Cultural Amnesia (127 page)

Even more than Bulldog Drummond, the Saint was a model for James Bond: years later, I could tell from the
first pages of Ian Fleming that he, too, had once thrilled to Simon Templar’s savoir faire, his Lobb shoes, his up-market mistress and his mighty, hurtling Hirondel—a car that would
have seen off Bond’s Bentley in nothing flat. Unlike Drummond, the Saint, though he packed a narcotic uppercut and could shoot the pips out of the six of diamonds after flicking it through
the air, existed on the level of mentality: he was clever, he had wit. He didn’t just charge and shoot, he figured things out, like Sanders of the River but without the solar pith helmet.
For someone like me— someone who was bringing exactly no sporting trophies home from school, and for whom a reasonable result in English was his sole academic distinction—the idea
that brains could be adventurous was heady wine. It was a short step to the most adventurous brain of the lot.
Ranging backwards in time but forwards in receptive scope, I
submitted to the awe-inspiring intellect of Sherlock Holmes.

In the Sherlock Holmes novels, and even more so in the short stories, almost all the action was in the
mind. Though the Saint could outwit his enemies and leave them chastened by his epigrams while they tied each other up and surrendered to the police, he was seldom relieved of the necessity to
plug a few of them as well. For Sherlock to carry a pistol was a rare event. In every tenth story, he might discourage an attacking footpad by taking a swipe with his walking stick, but that was
about it. Admittedly, and often without informing Watson in advance, Sherlock moved about a lot. Though his favorite posture was one of silent meditation, he was given to sudden disappearances.
(This motif was later borrowed by John Le Carré: “Then Smiley disappeared for three days.”) After Watson had duly added acute apprehension to his customary unflagging
astonishment, Sherlock would just as suddenly turn up in other cities, other countries. But his maneuverings were seldom in order to position himself for an attack. They were in order for him to
announce in the appropriate circumstances that he had the whole mystery figured out. From this and that he had deduced such and such. Watson, with the same access as Holmes to this and that
––the facts in the case—had deduced exactly nothing.

Neither, of course, had the reader, who in this instance was myself, reading far into the night as part
of my mental preparation for the mathematics examination next day. But Conan Doyle’s trick—a trick raised to the level of sorcery—was to make the reader identify with Holmes
instead of Watson. Watson was the same well-meaning dumb-cluck as you were yourself, but Sherlock was your dream of yourself. As a powerful aid towards making the reader imagine himself striding
across the moors or along fog-bound Limehouse alleyways in Sherlock’s long shoes, Conan Doyle made the master sleuth a bit of a shambles in every department except deduction. Hence his
appeal to generations of adolescent boys who couldn’t keep their rooms tidy and whose laundry was done by their mothers—a point reinforced, rather than invalidated, by the large
number of adult males who even today make a cult out of the Baker Street bohemian. Invariably the Sherlockologists are permanent adolescents retaining all the trainspotting tendencies of youth.
When a youth myself and in pursuit of an obsession,
there was no aspect of life I could not neglect down to and including personal hygiene. My chief obsession was reading, and
for a long while there was nobody else I wanted to read about except Sherlock.

I didn’t try to ape his physical mannerisms. A long way from 220 Baker St. London, No. 6 Margaret
St. Kogarah was scarcely a suitable dwelling in which to sit around in a dressing gown smoking a meerschaum while gazing into an open fire. I could gaze into the Kosi stove, and my clandestine
smoking—ten Craven “A”s a day and sometimes more—was a pretty fair equivalent for Sherlock’s drug habit, but otherwise there was no mimetic urge. I never stood in
front of the mirror with a deerstalker on my head pretending to be Sherlock, whereas, pretending to be the Saint, I had many times stood in front of the mirror with a sardonic smile, folded arms
and a casually tilted Mauser P-38 replica plastic water pistol. For my resident interlocutor, namely my mother, there was no possibility of faulting my logic as I told her why it was necessary,
rather than attending to my homework, to disappear that very evening suddenly in the direction of the public library so as to replace
The Hound of the
Baskervilles
and
The Sign of Four
with
A Study in Scarlet
and
The Speckled
Band
.

