The Meaning of Recognition (12 page)

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‘At Schindler’s’, the first story in the new book, evokes a south Queensland childhood with the same enchanting clarity that he achieved in his directly
autobiographical
12
Edmondstone Street
(1985), named for the house that his miraculous memory has never completely left. ‘I can feel my way in the dark through every room .
. .’ he said in the autobiography. ‘First houses are the grounds of our first experience.’ In the new story, he could still be expounding the importance of early experience, with
the descriptions uncannily getting sharper instead of duller as the point of view advances ever further from the object:

For any Australian who first went swimming at the end of World War II, the matted board will have the same effect as a truck full of madeleines would have had on Proust. Yes,
the diving boards were wrapped with matting: he’s got it exactly.

The child at the centre of the autobiography, the real Malouf, came from Lebanese immigrants on his father’s side and English on his mother’s. The boy in the story has nothing like
so interesting a background, but something much more interesting happens in the foreground. In the autobiography he merely grows taller. In the story he grows up. It is wartime, most of the
Australian young men are already overseas (too many of them, including the boy’s father, as prisoners of war), and south Queensland is teeming with American service personnel, young men who
have only one thing on their minds while they wait to ship out for the fighting in the north – the Australian young women.

A crucial time in modern Australian history and a crucial place are both vividly recreated. After the fall of Singapore, Australia was obliged to sideline its hallowed but fatally outdated
military dependence on Britain and go all out in its new partnership with the United States – a shift of alliance, if not of loyalty, so far-reaching that its consequences are still making
themselves felt today. One of the immediate consequences was that the strategically placed south Queensland became an occupied zone. It hardly needs saying that if the Japanese had been occupying
it instead of the Americans the results would have been dramatic in an even more unsettling way.

Nevertheless the drama was unsettling enough. The jealousies and resentments were intense, and partly because the Americans, on the whole, behaved like gentlemen. Their good manners, added to
their high pay and ready access to a PX full of otherwise unavailable consumer goods, made them hard to resist. Hard to resist didn’t mean irresistible: to form a sexual relationship with an
American serviceman was by no means common among Australian women already spoken for by one of our absent nationals. But fraternization in the form of friendship was. And of course the boy in the
story, when his mother takes up with her charming Yank, suspects nothing more. When he walks in on them while they are making love, he hardly knows what is going on, but the story, written from his
viewpoint, registers his shock. The long-term consequences are only hinted at, but clearly there will be some.

For the reader of Malouf’s work, this is an uncustomary use for the word ‘clearly’. The only previous instance I can think of for a potentially formative sexual event was in
another short story, included in the 1985 collection
Antipodes
, In that story, called ‘Southern Skies’, a first-person narrator, brought up in a refugee family, recalls how
when he was a boy at high school a friend of the family called the Professor took the opportunity to grope him while showing him the stars through a telescope. Since the boy has already declined
the advances of his mother’s mature and attractive female friend, yet does nothing to stop the Professor jacking him off while he melts with awe at the revelation of the heavens, it would be
legitimate to infer that a future course is being charted. No celestial music is heard, but the favorable auspices of the heavenly bodies are hard to miss.

*

In the fictional world of Malouf’s novels – a world in which childhood is a time rarely touched by sexuality and in which the same, on the whole, can be said for
adulthood – the emotional relationships among men are even more fascinating for their lack of specificity than the heterosexual relationships. Apart from that one middle-period short story,
there have been no instances of males sharing an explicitly sexual moment while the cosmos sparkles in approval. The heterosexual coupling in ‘At Schindler’s’ (‘nothing he
had been told or imagined was a preparation for the extent to which, in their utter absorption in one another, they had freed themselves of all restraint’) has a few harbingers, if only
sketchily established. In his biggest novel,
The Great World
(1990), the character nicknamed Digger, a returned prisoner of war, has a years-long and quite believable Thursdays-only
relationship with a widow similarly reluctant to give up her solitude. Nothing explicit is said, but at least you can assume there is a mutual sexual attraction, in the same way you can assume that
the male and female protagonists in Jane Austen, upon achieving marriage, will at some time get into the same bed.

But the main relationship in
The Great World
is between man and man, and the interesting thing about it is that nothing emotional is even implied. Vic and Digger are prisoners of war
together on the Thailand railway. The hellish conditions are thoroughly evoked, but one is all too aware that the source-point lies in research. The classic treatment of the subject was written by
an eyewitness: Russell Braddon’s
The Naked Island
(1952). Malouf, marvelous with his own memories, is never quite as good with other people’s. Still, the backdrop is sharply
painted. Suffering in front of it, however, Vic and Digger are wavy outlines. Vic is unbearably insensitive, yet Digger is drawn to him. There are heavy hints that their personalities are
complementary: Vic has the sense of possibility, Digger the solidity. After the war, Vic gets married and goes on to be a headlong, headline-grabbing entrepreneur, while Digger lives out a quiet
life with the woman who is Thursday. Yet we are given to understand that the true relationship is between Vic and Digger. They don’t get on, yet they can’t do without each other. But in
what way?

There doesn’t have to be sex: there is such a thing as chaste love between men. But if this is love, why can’t it be explored? Beyond a reciprocal irritability, the thing going on
between them is all implied intensity and no expressed feeling. A vacuum is not the same thing as ambiguity, which requires at least two different meanings. For the long scenes between the main men
in
The Great World
it is sometimes hard to find even one meaning, and the general effect of Malouf’s most ambitious novel is of being empty in the middle, a doughnut as big as the
Ritz. The fault is compounded by the richness around the periphery. Malouf is touchingly right about how Australia’s unemployed men during the Depression insisted on being given work to do
for their handout. And among those same men there was always a tradition of self-improvement: indigent autodidacts would swallow their pride to borrow knowledge.

