vision of someone wild in the street outside he would never dare to attack the bars in the window with that file he found in the cake.
Solitude is common in Malouf’s work, but it is rarely self-sufficient; although it should be said that the eponymous hero of
Harland’s Half Acre
(1984) is very definitely a man
on his own, a self-educated artist boiling and bristling at the center of the novel by Malouf that comes closest to being a masterpiece, and the more so because it is so unlike the others. As so
often happens with prolific authors, the least characteristic work is the most fulfilled. For once the hero, instead of being drawn to another man and spending the rest of the book failing to find
out why, resolves his conflicts within himself. If he has any sexuality at all, it all gets sublimated in creativity. Since the same almost certainly applied to Leonardo da Vinci, the reader can
scarcely think this unlikely.

Born in poverty and ignorance, Frank Harland, through sheer strength of talent, becomes a great painter, staying true to his gift even when faced with another economic threat – prosperity.
Malouf’s is not the only novel to celebrate the heroically inarticulate misfit painter. Joyce Carey’s Gully Jimson in
The Horse’s Mouth
was there first, and Patrick
White’s Hurtle Duffield in
The Vivisector
must have been much in Malouf’s thoughts. (Malouf wrote the libretto for the opera version of White’s
Voss
.) But
Malouf’s Harland is a true original. It has been said that he was based on the reclusive Australian painter Ian Fairweather, but really he has taken on too much life of his own to be pinned
down to one progenitor. Saul Bellow’s Humboldt is said to be based on Delmore Schwartz, but he makes me think of a dozen writers who created a square mile of chaos around them for every
square foot of order they created on the page; and in the same way, and for the same reason, Harland conjures up a platoon of Australian painters who came out of nowhere, followed their noses, and
drew the world to their solitary hideaways. Harland in his hut on the beach could be Sidney Nolan on his country estate. Harland is the artist incarnate, the artist who has been born to it and
can’t stop. The theme has an incandescent focal moment when his friend Knack, a learned refugee from Europe who has survived in Australia by keeping a junk shop, shoots himself along with his
mistress. The war in Europe has come to an end but the news from the concentration camps has been too much for them. Harland visits the bodies in the junk shop. There is blood all over the walls
and the shape of the stains gives him the idea for a painting.

Harland’s fruitful naïveté is boldly imagined, clearly defined, and psychologically true, so all of Malouf’s gifts can be put to work reinforcing the center of the book
instead of glamorously circumnavigating its perimeter. The best gift is his easy access to the memories of his youth, a treasury of sense impressions upon which he seems able to draw at will, with
no need to check up on their accuracy. When he names the objects in his mother’s sewing basket, it’s doubtful whether he needs a photograph: he photographed them with his mind when the
basket was on a level with his eyes. James Joyce had to write letters home to get some of his details about Dublin right, and Thomas Mann had to be in a constant process of researching his own past
to pull off a tour de force like the description of the Frankfurt am Main shop windows that provide Felix Krull with his freshman year at the academy of material desire. But Malouf’s
inventories read as if he can just pull them out of his head. You can tell he doesn’t feel the need to check up, because sometimes errors creep in. (In
Johnno
that little imported
English car called the Mini is on sale a couple of years too early.) But anomalies and anachronisms are hard to spot, and it’s a fair guess that they are very few.

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In
The Great World
the prisoners of war sustain themselves by playing memory games, cherishing their personal histories. Clearly Malouf feels that way about his own. He
can take his personal recollections with him into Australia’s nineteenth century because the layout of the households and the surrounding scenery in the subtropical south Queensland littoral
area wasn’t all that different then than it was in his childhood.
An Imaginary Life
remained singular in his work because he couldn’t take his memories with him into the
ancient world. The supposed classical purity of that book was really just an absence of detail, and when he tried to supply some the results were strangely impalpable. (And in at least one instance
disabling, as when Ovid observes that the barbaric locals ride without stirrups, the author having failed to apprise himself of the information that everybody did, since the invention of the
stirrup lay six hundred years in the future.)

