Cultural Amnesia (126 page)

Introduction to the Extras

Starting with Sludge

Nicole Kidman’s Poetic Stalker

Damon’s Bravest Day

INTRODUCTION TO THE EXTRAS

The manuscript of
Cultural Amnesia
was about
five years in the making, but it was already apparent to me after the first year or so that the book, if it were to come in at under a thousand pages, would have to narrow the channels of its
themes, and even discard some of them altogether. I still had an ambition that all the humanist topics could be hinted at even if only some were treated, but within that ambition there obviously
had to be limits. So I started parking ideas to one side. Such is an aging man’s impulse towards completism, however, that only very seldom will a story, once it has started, agree to lie
still: the ticking clock compels it into life, as if Dr Frankenstein’s deadline were being set by the bits and pieces collected on his table. Even before the main manuscript of the book was
finalized, spin-offs had started to become separate essays. These, as I finished them, I submitted to periodicals both in the UK and in Australia. My main Australian outlet was the new magazine
The Monthly
, which I thought destined to fill an important gap in the market, and for which I thought I had just the stuff. Unlike
Quadrant
and the other established high-brow Australian periodicals,
The Monthly
was aimed principally at the newsstands. Another
new Australian periodical, the
Australian Literary Review
, was also gratifyingly hospitable for stand-alone essays: and it had all the advantages of
traveling as a supplement of a national newspaper. I have always liked the idea of the hard subject made popular: as long as the piece stays true to the facts, it can serve as an introduction
even if it doesn’t cover the case. Ideally such an essay should be self-sufficient, and I like to think that all the essays appended here need no larger
context than
themselves to be initially appreciable. But if it seems to the reader that these essays connect to the main book, whether in spirit or in rhythm, it is because they had their individual
beginnings somewhere within its perimeter, at a time when I myself was not yet sure where the perimeter would eventually be marked out. I thought that I would have room to prove that a Formula
One racing driver could be partly motivated by the temperament of an artist. When it became apparent that there would be no room even to suggest such a thing, I had to think again. But I
didn’t drop the idea, because it was based on an aesthetic perception, and that kind of idea is impossible to drop. We don’t hold such ideas. They hold us. Right there begins the
wider concept underlying all my opinions about the various subjects of the humanist universe: the whole exfoliating multiplicity is based on a simple passion, and no analysis that fails to
acknowledge that emotion will ever make sense of its results.

STARTING WITH SLUDGE

It was my third year at Sydney Technical High School, and our English class was being
taken by a history teacher while our regular teacher was away ill. Though he conspicuously wore the first Hush-puppies I had ever seen, I can’t remember the history teacher’s name.
But I can still remember everything he said. To keep us in order, he had been asking us what we read at home. I said that I had been reading the collected works of Erle Stanley Gardner. He said
there was nothing wrong with that, but that the whole secret with what he called sludge fiction was to enjoy it while you built up the habit of reading, and then move on to something hard. The
very idea that there might be something interesting further up the road had not occurred to me before that day. Many years later, I realized that he had chosen his words with care, so as not to
crush. Our knowledge of ourselves is that we are alone, and our dream of ourselves is that we are alone because we are unique. Sludge writers who can tap into that dream are off to a flying
start, and the first sludge I knew in my life was flying sludge. It is still airborne in my mind’s eye: our house in Kogarah, my little room, and the narrow bed holding up the square
squadron formation of my Biggles books, all laid out face up and edge to edge so that I could kneel and worship them as if they were household gods. It wasn’t a case of judging books by
their covers, because when it came to these particular books I loved their contents, whole chunks of which I could recite by heart, especially when not asked. But my adoration for what was in
them had made icons of their outward appearance.

My favorites were the covers with the green background against
which, framed by his
leather helmet and the heavy collar of his Sidcot flying suit, the features of Biggles loomed with a hieratic numinance which, I was to realize much later, exactly echoed the Nazi sculptures of
Arno Breker, much admired by Hitler and his terrible friends as the ideal of Aryan manhood. All the green-covered books had the word “Biggles” in the title except
Spitfire Parade
, which somehow I treasured even more than the others, perhaps because you had to know it was about Biggles—it was, as I
explained to my mother on several occasions, secret information. The narrative paintings on the covers of the later books were a disappointment, as indeed were the books themselves: the
post-World War II Biggles adventures had lost focus, not because their hero had aged—miraculously, he never did—but because his author, Captain W. E. Johns, still alive and writing,
must have been older than Dr. W. G. Grace would have been if he had been still alive and batting. There was also the possibility that I myself, the ideal reader, was feeling the effects of the
passing years, which were soon to propel me into long pants and the necessity to shave.