This tradition reached a sad apotheosis in the prison camps, whose informal oral universities Malouf conjures up with tender, admiring accuracy. He has a real feeling for the kind of friendship
between males that Australians are encouraged by their nationalist cheerleaders to call ‘mateship’. But Vic and Digger, never able to relax with each other or say what is on their
minds, are pretty strange mates. They barely even like each other. So what gives?

*

The same question mark-shaped cloud has hung over Malouf’s novels since the beginning, although it should be remembered that a dark enough cloud, as well as blocking out
the sun, can provide much-needed rain. Seductively forecasting what his autobiography was going to be like, the novel
Johnno
was published in 1975. At the exact time when Brisbane was
changing irrevocably into a skyscraper-studded modern metropolis,
Johnno
recreated the single-story small-town city of its author’s youth, thereby providing Brisbane’s current
and future citizens with a vocabulary and a map by which to cherish its remnants. Malouf was already a wizard for nostalgic detail, conjuring up such ephemeral treasures as the album-cum-catalogue,
celebrating the career and products of the confectioner James MacRobertson, whose colour plates ‘seemed as beautiful to me then as anything I had ever seen or could imagine, a sort of
colonial Book of Hours’.

But this is a fictional narrator talking, not Malouf. His name is Dante and he has a friend whose nickname is Johnno. Dante is slated for a life of order, Johnno is a
maudit
, a wild
man, and . . . that’s it. Really they should drive each other mad, but they are involved with each other and you wonder why. Coming closer to now but sticking with the same theme, in Jay
McInerney’s
The Last of the Savages
we find out why the square narrator can’t let go of a friend whose erratic nature scares him to death: it’s love. But the ties binding
Dante and Johnno are hard to trace. One thinks naturally of other books about the same sort of relationship because Johnno is such a literary performance. Though Johnno has artistic interests, he
has no real talent to justify his chaotic behaviour, but boy, is he literary: he quotes the first line of the first Duino elegy in the original German without feeling the need to say that Rilke
wrote it.

Unfortunately the narrator doesn’t feel the need either. If it weren’t my profession to spot these things, I would have been in the dark. But I spent most of the book in the dark
anyway. Is the narrator called Dante because he needs a Virgil to lead him on a spiritual journey? But what kind of Virgil is Johnno, karmically predestined for a beatified self-destruction on no
clear evidence of superiority? Even for J.D. Salinger’s Seymour Glass it wasn’t enough to read Rilke: he had to have his own poetic powers that needed Japanese forms to contain their
unheard-of intensity. Johnno just haunts the downtown bars in a dozen or so of the world’s capital cities while Dante checks out his performance from a distance, apparently with no particular
disapproval. A mental connection between them is difficult to see, and an emotional one emphatically not in question.

*

A love between men surpassing all understanding: this theme was repeated in Malouf’s bewitching short novel of 1982,
Fly Away Peter
, still the most convincing
thing he has done when reaching back beyond his own time. Before World War I, an enlightened scion of the Queensland landed gentry called Ashley takes on a proletarian called Jim to help him run a
bird sanctuary. The class difference between the two of them is well brought out. Though they are both living in Australia, they are from two different worlds. It takes birdwatching to unite them:
that and the war, in which they both die on the Western Front. One an officer, and the other definitely not, they take separate routes to the same death, and you would think that Malouf might make
something more of their last meetings in France before they get wiped out in the trenches. But he plays it down. Indeed, he throws it away. One suspects that he finds the whole idea of structure
artificial, but he would have a more consistent chance of justifying such casualness if the mental connections between his main characters were perceptibly articulated. Whatever joins Jim and
Ashley never fully emerges from the wetlands where they watch the birds, so there is not enough to regret when it gets lost in the mud. But, almost exceptionally in Malouf’s work, you can see
why they liked each other, and by no coincidence
Fly Away Peter
is sufficiently focused at the center to make the way it goes blurry at the edges seem deliberate.

If the same could have been said of
The Conversations at Curlew Creek
(1966), it would have been what the Australians call a bobby-dazzler. As it is, it is a work condemned to mere
distinction. Transferred backward through time to the bad old colonial days of the 1820s, Malouf’s standard two-man relationship might have had real power if it had been spelled out, but it
remains a matter of suggestion. Adair and Fergus were once close friends in Ireland, where Adair was the homeless waif received into a grand family and Fergus was its scapegrace golden boy. Since
Fergus will inherit everything by right, Adair lights out for New South Wales to make his own way as an officer of the law. Fergus, going all the way to the bad, ends up there too, and turns
bushranger. Adair is a man of order and Fergus is a creature of impulse: Digger and Vic, Dante and Johnno, we have been here before.

Balancing two complementary halves of a single personality isn’t a bad way for a novelist to search his own soul, but it helps the novel if both characters are at least present. Fergus,
however, spends most of the book absent without leave. Adair isn’t even sure if Fergus is in Australia. Just why Adair isn’t sure is a bigger mystery than the author allows: there
weren’t very many people in Australia at the time, and someone billed as a 6
'
6
"
blond Irish aristocrat would have been talked about. But Malouf prefers another kind of
mystery. In the end, if it is the end, Fergus turns out to have been, or possibly been,

In real life, legends undoubtedly do grow out of events. But this sounds like an inadvertent acknowledgment that the urge to create a legend came first, and then the events were
made up to fit.