The Revolt of the Pendulum (29 page)

Hope’s notebooks are not very extensive anyway, and this selection is quite short. (Why it has to be a selection, embedded thinly in a mass of unnecessary commentary, and can’t be a
complete transcription with a suitable but more proportionate scholarly apparatus, we are not told – or rather we are, but not in a way that is easy to understand.) No book with so little in
it needs to be this big and awkward. You should be able to carry it in a pocket. You couldn’t carry it in a saddle-bag. The format is huge. The paper is good enough for a glossy magazine:
i.e., needlessly heavy. The bulk of the book is set in a sans serif body type. Nobody outside an advertising agency can read more than a page or two of sans serif type without contracting
conjunctivitis. There would be no need to put the word ‘page’, even if it were capitalised, beside the page number on every page even of a pamphlet, let alone of a book 366 pages long.
Hope was a master of economy, and here is his acolyte in charge of a book that uses the word ‘page’ 366 unnecessary times.

As for the copy editing, the publishers should have been reminded that it is traditional to give the author some help if she can’t herself spell or read her own writing, and especially
when she can’t read the writing of the man she is supposed to be a student of. Just confining ourselves to the mistakes she inadvertently wishes on Hope through not being able to transcribe
what he must have written, we are faced with a steady barrage of misplaced creativity. The man who wrote the words for Mozart was Da Ponte, not Da Pente. Apparently not having realised that Hope is
referring to Lucretius, Dr McCulloch conveys the impression that her author thought there was a poem written by Alexander Pope called
De Renum Natura
, which sounds like it might have been a
versified medical treatise on the proper functioning of the kidneys. What Hope meant was undoubtedly
De Rerum Natura
.

Hope almost certainly did not write the following: ‘Teaching university students I have found that if Keats were writing the
Ode to a Nightingale
today he could not rely on his
readers knowing what was meant by Bacchus and his bards . . .’ Nor could Hope, alas, rely on his star pupil knowing that Keats was talking about Bacchus and his pards. That’s pards, not
bards: only a little letter, but if it was Dr McCulloch, and not the printer, who mistook it, then one would have thought that her spontaneity of response was in no danger of being inhibited by her
erudition.

Dr McCulloch mentions in her introduction the difficulties of Hope’s handwriting, but doesn’t seem to realise that a guess is inappropriate when it comes to a proper name. Thus she
saddles Hope with the responsibility of calling Michael Ayrton Michael Ayston (twice on the one page, making it obvious that she has never heard of him). The authority that Hope quoted on Ariosto
was Croce, not Groce. Benedetto Croce was an Italian philosopher. DeJuan Groce is an NFL footballer with the St Louis Rams. Least impressively of all, Dr McCulloch has Hope quoting Horace as saying
Eheu fugaces, Postune, Postune
. Whoever the mysterious friend was that Horace addressed in the vocative, his name was Postumus, not Postunus. Unless Hope himself managed to scramble one of
the most famous lines in classical literature,
Postume, Postume
must have been what he wrote down. What made Dr McCulloch think that she could guess at Latin?

Thus proving every few pages that she is a bit light on the general culture her learned subject has in such abundance, Dr McCulloch cracks on with the task of bringing out his profundity as a
writer of speculative prose. She does a surprisingly good job of it, which argues well for the potency of his sane influence. He must have been quite a teacher, if he could have transmitted the
virtue of general cultivation in the arts to someone who knows so little, and the value of common sense to someone whose whole instinct is to reach for a literary theory as a preliminary to
thinking about literature at all. Hope was a great believer in the merits of what Keats (he of the Bacchic bards) called negative capability. Following his example, Dr McCulloch is a great believer
in it too, and proves that she is by advancing a theory in its support.