It was a phase, of course, and I bless it in retrospect, because Conan Doyle was a real writer providing
a free immersion course in the fundamentals of evocation. Conan Doyle was my first case of following a writer along his side-tracks. Previously, not even the authoritative Captain W. E. Johns had
been able to do that. Biggles led me to Worrals and Gimlet but not for long, because Worrals never shot anybody down and Gimlet didn’t even have a plane. With Conan Doyle it was different.
Willing to try Professor Challenger because the same author had invented Sherlock Holmes, I was plunged irretrievably into the Lost World, and nowadays I can only pity a generation that gets its
dinosaurs from Jurassic Park instead of from the magic plateau in whose steamy jungle the Prof and his friends spent so much time on the run. A Steven Spielberg dino is a stunning special effect.
A Conan Doyle dino was a dino: it stank. The grunts, smells, and yells of fear helped to offset the sneaking suspicion that Challenger was just Sherlock in a pith helmet—i.e. yet another
lightning intellect condemned to loneliness among ordinary mortals with slowly churning primitive brains. And anyway, how bad was that?

Like Conan Doyle and Leslie Charteris, C. S. Forester was too good a technician to be
classified as a sludge writer tout court, but his central character was that same sludge basic: Horatio Hornblower, the best strategic brain in the Royal Navy, was so brilliant that he could work
his way to a just preferment only through penetrating the defenses of the envious and mediocre. Pretty much like school, really. Saying the minimum like Gary Cooper in
High Noon
or Alan Ladd in
Shane
, resigned to being misunderstood like Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox Ford’s great
tetralogy (a sludge masterpiece daringly masquerading as literature), to whom else was Hornblower designed to appeal except an Australian schoolboy whose class marks were going steadily down the
drain?

It was clear to me even at the time that Forester had based Hornblower solidly, not to say shamelessly,
on the original of the heroic figure occupying the top of Nelson’s Column. Along with the leading character, everything in the Hornblower saga had its basis in historical reality. Forester
knew the concrete detail of the period inside out. Years later I wrote myself a starring role in a Footlights sketch as a pirate captain who did nothing but lurch about shouting orders.
(“Belay the thwart bollocks and lash down the foreskin!” etc.) I was congratulated afterwards by a yacht-owner in the audience who kindly suggested that I must have known the
authentic nautical terminology quite well in order to parody it so effectively. Actually my own nautical career had consisted of one terrified trip across Sydney harbour as the other half of the
crew of my friend Graeme McDonald’s VJ, a journey during which the mere thought of the sharks cruising below froze my hands to the sheets. I got my technical talk from Forester.
“Bumscuttle the larboard strakes, Mr Bush!” I got it from him in full confidence that he got it from reality. But Forester’s painstaking verisimilitude should not be allowed to
disguise the fact that Hornblower is a fantasy.

I hope I spotted that at the time. For a short while I might have attempted to address my classmates the
way Hornblower addressed his first mate, Mr Bush—saying the minimum, asserting his authority, bridling at contradiction—but taciturnity was not my natural style, nor tolerance theirs,
so the imposture could not have lasted long, and anyway it was obvious that in at least one vital respect Hornblower was a wish fulfillment. He could steer his ship into the massed broadsides of
the whole French fleet and the enemy cannonballs would hit everyone on board except him. They just curved around him. They had been manufactured in the same ordnance factory
as the Hollywood bullets that swerved past John Wayne on Iwo Jima. When Hornblower did get hit, he got hit at the edge, leaving all the bits that mattered still working. The same could have been
said of Nelson—it must certainly have been said by Lady Hamilton—but Nelson spent as little of his career as possible facing overwhelming odds, whereas for Hornblower the odds had to
be overwhelming or he wouldn’t bother pointing his bowsprit at them. In recent years the indecently gifted Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte, taking a tip from Stendhal, has been
turning out a wonderful series of novels and novellas about what war was really like in the Napoleonic period. His key trick is to build a central character you can’t help sympathizing with
and then kill him off at random. This is a cruel literary strategy but in the cruelty lies its truth. War was like that, is like that, and will always be like that, until the day when Full
Spectrum Dominance, or whatever the nerds call it, allows a battle with no people in it at all. In reality, flying metal doesn’t care what it hits. Least of all can flying metal be staved
off by moral stature. An invulnerable character is inviting you to join him in dreamland, the land of flying sludge.

