Even as We Speak (51 page)

Let’s see, what have I forgotten? Oh yes, ‘The Saga of the
Saucy Mrs Flobster
’ is here too – one of his maddest things. And there is a killing parody of John
Buchan called ‘The Queen of Minikoi’. And there are all the walk-on characters who turned up in story after story, like the singer Emilia Rustiguzzi and the chatelaine Stultitia, Lady
Cabstanleigh: that airy profusion of magic names which came bubbling up inexhaustibly from Morton’s slightly psycho talent. Evelyn Waugh spoke nothing but the truth when he said Beachcomber
had ‘the greatest comic fertility of any Englishman’.

Well, all that marvellous ‘stuff’ (Ingrams says that Morton calls his stuff ‘stuff’) is here, alive and kicking. Yet so much is missing. When I take the aforementioned
By the Way
down from the shelf (and I could just as easily take
Gallimaufry
or any of several others) I find Beachcomber’s protean multiplicity made assimilable in a way no
latter-day selection is ever likely to match. There are learned notes on setting Ronsard and Leconte de Lisle to music (did any other writer for the
Daily Express
ever allude to the
Song of Roland
or quote in Latin?) coupled with a typical counterfeit sea-shanty conveying his distaste for that tedious branch of folk art (‘Blow the Man Up’). And here are
Madame Sapphira’s Sixty Superlative Mannequins, making, so far as I know, their one and only appearance. But the bright young thing Boubou Flaring was always coming back, as were the
ballet-dancers Tumbleova and Trouserin. Here is the sole mention of ‘Fluffy’ Whackabath. And here, in all its ga-ga splendour, is
If So Be That
, one of Beachcomber’s
miniature serialized novels – a form conspicuously absent from Ingrams’s book.

If So Be That
, by Helpa Kitchen, is a romance of the Spanish-American War, which is why its opening chapter is set in Arabia and features the Sheik El Blista. A later chapter stars
Okuno Pigiyama, Japanese Plenipotentiary Extraordinary with or without portfolio at the Court of Athens. (‘But on the footplate of the Silver Monster, all unheeding, Ingeborg Maelstrom, the
first Norwegian woman renegade politician to cross the Rockies, is braising carrots.’) Frayn included
If So Be That
in
his
book, which is probably why Ingrams left it out,
but how could that extraordinary tale
Hark Backward!
be ignored by both? Nowhere in all Beachcomber is there a mightier battle than the one fought out for the hand of Petunia Pewce between
Captain ‘Nark’ Fiendish (a clear precursor of Foulenough) and the radiant and well-groomed Nigel Barriscale (triple blue and fourth in Archaeology), an Etonian dullard who converses
entirely in permutations and combinations of ‘Oh, I say’ and ‘Oh, I say, what?’ (But he finally wins Petunia by donning skates and inscribing ‘Play Up, You
Fellows’ on the ice in ancient Aramaic.)

Nigel Barriscale (whose epic climbing-party from Niederschwein to the peak of the Bumbelhorn included the mysterious Vivacity Dumpling) was merely the earliest of Beachcomber’s researches
into the psychology of the Upper-Class Twit. (He preceded
Monty Python
both in this and in his use of very long, extremely silly names –
vide
the full title of the Viscomte
de Malsain-les-Odeurs-Subterrannées du Brebingotte Nonsanfichtre, which goes on for half a page – but then, he preceded everybody in everything.) His arch-conservatism was humanized by
an irrepressible taste for anarchy, and indeed he was apt to rhapsodize seriously about the French revolutionary heroes. A nose for aristocratic cretinism led him onwards to invent one of his
greatest characters, Big White Carstairs, but not even
that
ramrod-backed blockhead was his final word on the subject. The figure of the well-bred dumb-bell recrudesced to haunt his
delicious fiction of World War II,
Geraldine Brazier
,
Belle of the Southern Command
– which is not in Frayn or Ingrams or anywhere I know of except an obscure anthology
called
The Phoenix Book of Wit and Humour
, edited by Michael Barsley and published in 1949.