So far, Malouf has been at his most comfortable with his house around him. At whatever time they are set in the two hundred years of white settlement that we used to think of as the whole of
Australian history, his best stories – with
Remembering Babylon
,
Fly Away Peter
, and
Harland’s Half Acre
as the outstanding examples – are richly
detailed transitions between wooden-walled interiors and landscapes in which every plant and living thing is catalogued by memory. Even when the house is crowded, there is a place in it for a
precocious boy. Frank Harland and his brothers are brought up in a single room, sleeping several to a bed, but Frank ends up getting the single bed against the wall, the way to the world. And there
is always a space under the house, which is the way to adventure. Not just in the autobiography but in a surprising number of the novels as well, the dark, wedge-shaped space under the house is
where the protagonist goes to be alone and to find his way forward, up to the limit set by the line of light where the front of the house almost meets the ground. (In Queensland the old
weatherboard houses usually had a moat of air between themselves and the ground, thus to stave off the white ants, a species of termite fanatically dedicated to the demolition business.) In the
title story of the new book he is still under the house, still feeling its weight on his shoulders, still mesmerized by that line of light.

But there is a difference. The old entrapment has, at long last, been reduced to something merely formative, rather than definitive. ‘Dream Stuff’ is a story about someone who has
been out into the light and let it change him: it is the story, in fact, of an internationally successful writer who has taken his risks, including the risk – perhaps the scariest of all for
an Australian expatriate – of going home. Thus to draw on his adult experience is a rare thing for Malouf and one can only hope for more of it. On the evidence of his new book, there is a new
expressive impulse that will be hard to deny. Probably it was always there, but he kept the lid on it. In
Antipodes
there is a beautiful story, ‘That Antic Jezebel’, about the
Sydney community of European
beau monde
refugees. A one-time all-conquering beauty dresses up in her old finery to go to the new opera house, where she is disturbed to find that one of her
ex-lovers fails to take his regular seat. He has died of old age, and soon she will too.

From someone who could write a story like that, it would have been legitimate to expect a string of books that dramatized the complex postwar interchange between Australia and Europe, but apart
from a few pages about Tuscany appended to the autobiography, Knack’s suicide in
Harland’s Half Acre
was the only further sign of such interests. (Malouf lived in Tuscany at
one stage and still spends part of each year there: he has been frank about finding the Australian arts world too attentive. Though pleased enough to be accepted, he is not the type to relish being
found familiar.) More often than not, and certainly more often than a man with his qualifications might have, Malouf has written novels as if he were setting out to meet the demands of an
unreconstructed Australian nationalist for reliably indigenous yarns with as few cosmopolitan overtones as possible. They are complex, many-layered books, but with rare exceptions they are not
many-layered in the social sense, and even his sole truly large-scale work,
The Great World
, has not much in it of Australia’s actual social workings. As in a film script, there is a
high-concept contrast between rich man and poor man, but there are no real social divisions, and to carry on as if Australia does not possess social divisions is worse than uninformative, it is
sentimental.

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In Australia, as in America, there is a world where money grows old, power is preserved, and customs are refined beyond the easy reach of the common people. Australia
isn’t England, but it isn’t Illyria either. Though democratic, prosperous, and egalitarian beyond all historic precedent, it is still a complex society, with highly sophisticated,
self-protecting elites that Malouf in his years of success has learned a lot about. That there could be startling results if he puts this knowledge to use is proved by ‘Great Day’, the
last and longest story in the new book, in which the members of a distinguished family gather at their country seat, where the patriarch, an erstwhile political grandee called Audley, is living in
the afterglow of his influence on public life. He is still consulted as an oracle by the media and the new crop of politicians, but his children, all grown to adulthood, have their own ideas about
his infallibility, and are working out their destinies according to their own desires.

The women’s roles are particularly finely detailed – a new departure for Malouf. Audley’s daughters could be Russian sisters longing for Moscow, except that they are already
there, and find themselves unsettled. For tone, pace, and sense of nuance, a comparison between ‘Great Day’ and a Chekhov long short story – ‘Anna Around the Neck’,
for example – would not be too far-fetched. And as with Chekhov, the reader finds the end of the story looming far too soon. ‘Great Day’ cries out to be a novel: the novel Malouf
has not yet tried, the novel about now.