As a war orphan myself, I don’t think I ever quite lost sight of the truth about the insouciant
randomness of the Grim Reaper’s scythe, but there was perhaps an element of compensating for the absent father figure. I think it more likely, however, that I was just fantasizing about the
possibility of individual initiative and valor having some effect in a world which I already knew to be unjust. Some of my heroes were fascists in all but uniform. My adolescence had taken place
after, and not before, the era in which the supermen had done their worst, but I didn’t spot the connection: perhaps because I was unusually obtuse, but more likely because adolescence
takes place in its own time, and refuses to be pre-empted by history. Putting the best possible construction on it—something we ought not to do for ourselves, but there are times when it is
necessary in the interests of justice—I think I admired my collection of superior beings for how they did their duty, not for how they indulged their eminence. From far off, beyond the
walls of my bedroom, history had already reached me as a wave of
shock. Clearly one was powerless, and yet here were these marvelous people who had power: not power over
others—that never really appealed to me, a blessed blank spot on my crowded list of vices—but power over events. The only drawback was that they were fictional.

In my next phase, I moved up to reality, but read about it as if it were sludge fiction. After World War
I, the books that told the story of what the war had been really like did not start coming out until about 1928. After World War II, the flood of realistic accounts started almost immediately. In
Australia, my generation of schoolboys grew up reading about British heroes: Guy Gibson in Paul Brickhill’s
The Dam Busters
and in Gibson’s own
Enemy Coast Ahead
, Douglas Bader in
Reach for the Sky
(Brickhill again) and all those resourceful RAF types in
The Great Escape
(Brickhill yet again). Paul Brickhill was an Australian but he might as well have been working for the British Council. I took in all the
factual detail but as far as the characters went I was still dealing with Biggles, Bulldog, and Sherlock. In
The Big Show
and
Flames in the Sky
, Pierre Clostermann was the French Biggles. When I read Adolf Galland’s book
The First and the Last
I was
almost sorry the Luftwaffe hadn’t won: clearly they would have, if only Hitler hadn’t been so stupid about the Me-262 jet fighter’s potential. Galland, if not precisely the
German Biggles, had a lot in common with Eric von Stahlhein, the caddish but talented gentleman spy and ace pilot who had almost brought Biggles to earth in
Biggles Flies West
. When I read Desmond Young’s
Rommel
, I was overcome with grief that he hadn’t won in the desert:
clearly he would have, if only Hitler hadn’t been so stupid about strategy. My three-color drawing of Rommel, copied from the dust jacket of Young’s book, decorated the wall beside my
bed. From my mother’s angle it might as well have been a drawing of General Yamashita, but she knew how to wait.

She had to wait quite a while. My hero worship was slow to fade, partly because the cast of characters in
the war books had actually been pretty heroic. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that they had had the opportunity to cut a dash because their circumstances were favorable. But my voracious
reading habit eventually led me to the uncomfortable truth. In
The Scourge of the Swastika
, by Lord Russell of Liverpool, I read my first accounts of
another kind of prison camp from which no tunnels led out, and saw the kind of pictures I had no urge to copy. And when
I read
The Naked Island
, by Russell Braddon, I got my first close-up of the war my father had been in, and they had all been in: a war to the death, a war in
which men were very lucky indeed if they even got the chance to fight, and in which women and children had died by the million. Children like me. Time to grow up. After that, I continued to read
everything that was real, and I still do. But I got the habit by reading everything that was false.

—
TLS
, December 16, 2005

NICOLE KIDMAN’S POETIC
STALKER