This theory is a theory of something called the rhizome, which, on her account, was first dreamed up by two sparks called Deleuze and Guattari, in their book
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia
. As far as I can tell from her expounding of it, the rhizome allows a principle of organisation which to the eye of an earthling looks pretty much like a random arrangement of
themes. Since Hope’s notebook entries amount to a random arrangement (i.e. no arrangement) of themes, the rhizome can be said to fit, and Dr McCulloch is encouraged to proceed with the
self-imposed task of bringing, ‘in a Deleuzian sense’, order out of chaos. The tolerant reader will go with her, perhaps occasionally muttering to himself that a Deleuzian sense sounds
as if it could turn delusional after a few drinks, and that the word ‘rhizome’ has an affinitive similarity to the word ‘rissole’, the classic Australian term, drawn from
the culinary arts, for something being reduced to a wreck. (Used as a noun, the word ‘rissole’ denotes a kind of proto-hamburger, but used as a verb – as in ‘Strewth,
we’ve rissoled the Holden’ – the same word means that the machinery has ceased to work.)

But in this case the machinery does work, because the randomness was never chaos. Hope was merely making notes, in his shapely, clear, pregnant prose, and as long as Dr McCulloch contents
herself with isolating and highlighting his themes, she is on ground so sure that not even the spectre of the lurking rhizome can rissole her argument. Hope’s wide general culture extended to
science as well: he had an Empsonian feeling for the poetry of the factual world. Armed with that, he was able to see immediately that Arthur Koestler’s attempt to co-opt particle physics as
supporting evidence for the paranormal involved a category mistake. Of Koestler’s restlessly mutating faddism, Hope, either echoing P. B. Medawar or (more likely) simply arriving at the same
conclusion independently, devastatingly said ‘once a journalist, always a journalist.’ Dr McCulloch might have taken Hope’s underlying point further here: Hope was warning against
scientism, as if foreseeing a day when pseudo-scientific theory would invade every field, including, disastrously, the humanities. She might have divested herself of her reliance on imported mental
snake-oil; but, alas, once a theorist, always a theorist. Still, at least she realises that he was right in that case.

She is commendably ready to concede that he was right, or at least reasonable, in almost every case: a nice instance of negative capability on her part, and a testament to her fundamental
generosity, a quality which can’t always have been easy to apply to so awkward, and sometimes plain provocative, a subject. Hope’s celebrated, and eventually notorious, anti-feminism
was mainly superficial. You could even say that he conceded women the power, and was always in awe of Eve, as if she carried Delilah’s scissors. His ‘Advice to Young Ladies’ of
1965, celebrating the courage of a vestal virgin who faced the death penalty for being witty, is one of the most effective hymns to female individuality ever written by a male. Feminist critics,
however, from the late 1960s onward, found Hope’s poetry a field rich in opportunities to burn him in effigy. The males in Hope’s poems were aroused by the beauty of the females, were
they not? Well, then.

Since radical orthodoxies of every kind have established themselves in the Australian academic world’s main discussion – or, as the academics themselves would be more likely to say,
in its ‘discourse’ – with a solidity and inflexibility that an outsider would find it hard to credit, Dr McCulloch is actually being quite brave in backing him up. Although she
finds some of Hope’s more overtly sexy poetry insensitive, she nevertheless thinks that he was always on to something in writing as if the sexual impulse might have a mind of its own, and
that women, also, might occasionally be mastered by desire. Her complaint about ‘the fact that sexual attraction is often left out of feminist discourse’ only sounds trite. In the
Australian context it verges on the daring. Similarly, she is going quite a long way towards dangerous independence when she defends Hope’s reactionary opinions about modern poetry.

Strangely enough, Dr McCulloch goes further in this direction than she needs to. Hope’s reactionary views were attractive when he wanted to warn against pointless innovation and keep faith
with the past. (He was dead right, for example, about the cultural impoverishment that would inevitably ensue from Australia’s adoption of metrical distance measures. By now it’s as if
the Australian version of the English language had been taken over by an inspectorate from Brussels: give them 2.54 centimetres and they’ll take 1.60934 kilometres.) But he overdid it when he
preached against modern poetry, by which he meant anything that wasn’t clear in meaning and sustained by an ascertainable structure. According to Hope, there was nothing in English poetry
after Yeats, because Yeats, according to him, was the last to write intelligibly, and in forms you could see. This left the way open for Hope himself, who wrote in visible forms too, but it closed
off his attention to whole swathes of achievement, including even Eliot, whom Hope managed to find prosaic. By this shared measure of cranky obscurantism, Hope and Robert Graves should have been
soul-mates. Hope admired Graves’s hieratic, muse-wooing attitude to the sacred art they shared. But Hope also found Graves insufficiently respectful of Yeats, lauded in
The Wandering
Islands
as the only touchstone in modern times.