Bulldog Drummond arrived in my life like a descending testicle, a fair analogy for the size of his brain.
By comparison, Sanders of the River was an intellectual. It never occurred to me—though it probably occurred to the author, Edgar Wallace—that Sanders, in demonstrating his mental
superiority to all those benighted fuzzy-wuzzies, was the incarnation of the imperial principle. I just liked the way Sanders, having figured everything out in a flash, adjusted his pace so that
lesser breeds could catch up. Bulldog had no such resources. But his capacity for ratiocination was never the attraction: it was his Caesarian speed of movement as he went into battle against the
all-purpose international heavy Carl Petersen. (Surely it was no coincidence, as the academics say, that John Le Carré chose the name Karla for the similarly globe-girdling eminence rouge
who was later to haunt the squinting imagination of George Smiley). Acutely potentiated by the hormonal stirrings of pubescence, my feelings for the even more evil Irma Petersen were a giddy
cocktail of fear and desire—as, I now suspect, were those of Drummond. The bone-headed crusader would run, swim, drive, or fly vast distances at incredible speeds specifically to place
himself at her mercy. He always survived her perverted attentions, perhaps because (the thought scarcely entered my adolescent
mind, for want, as it were, of a point of entry)
she had a thing for him. The relationship was duplicated three-quarters of a century later in the classically awful British television SF series
Blakes Seven
: no apostrophe in the title, no sense in the plot. The depraved space queen Servelan, played by the slinky Jacqueline Pearce, could never
quite bring herself to volatilize the dimly heroic Blake even when she had him square in the sights of her plasmatic spasm guns. The secret of Blake’s appeal, or Blakes appeal, for the
otherwise infallibly fatale Servelan remained a mystery, like the actual wattage of light bulb on which the design of Blake’s space-ship, or Blakes space-ship, was plainly based.
Drummond’s appeal for Irma was no secret at all. He was born to jack-boots as she was born to high heels. But the relationship was identical in its balance of forces. In sludge fiction
there are only so many situations. It’s part of the charm, and part of the importance: these adventure stories by and for childish adults emanate from Jungian archetypes boiling deep below
the brain, somewhere in the medulla oblongata. Their thematic templates are practically genetic.

But I didn’t know that yet. The Bulldog Drummond books belonged to the parents of my friend Graham
Gilbert, down the street. His parents must have inherited them from their parents, because his parents never read anything, with the gratifying consequence that the books were in pristine
condition, all lined up with yellow wrappers intact—the author’s sobriquet “Sapper” stood out boldly on their spines—in a rosewood cabinet topped off with
ferociously polished ornaments of brass and glass. One at a time, I borrowed every volume, immersing myself in their steaming bouillabaisse of dimwit derring-do and xenophobic snobbery. In
retrospect, the jut-jawed, meat-headed Bulldog stands flagrantly revealed as a brawling anti-Semite to whom Julius Streicher would have been glad to extend a sweating paw, but at the time such
considerations did not impinge. What counted was the hero’s Pavlovian readiness (Bulldog Drummond Attacks) to pit himself single-handed against a conspiratorial world. He did the same
routines in every book—got tied up loosely by Irma, cut his way free, shot it out with Carl—but still I read them all. Sameness was part of the satisfaction.

Completism was part of the hunger: with print as with food, I was the kind of consumer who leaves nothing
on his plate. When
I graduated to Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner—the local lending library came in handy at this point, because there were so many titles by each
author that I could never have afforded to own a tenth of them—I read everything by both, even though each repeated himself shamelessly and often verbatim. (Actually Ellery Queen was two
people at the very least, but for inventiveness they barely added up to one: whereas Erle Stanley Gardner also wrote copiously under the name of A. A. Fair, thus engendering another few dozen
titles to get through.) Nothing, however, could beat actually owning the stuff. Personally doing a lot for the royalties of Leslie Charteris, I bought every Saint book in print, usually in the
big yellow Hodder and Stoughton trade paperbacks, although the Pan pocketbooks were more desirable, having the better cover paintings. (On the Pan covers, Simon Templar posed in black tie and
pistol plus adoring soignée women: surely the prototype for James Bond’s graphic image in later years.) There was no room to arrange all my Saint books on my bed, so I lined them up
in rows on the lounge-room floor, in front of the Kosi stove:
Enter the Saint
,
The Saint
Steps In
,
The Saint Closes the Case
, and (wait for it: the title of the century)
The Last Hero
. Bliss! And boy, couldn’t Leslie Charteris write, I asked my mother rhetorically, quoting the evidence by the page while she
dusted the wax fruit in the brass dish. For the first time in my career as a reader, here were sentences which, when you read them again, got better instead of worse.