Cultural Amnesia (79 page)

There can be a stubborn investment even in cruelty: Daniel Goldhagen, in his unfortunately famous book
Hitler’s Willing Executioners
, is too much startled by the not very amazing fact that the Nazi concentration camp guards went on maltreating their victims even
when the game was up. They had always done so: to stop voluntarily would have meant admitting that it had all been useless. The most spectacular example of blind stubbornness in the World War II
period was the behaviour of the Japanese officers in high command who not only wanted to go on fighting after the war was clearly lost, but actually seemed to believe that some kind of victory
could still be won. Or it should have been the most spectacular example, but the palm belongs to Stalin. By a quirk of personality, being right about military matters was so important to him that
he added millions of innocent lives to the total his political vision had already cost his unfortunate nation. For his ideological crimes there might have been some justification: certainly
foreign observers as intelligent as Jean-Paul Sartre thought so. But for Stalin’s pig-headedness in the face of towering evidence that he had made a mistake there was no justification at
all. The consistent irrationality of his behaviour from the eve of the war to its end is well recorded by Dmitri Volkogonov in his indispensable biography of his father’s murderer. What
concerns us here, however, is its normality: the pre-emptive, silent tantrum that we call a refusal to listen, and the disabling consequences of realizing that we ought to have done so.
Montesquieu transfixes the issue with that single word,
honte
. It is the shame of the child who has been caught out. Though Montesquieu understood all
evils, it was not because he could trace them to suppressed propensities for evil in his own nature. He was too good for that. It was because he could trace them to memories of
childhood: those memories which reading helps us to outgrow, but not to forget. Not even the uproar in the nursery, however, could make Montesquieu despair of human nature. He said
he had a better opinion about himself when he read Marcus Aurelius, because Marcus Aurelius gave him a better opinion about people. One feels the same about him.

ALAN MOOREHEAD

Alan Moorehead (1910–1983) was among the most prominent of Australian cultural exports after
World War II, when his books of non-fiction such as
The Blue Nile
attracted a wide following in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as in
his home country. His rise to international fame had begun during the war itself. He was one of several Australian war correspondents who took the opportunity to employ, on a wider stage, the
journalistic proficiency they had developed after several years of hard slog in the newsrooms of Sydney and Melbourne, along with the fluent, easily correct prose that they had learned to
write in the Australian school system. Moorehead was there for the battles and the conferences through North Africa, Italy and Normandy all the way to the end. The hefty but unputdownable
African Trilogy
, still in print today, is perhaps the best example of Moorehead’s characteristic virtue as a war correspondent: he could widen the
local story to include its global implications. By extension he later did the same for his home country: resident in Italy, he inaugurated the era of expatriate Australian writers which
continues into our day. There were Australian musicians and theatrical figures who lived abroad before the war, and in
recent times Australian artists in every field have
colonized the world, but the post-war waves of expatriate Australian writers would have been less confident about their adventurous enterprise without Moorehead’s pioneering example of
the confident interloper who showed how it could be a positive advantage to come from somewhere else. No writer did more than Moorehead to put Australia into the world picture as the most
striking example of the old empire’s having produced, in its disintegration, vital new centres of creativity. When Moorehead was starting off, most Australian artists in any field
thought of Britain as “home,” the infinitely richer mother-culture whose approval would validate them. Today the position is reversed: the British would like to know
Australia’s secret. This demonstration of how colonialism can turn back on itself was well understood in advance by Moorehead, who set up his post-war European camp in the full
knowledge that it was an advance post for Australia’s forthcoming cultural expansion, although not even he could guess how successful the expansion would be.

A startling amount of the productivity was his. Of his many books written in his self-imposed exile,
No Room in the Ark
, a charming tribute to the African wild animals, is a good example of his knack for getting there at the right moment and spotting
the trends: in the Africa from which the old empires were at last retreating, the animals had become a resource, and the resource was threatened by mismanagement. Typically, he had spotted a
theme which would be important in the world’s immediate future. The final effect of Moorehead’s accumulated work, so much of which stays as fresh as when it was written, is to
convince you that to be born and raised in a prosperous liberal democracy not only confers the energy to see the world as it is, but the obligation to make sense of it, on behalf of all those
deprived of the opportunity.

Outside, the street vendors came by, and the cries of the Cairo
street vendors are just what you would expect them
to be—entertaining and romantic in the evening and merely damnable in the early morning when you are trying to
work. There was one man who brought such nameless pain and misery into voice that I was forced to the open window to listen. He was selling bath mats.

