Cultural Amnesia (80 page)

The dimensions that were present made up for it. For a world war, he had a world mind. He understood the global
interconnections of the battle zones from the start. He had a fully European intelligence as only a colonial can have: a cosmopolitan view that enabled him to assess the European tragedy without
lapsing into chauvinism. Few Australian intellectuals, then or later, could match his capacity to see that Australia, far from frittering away its military resources, was making a necessary
contribution to its own defence by throwing its efforts into the battles in the Middle East. In recent years, as the revisionist interpretations of Australia’s connection with Britain
reached an apotheosis of myth-mongering in the seductive theory of Other People’s Wars, a position like Moorehead’s became hard to understand. Now that the tide of politically
inspired fable is receding, his view should look coherent again, and even more intelligible, because it outlined a recalcitrant set of facts, and if the facts had not been so awkward, the urge to
deny them might never have arisen. Moorehead was one of the first Australian intellectuals able to overcome their cleverness and see what their much-patronized politicians saw: that there was no
question of a world war leaving Australia out. A nose for grand strategy put him miles ahead of any other Australian reporter on the beat. (A possible precursor was indeed antipodean, but from
New Zealand: the cartoonist David Low, although he, we should remember, was spectacularly wrong about the war before it actually started.) Moorehead’s own country was not the only one to
reap the benefit of his fair-mindedness, but a compatriot can be forgiven for attending first to what he said
about the Australian troops. He reported faithfully and truly
that in the long, hard preliminary slog to Benghazi they were crucial in reducing the Italian army from a fighting force to a liability. Moorehead blinked no details of the fiasco on Crete.
Naturally if there had been less censorship he would have been able to be scathing about the blunders, but he left room between the lines for his bitterness to show. He was firm, however, on the
critical point: the Australians had participated in an action which, though it failed, played a vital role in delaying Operation Barbarossa, and thus influencing the war in Russia. Seeing how the
defeats fitted into the victories, he never made the intellectual’s characteristic error of searching through a jigsaw as if it had a key piece. With
War and
Peace
as a knapsack book, he was able to complement Tolstoy’s key insight—everything depends on morale—with an insight of his own: morale depends on everything.

At this range it might be hard to imagine how important it was to be a good writer stating such complex
and vital truths. In World War I, with Keith Murdoch’s fanciful press campaign placing such disproportionate emphasis on the Dardanelles, there was no comparably imaginative prose available
to stress what the Australians achieved on the western front. To this day, few Australians, even when they are students of modern history—alas, especially when—have any idea that
their countrymen played a significant role in the final breaking of the deadlock in the trenches at the end of World War I. (Philip Knightley has been almost the only popular historian to mention
the matter.) Thanks to Moorehead, however, the importance of the 9th Division at Tobruk in World War II is not as easily overlooked. Without the Australians and New Zealanders, the Germans might
have prevailed in the desert, and thus been far more free to act decisively in Russia. Only for Hitler was North Africa a sideshow. Rommel knew better. So, to his lasting credit, did Moorehead.
He could see how each part of the war affected every other part—the hardest aspect of a world war for a writer to deal with, since writers are so likely to get lost in particulars. In a
war, however, the particulars resonate across the world, and the penalty for not being able to follow them is to miss the picture.

Later on, when the centre of attention switched to the European mainland, Moorehead was careful not to let his cat
burglar’s gift for access affect his broader judgement. After the war another Australian
expatriate, Chester Wilmot, capped a brilliant success as a BBC war reporter by
emerging as a literary heavyweight in many ways comparable in stature and ability to Moorehead. Wilmot, in his best-selling book
The Struggle for Europe
,
gave a partisan view favouring Montgomery’s thesis that he could have thrust straight through to Berlin if Eisenhower had not stopped him. Wilmot had allowed Montgomery to bowl him over.
Moorehead did not. Moorehead had befriended Montgomery in Sicily, had secured unequalled access to his headquarters in Normandy, and was eventually given the green light to write a biography.
Montgomery kept back some of the most explosive stuff, including his diaries, but on the whole he gave Moorehead the inside track. It would have been easy for Moorehead to overdo the gratitude.
In retrospect, he might seem to have done so: he swallowed Montgomery’s preposterous line that the delay in pushing on beyond Caen was deliberate, and wrote almost nothing about
Arnhem’s magnitude as an unnecessary disaster. But for the time, Moorehead’s 1946
Montgomery
was a probing book, and remains a well-balanced
one. Moorehead proved himself capable of spotting the fatal flaw in Montgomery’s technique at his wartime press conferences: Montgomery patronized the correspondents by forever trying to
pre-empt their job of turning technicalities into simplicities. Over and above the question of Montgomery’s merits and deficiencies, Moorehead was well able to see—as Wilmot
calamitously didn’t—that Eisenhower was Montgomery’s superior in character and judgement. Finally, Moorehead was not seduced by the cosy glamour of the nearness that had been
granted to him. He was too successful a seducer himself.