It was a sad joke when Hope boycotted a visit to Australia by Graves, on the grounds that Graves, in his Oxford lectures, had been rude about Yeats: the two eccentrics might have had a fine time
agreeing that Auden was overrated. As things happened, nothing happened. Hope demonstrated his feelings by not showing up. It is easier to demonstrate your feelings when you are present. With good
reason, Hope was a proud man. But he was also a shy one, and shy pride is easily interpreted as arrogance.

Hope was braver in print, where he really was arrogant. Early in his career a victim of one of his book-reviews committed suicide. After that, Hope softened up as a reviewer, but he was never
slow to dismiss whole modern careers. There are plenty of poets who indulge in blanket condemnation. The price of ploughing a lonely furrow is often to mistake it for the only path across the
field. But Hope was also a teacher – as professor of English at the Australian National University in Canberra he was at the head of his profession – and he had no business encouraging
students to do more of what they will do naturally unless told otherwise: not read. There might have been an excuse for it if his brilliant start as a formal poet had gone on to further triumph. To
that question we can now turn, Hope having enjoyed fifty years of scarcely interrupted endorsement since he made his initial impact. Indeed the advent of Dr McCulloch’s misconceived opus
might well mark the point when endorsement, having decayed into hagiography, needs as much interruption as it can get.

To her, then, we can now say farewell, with a final ‘well done’ for defending an important artist whose achievement exemplifies everything that Australian ideologists would like to
bury about a superseded world of racist, imperialist, sexist culture in plain language, that last property somehow confirming it as the height of elitism. The farewell is made easier to say by the
physical discrepancy between Hope’s elegant initial book (bound in green and gold by Edwards & Shaw,
The Wandering Islands
was a lovely thing to behold at a time when most
Australian books smelled of glue) and a lumbering compendium that drains the spirit even when seen edge-on in the shelf. And I just heard the shelf creak. No,
Dance of the Nomad
will have to
go. Hope, who clearly had a personal regard for the author – he wrote a poem to her, which she quotes complete – would have taken one look at it and changed his own name to Despair.

Luckily he never lived to see the day, although he came close. Hope died in 2000, at the age of ninety-three. His stature was never in question and still isn’t, but those of us with a
regard for his abilities can legitimately ask ourselves why he didn’t conquer the world. Nothing could have stopped him doing so except himself. His poems were instantly intelligible wherever
English was spoken. Unencumbered with specifically Australian references, populated with an international cast-list of biblical and classical mythology, they could be appreciated by anybody
susceptible to his lyrical gift and rhythmic force, which meant just about everyone who read English poetry anywhere: people who couldn’t tell an iamb from a trochee could still tell that
Hope’s verse did the business.

And for a while, after
The Wandering Islands
, he got even better. I was at Cambridge in the mid-60s when I happened to see a plush magazine from the University of Texas that carried his
long verse letter to Leonie Kramer, ‘A Letter from Rome’. Its supple mastery of a playful tone suggested that he might have secretly paid pre-war Auden and MacNeice a lot more attention
than he had ever let on. The news-reading properties of
Letters from Iceland
and
Autumn Journal
were in it, and it had a swing to the handling of the
ottava rima
that was not
shamed by the rhyme royal of ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, while proving, from stanza to stanza, that Hope had an even better grasp than Auden of how light verse could develop an argument
through comic narrative. The overtly satirical poems of
The Wandering Islands
had usually been called satirical because they weren’t really all that funny, but parts of ‘A Letter
from Rome’ were funny, especially about the hard labour of taking in too much art at once.