Geraldine Brazier (the loveliest WOOF in the British Army) is a German spy, but she is so beautiful that none of the male officers believe it, even when they catch her going through the safe.
Neither Captain Roy Batter-Pudden nor Colonel Fritter can bring himself to condemn her, mainly because they are extremely stupid:

Awkwardness with women is the norm in Beachcomber’s ruling class. Awkwardness, and an utter deficiency of brains.

The old Beachcomber anthologies are getting harder and harder to find second-hand, and new readers have to start somewhere. Between this book and Frayn’s they will get a good part of the
message. No student of humour can do without a working knowledge of Beachcomber, but studiousness need not – and in this case could not – drive out enjoyment. Beachcomber hated (hates
– he is still alive) the modern world, and there is about his work something of the frantic music of a death-dance buoyed up by the mutter of only half-forgotten guns. Wild liberty is the
mark of his humour; not careless but carefree; as if the whole of his creative life had been a stolen evening. ‘
Ne vois tu que le jour se passe?
’ writes Ronsard in one of
Morton’s favourite poems. ‘
Je ne vy point au lendemain.
’ Believing that, Beachcomber could have done nothing. Instead, he did his ‘stuff’.

New Statesman
, 20 December, 1974

Apart from the programme note, these dispatches appeared in
the
Independent
between 16 September and 2 October 2000, and were syndicated in the
Sydney Morning
Herald
and the Melbourne
Age
.

Mount Olympus, meet Sydney harbour: you belong together. After a century of modern Olympiads, Sydney in the year 2000, even more than Melbourne in 1956, is the perfect place to
put the games back in touch with ancient Greece. The reason, which at first hearing might sound like a paradox, is that Sydney is the last place in the world where the classical ideal of
white-on-white, empty-eyed austerity can be achieved. But there is no paradox, because the classical ideal never had much to do with ancient Greece. The classical ideal was hatched two thousand
years later, in the eighteenth century ad, when every piece of sculpted Greek marble that came under the scholarly magnifying glass had long since lost its paint. In ancient Greece the marble
statues were painted in bright colours, and those vacantly staring eye sockets we see in the museums had jewels in them. Ancient Greece looked nothing like a cemetery. It looked like fun. When the
ancient games were on, the air was hot, bright and vibrant with music, and sparkling water was never far away. Does that remind you of anything?

It reminds you of Sydney, which as long as it doesn’t get too puffed up with seriousness is bound to stage the best modern games ever. Luckily, Sydney has never been a suitable place for
sustained solemnity. I can remember how in my childhood the local population would manage to stay solemn for the first half of Anzac Day, and then the joy of life once again took over. Shutting the
pubs at six o’clock in the evening, our wowser authorities did their grim best to keep the joy confined, but it would always burst out, even before the postwar migrants gave us interesting
things to eat and drink. We used to do pretty well even with the uninteresting things: prawns wrapped in newspaper and a few beers, with the odd Lamington for a touch of luxury. Nowadays you hear a
lot about what an unsophisticated life we used to lead, and in many ways that was true: but it was a blessed life too, fed with fruit, bathed in sunlight, and full of playful energy. A lot more
energy went into play than into work, but that was inevitable. Too many of the best things in life were free. Hence the fact, much complained of by those who cared for our cultural welfare, that
sport counted for more than art. Art was something you had to work at shut away. Sport, even if you were slogging to be a champion, could be pursued out there in the open air, the sole difference
between you and one of those ancient Greeks being that you were only practically naked, instead of naked.

Australians worshipped sports champions as a way of giving thanks for the land we lived in. In a vociferously egalitarian culture, to praise the tall poppy was an activity rarely well received
even by the poppy, which sensibly feared for its vulnerable stem. Even today, Australians can feel uncomfortable about singling themselves out: it might be taken for conceit. But our athletes were
assumed to be personally no more ambitious than Phar Lap, who ran fast because it was in his nature, having been born under the Southern Cross. Yes, our medal-winning swimmers were remarkable, but
weren’t we
all
remarkable swimmers? At the baths, the champion was just the one who charged up and down the pool all day while we hung around the sandpit with the girls. We all
thought of ourselves as sports experts simply for having been born here. We could talk about the finer points of a sport as if it were an art.

