The Revolt of the Pendulum (32 page)

More scintillating than any of these had been Hughes. He would have a sound right to laugh at the imputation of privilege – I can remember well how there was so little money left in the
family that his mother had to start a ski-lodge business from scratch – but there is this much to it: he doesn’t necessarily sense the Australian electorate’s reluctance to
countenance any measure that might divert power towards an oligarchy. The question of which interests would be favoured by a republic popped up quite early in the argument, and even that vast
majority of the intelligentsia who were convinced that the coming of the republic was historically inevitable were still ready to question the credentials of a carpetbagger who looked too eager to
scramble aboard the bandwagon.

Almost anybody with a university degree in Australia was, and is, ready to call the common people a bunch of racists for electing John Howard. The contempt of the commentariat for a good half of
the electorate is one of the wonders of modern Australia. (At this point, Americans might need to be reminded that in Australia voting is compulsory, so half the electorate means half of all the
adults alive.) In theory, the republicans should have agreed with Hughes when he treated the rest of the Australian population as wrong-headed on the subject of the republic. But they preferred to
think that the visiting fireman was patronising everybody, themselves included. This opinion of him was reinforced after the accident that turned him into Evel Knievel, when the press – never
helpful to a celebrity on trial – gave him their standard bucketing and he reacted as if its personnel were out to get him. Undoubtedly some of them were, but in Australia it would be wise
for even Shakespeare to have a fraternal drink with the Fourth Estate. Suddenly feeling the warmth drain out of his welcome, Hughes gathered himself up on his crutches, shook the dust of his
homeland slowly from his shoes, and headed off to light up the metal detector at Sydney airport. In the book, he contemplates saying a defiant goodbye forever to the land of his birth.

The land of his birth is unlikely to let it happen. If Australia’s too-much talked-about National Identity – that metaphysical abstraction which for so long has been longed for, and
longed for so pointlessly because it was always there – means anything at all, it means something that comes with you wherever you go. Hughes spends a lot of time in this book saying what his
country never had, and still hasn’t got. Actually it’s got it, because it’s got Hughes. He should give his country a little more credit, if only because it still gives so much
credit to him. Nowadays he gets quite a lot of curled lip from the media, but the bitchery is really praise: praise for the larrikin, Australia’s eternal prodigal child.

Hughes is the Bastard from the Bush dressed up as the Wandering Scholar. Thousands of bright young Aussies will want to be him, in the same way that thousands of slightly less bright Aussies
want to be the cricketer Shane Warne. Hughes is quids in. All he has to remember is that his nation has got some credit coming for helping to form the best part of his brain, the part that wants to
share any discovered joy. One doesn’t ask him to praise his homeland: just to be fair will do. He is very droll, for example, about the reactionary views of Robert Gordon Menzies, Prime
Minister of Australia for most of our youth. But when Hughes accurately recollects the two scholarships he won to Sydney University, and that he wouldn’t have been able to go there without
them, he neglects to say that his brilliant examination results would have secured him another scholarship, a Commonwealth Scholarship, had he required it: and that the Commonwealth Scholarship
scheme – the chief reason why the Australian universities in the late 1950s were teeming with the names that have since become famous – was the invention of the Menzies government.

The Commonwealth Scholarship scheme educated the very generation of intellectuals who were to spend much of their lives vilifying the government that made their education possible. Such ironies
are what Hughes should be reporting. I can’t believe he misses them out deliberately. I’m afraid they count among the small number of Things He Still Doesn’t Know. But they are
far outweighed by the Things He Found Out, and he might consider putting a few more of those into a second edition, in the space left when he removes an elaborate, pages-long confusion between the
F2B Bristol Fighter and the SE5. A stickler for accuracy in aeronautical matters – he was a mighty aero-modeller in his adolescence – Hughes will be horrified when he Googles the
designations and sees the trick that his magnificent memory has played on him. The better the memory, the bigger the trick: it’s a rule in life.