When dealing with stars, it helps to be a star. All the Australian war correspondents were gifted operators, but Moorehead
had that invaluable extra attribute of being at his ease in a grand headquarters. High plaster ceilings and marble floors did not overawe him. He was one of those colonials who, through being
hard to place, can place themselves anywhere as long as they are given a few minutes to dust their shoes and straighten their ties. In Cairo he was given letters from Auchinleck and asked to
deliver them to Wavell in Delhi. In Delhi he had a long close-up of the brilliance of Sir Stafford Cripps—whom he might have overestimated, if Denis Healey was right in calling Cripps
“a political ninny of the most superior quality” (
The Time of My Life
, p. 471).
Moorehead also recorded an unsettling
insight into the intransigence of Gandhi. Challenged about the possible effects of relying on passive resistance to dissuade the Japanese, Gandhi was forced into his fallback position of averring
that not even the Japanese could kill every Indian. Moorehead, who already had some idea of what Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union added up to in terms of population control, clearly had his own
opinions. At such points, the
African Trilogy
is not just about World War II, but about twentieth-century history in its grim totality. But rather than
claim too much for a book that already holds more than we have a right to expect—it was, after all, written on the spot, and often on the run—the reader probably does best just to
enjoy the neatness of detail and the refreshing flow of common sense, the clear water supply of sound judgement from a young man who had realized, without having his head turned, that the
world’s crisis was his opportunity. The sense of destiny is in the dignified vigour of his prose, not in the magnitude of events. In that respect, he was the harbinger of the Australian
voice that the world has since come to know, value and envy: the voice of common eloquence, speaking the way the Man from Snowy River used to ride. Unaffectedly confident, content to evoke
without straining for effect, Moorehead described “the wonderful turquoise sea at Alamein, when the sunlight strikes the white seabed and is reflected back to the surface so that the water
is full of dancing light and colour.” Thus having established that he knew how to say just enough, he had the authority of tone to say what was profoundly and lastingly true about the
Australian 9th Division that came into the Alamein line after two years of fighting.

“Tobruk had discovered the Australians to themselves.” It was a piercing historical insight, which I had the
privilege of echoing with a whole heart while reporting the Sydney Olympics more than fifty years later; and I was well aware whose voice I was copying. One way or another, all the expatriate
writers in my generation have found themselves paying their tribute to a majestic progenitor. He could have handled success better. He should never have allowed
The New Yorker
to cripple him with the notoriously arrhythmic restrictions of its house style, but he had a Mediterranean house to keep up, and money talked. His first
book about a world war, however, was the start of something for the country he left behind. In a few pages, Moorehead placed himself
at the centre of the discussion about
Australia’s relations with England—such as they had been, and such as they would be in the future. Proponents of an Australian republic have a good case, but it will remain incomplete
until they take in what Moorehead wrote. It was surprising to find that Robert Hughes, so convinced and convincing an admirer of Moorehead’s, should have forgotten what his mentor said on
the subject. He said what good writers always say: that history is the field to which you must first submit if you would turn it to use.

PAUL MURATOV

Paul Pavlovich Muratov (1881–1950) shows just how brilliant somebody can be and still be a
forgotten man. Essayist, critic, novelist and playwright, he was also the most learned, original and stylistically gifted Russian art historian of his time, and he wrote at least one book
well equipped to last beyond his time and ours as well; but today it is as if he had never existed. What went missing wasn’t him, but the Russia he grew up in. As with Diaghilev, he had
all the artistic wealth and burgeoning energy of pre-revolutionary Russia as a context, but unlike Diaghilev he had no means of taking the spiritual substance of his context with him when it
was time to run. In 1914 Muratov edited the magazine
Sophia,
promoting his ideal of a perennial classicism. He had already written a travel book meant
to embody that idea:
Obrazy italii
, a title which is usually translated as The Images of Italy, although The Forms of Italy might be a better way of
putting it, because he talks about much more than just paintings, taking in sculpture, buildings, gardens and the layout of cities. (We have a certain latitude in translating the title
because the book itself has never been rendered into English.) The Revolution in 1917 was a powerful hint that the idea of a perennial classicism had a shaky basis in reality. The hint soon
became a storm. After 1918, Muratov was associated with the only bookshop in Moscow which remained unregulated by the state. Called the Writers’ Library, it was a
wonderland of a market in which the bibliographical treasures of Tsarist Russia were exchanged for grain, clothes and firewood. (Readers of Italian can find the story on pages 4 and 5 of
Muratov’s Google entry, where Michael Osorgin, with the help of Claudia Zonghetti’s suitably elegant translation, tells the almost unbearable story of the writers and the scholars
shaking from cold and hunger as they traffic in their doomed treasures.) Banished in 1922, Muratov went on the road, deprived for the rest of his life of any scholarly resources except his
memory. In the 1920s he was in Berlin, as a valued member of the vibrant émigré community evoked by Nina Berberova in
The Italics Are
Mine
, the best single book written about Russian culture in exile. Berberova played chess with him, and always remembered him as “a whole and accomplished European”: large
praise from her, who was so conspicuously that very thing herself. (Berberova said a beautiful thing about Muratov. “He was always in love in a balanced and quiet way.” She also
said that he was “a man of inward order who understood the internal disorder of others.”) At some point, along with several other books, Muratov managed to publish
Obrazy italii
in the definitive edition mentioned below. In the 1930s he was in Paris, where he acquired a reputation among left-wing intellectuals as an
anti-Bolshevik—a very plausible development. During the war he was in Ireland, pursuing an incongruous new career as a military journalist: he wrote an account of the Russia campaigns
for Penguin, thereby telling the almost laughably ironic story of how the Nazis were defeated by the same forces that had earlier ruined his life. As far as I can piece his story together,
Ireland was his last stop. I could have left him out of this book and nobody would have noticed. The history of humanism in the twentieth century has managed to bury
Obrazy italii
, and nobody cares. Our idea that if a book is good enough it can never disappear is thereby proved false, because
Obrazy italii
is one of the most dazzling books of its type ever
written. Can something so wonderful be allowed to vanish? Muratov himself was
probably reconciled to the possibility. In that tragic bookshop called the Writers’ Library he had seen a whole culture breaking up, like a stricken submarine in the abyss. So he had no
illusions. But he didn’t give in, and his subsequent career as a wandering scholar proved that there can be such a thing as a heroism of the mind.