Looking back on it, I can’t see that we were wrong. Pundits who bewailed Australia’s philistinism were missing the point. Culture was not to be had by elevating our pretensions, but
by broadening our range of spontaneous enjoyment. And that was exactly how it happened. Music had always been a natural form of Australian expression. Long before the First Fleet arrived, there had
been music in the air. And any singing teacher will tell you that merely to grow up speaking with an Australian accent equals ten years of free lessons in how to place the centre of the voice up
there where it belongs, just behind the nose. Back before World War I, the Australian Impressionists had already proved that their country was a natural open-air studio. Literature was longer on
the way because it had further to come: requiring more thought, it was more easily discouraged, and only in recent years have our writers begun to carry themselves with the confidence of our
painters and musicians – which is to say, with the same confidence as our athletes, who have always wanted to take on the world, and always known that there is nothing incongruous in such a
wish.

There ought to be, of course: though a big country on the map, we are a small one by population. But history doesn’t work that way. Most of the nations big enough to do even better than
Australia in the Olympics of the last century would have given, at the end of it, an awful lot to have been called back and asked to start again. We, too, had to fight to stay alive, but our social
fabric stayed in one piece, and with the help of many who escaped from less lucky places it grew to maturity in a way that has made us the envy of the world – a nation where all the creative
possibilities of life can flourish at once, and so reveal themselves to be more complementary than opposed. There never was a real opposition between sports and arts; there only appeared to be; and
now we can see for a fact how they join up. All we have to do is look at these buildings and their natural setting, and look forward to the voices of the children’s choirs. The Sydney
Olympics are already an aesthetic event before a single starting pistol is fired. If the ancient Greeks could have seen this, they would have said: yes, that’s it.
That’s
the
classical ideal. You’ve got it right at last.

Just after lunch on Tuesday I left a London that was running out of petrol and on Wednesday evening I arrived in a Sydney that had everything, up to and including the Olympic
Games. The contrast was stunning. Prosperity, energy and sheer friendliness flooded the atmosphere even at the airport, where I was busted for drugs in the nicest possible way. In the customs hall
a sniffer dog took an interest in one of my bags. Interest escalated into a passionate relationship. While the mutt was humping my holdall, its handler, a dedicated but charming young lady with
freckles, regretfully insisted that she had to frisk me. Jet lag was joined by trepidation: what if some pharmacist for the Chinese swimming team had disguised himself as a baggage-handler at
Bangkok and planted a gallon jug of human growth hormone in my spare underwear?

Barely had half my intimate garments been unloaded on the examination table before it transpired that the canine narc had been turned on by a box of chocolates I was bringing in for my mother. I
should have guessed. Even when of German extraction, an Australian dog can only be a hedonist, and Sydney was out to prove that it can do hedonism better than any other city on earth or die
trying.

If that sounds like a contradiction in terms then it fits Australia’s collective state of mind as the games get under way. Never in the world was there such a degree of national well-being
plagued with so much insecurity, although it’s a fair bet that most of the paranoia is generated by the press rather than the people. For the media and the intelligentsia – two
categories which in Australia share the one mind to an extent rare in the civilized world – there is a nagging, never-ending doubt about whether Australia has yet taken its rightful place as
a Mature Nation. Will the Sydney Olympics finally work the trick? Or will we screw the whole thing up?

Among ordinary people the same intensity of soul-searching is hard to detect. They just get on with enjoying the good life, on the sensible assumption that the rest of the world must be doing
pretty well if it’s got anything better than this. A lot of the ordinary people were there among the milling foreign visitors as I arrived downtown in a cab driven by a Lebanese who had found
the way with remarkably little trouble for someone who had immigrated the previous week. Squadrons of local roller-bladers in kangaroo-eared helmets zoomed politely through strolling swarms of
guests joining one jam-packed pavement bar to another. Australians from out of town were easily identifiable, especially if they were wrinklies. A wrinkly is anyone my age or even older. Wrinklies
often still wear the Akubra hat of legend. There were wrinkly married couples in the full kit of Akubra, many-pocketed leisure suit and bulging backpack, except that the whole ensemble was coloured
Olympic blue. When there are wrinklies in the street at night, it means everybody is in the street at night. Ancient cries of ‘No worries’ echoed under the awnings, even as the fiendish
music of the young blasted out of the bars.