—ALAN MOOREHEAD,
African Trilogy
, P. 189

B
EFORE THE
LATE
1930s there had been individual Australians who had sailed away to make a world impact both in the high and the popular arts—Nellie Melba, Robert Helpmann, Errol Flynn—but
with the opening of World War II it started to happen in waves, and the first wave consisted of the war correspondents. Of those, the most dazzling was Alan Moorehead. Counting as
Australia’s first really conspicuous gift to international English prose, Alan Moorehead achieved the peak of his fame after the war, with his two best-selling books about
nineteenth-century African exploration,
The White Nile
and
The Blue Nile
. But he was building on a solid reputation
laid down during the war itself, when he was writing at his best. Though the Nile books have their merits, I have always found them shapeless, just as their author, I suspect, found the
explorations indeterminate: nothing much was decided, argument was endless, and narrative was defeated. Moorehead retraced the steps of the explorers but all the paths were overgrown and
didn’t tell him enough about what things had once been like. The
African Trilogy
, on the other hand, has a neatly monumental story to be told in the
present tense. From being down and almost out, the Allied forces in North Africa came back against the Italians and Germans, brought them to battle, and defeated them. Moorehead was there to see
it all. In this latter respect he had a big advantage over another star Australian war correspondent, Kenneth Slessor, who had made the hideous mistake of allowing his demanding wife to encumber
him with her presence during the biggest assignment of his life as a journalist. While the battle of El Alamein was being fought, Slessor’s wife required his presence in Jerusalem to help
her go shopping. The most important Australian poet of his generation, Slessor had linguistic gifts outranking even Moorehead’s, but there was no substitute for being there: Slessor wrote
the best poem about the North African campaign, “Beach Burial,” but he wrote it after the event.

Moorehead was almost always there for the event. Travelling light, he had nothing except
the official censorship to interfere with the flow of his prose as it went back to Fleet Street in the form of dispatches. His copy was world-famous at the time and has stayed good: it represents
the best title to the encomia that the late-twentieth-century Australian prose writers, with Robert Hughes in the van, have lavished on him ever since. They are quite right. Moorehead could
control his tone even when the circumstances were at their most intense: the hardest thing for a correspondent to do. To take the most obvious comparison, he was a far better reporter on combat
than his friend Ernest Hemingway, whose cadences he sometimes borrowed, and always to his detriment. But he never made the mistake of borrowing Hemingway’s self-importance. Hemingway always
wrote as if the action revolved around him. Moorehead wrote as if he had just happened to wander into it: the common experience of the war. Paradoxically, he sometimes had to feign this knack for
happenstance. His
sortable
qualities of charm, good looks and cultivation gave him the entrée everywhere. (Then as later, the simplest classical tag
from an Australian would stop the show with an English upper-crust audience, and Moorehead could quote from Theocritus and Horace until the officers’ mess was drunk dry.) On top of the
parlour tricks he was a terrific fixer, showing the Australian lurk-man’s perennial talent for hitching a ride into the forbidden zone.

For reporting a modern war, Moorehead’s only but irritating drawback was a lack of sympathy with machinery. Even
about weapons he had a nose for the big picture—he was able to tell Beaverbrook personally that when the Allied tanks came up against the German ones after D-day, the Allied tanks would be
outclassed—but when it got down to nuts and bolts, a shape in metal did little for his senses. He was the sort of writer who said “microphone” when he meant
“loudspeaker.” Another Australian, Paul Brickhill, aiming unerringly at an empire-wide audience of bright schoolboys, wrote a series of hit books (
The
Great Escape
,
The Dam Busters
,
Reach for the Sky
) that inadvertently showed up the extent to which Moorehead
had failed to penetrate the mentality of all the young men who had been propelled by the war into a new, classless world of high technology. (It was to be of high social significance that there
were few English-born popular authors capable
of duplicating Brickhill’s achievement either: but what matters here is that Moorehead didn’t.) To that extent,
Moorehead was stuck in the mud. His renowned social mobility was employed mainly among the upper classes. There was another story emerging from the machine shops, but he missed it. (In the next
generation of Australian social historians, a sympathy with technology and industry would put Geoffrey Blainey in the forefront: but his emphasis was regarded, and regarded correctly, as an
initiative without precedent.) Though Moorehead had marvellous powers of evocative description—
vide
the passage about the anthills in chapter 5 of
Rum Jungle
—they just weren’t aroused by anything technical, which meant that a whole dimension of tone was missing from his reportage, because
World War II was a technical war.