But he can always fill the freed-up space with just one more radiant observation about his field of study and arena of true passion. I drafted this piece in the cafeteria across the street from
the Glasgow School of Art, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s great masterpiece. It was registration day, and there were all those young students. I could remember when, in faraway Sydney, they used
to be us; and I couldn’t look at any of that wonderful building’s details without being grateful to Hughes for helping to open my eyes, in those years when I still knew nothing except
that I wanted to know everything. He didn’t have to find the language for being thrilling about the serious: he had it from birth, which is probably why, in this fine book which should be
even finer than it is, he can treat his unrelenting adventure in the arts as incidental. But it’s fundamental, to him and to the whole bunch of us: surely he knows that. And as I sit typing
this last paragraph in my London apartment, an email from a mutual friend tells me where Hughes is right now. He’s in Australia, promoting this book. The Japanese say it every day: I go and I
come back.

New York Review of Books
, January 11, 2007

Postscript

Naturally gifted critic though he was, Hughes left Australia before he had had time to make a full estimation of how thoroughly the influence of the European refugees had
changed the modern culture. His early cartoons were notably influenced by Molnar, a Hungarian immigrant who dominated the
Sydney Morning Herald
in the same way that Osbert Lancaster
dominated London’s
Daily Sketch
. The European influence was already everywhere. For us natives, it was a matter of seeing what lay too close to be noticed. Later on, with the benefit
of exile, Hughes got things in perspective, but by then his early remarks about Australia’s isolation had been published and taken hold. A star critic will always need criticism in his turn,
but Hughes was so brilliant that no modifying voice could be heard against his own. It was a pity, because the full story of the modern Euro-Australian interchange was one he might have told
earlier, and thus helped to save a generation of Australian cultural pundits from a career spent gazing into their own navels. But he had other stories to tell, and they changed the world.
The
Shock of the New
was an Australian expatriate achievement on a level with Rod Laver winning Wimbledon five times, Dame Joan Sutherland singing the title role of
Lucia di Lammermoor
at
Covent Garden, and Sir Jack Brabham designing the car in which he won the World Championship.

MODERN AUSTRALIAN PAINTING

Delivered as a National Trust Lecture at the State Theatre in Sydney on June 27, 2006, and later published in a shortened version
by the
TLS
, September 1, 2006

One big advantage of having your name attached for long enough to Australia’s inexorably spreading wave of cultural world conquest is that you eventually get to meet
everyone else. Throw another launch ceremony on the barbie! Prizes are awarded, exhibitions are opened, movies and plays are premiered, and sooner or later even the most dedicated creative loner is
flushed out of hiding to loom within reach of your extended hand. A characteristic sight at any big-time Australian cultural get-together is two life-long recluses falling into each other’s
arms. Last time I looked, I was personally acquainted with at least three of the most illustrious Australian painters of the post-war generation, the gang who really and undeniably put the
Australian branch of their art-form on an international level.

Admittedly I had met Sidney Nolan and Charles Blackman only once, and Russell Drysdale and Arthur Boyd not at all. But Margaret Olley? Jeffrey Smart? Not only mates of each other, but mates, to
a certain extent, of mine. John Olsen? Last had a drink with him at a big fund-raiser at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney when Margaret Olley was making it surreptitiously clear, with some
well-aimed muttering from the side of her mouth, that she thought her dear friend Edmund Capon’s curatorial campaign to buy a triptych by Cy Twombley was three kinds of a mistake. Actually
I’ve been in John Olsen’s delightful company for a total of about five minutes, and although I’ve been invited to lunch at Margaret Olley’s house in Paddington a gratifying
number of times, my only extended time in the company of Jeffrey Smart was when he was doing the preparatory drawings for his
Portrait of Clive James
which now hangs in that same Art Gallery
of NSW. During the sittings Jeffrey did quite a lot of
sotto voce
complaining about how hard it is to draw someone who has one ear far higher on his head than the other, while possessing
eyes almost invisibly small.

I could have wished that there was rather more
sotto
and rather less
voce
, in fact. But I was to discover that in the finished portrait none of these personal details would matter
very much. The main study drawing was done in the painter’s studio in Tuscany. I thought the drawing of my head rather heroic, with something of a Roman senator about the proportions of the
skull, although he would have had to be a Roman senator with an ear-alignment problem. But I didn’t see the finished portrait until some time after it arrived in Sydney. I visited the gallery
expecting to see a larger version of the drawing, and indeed it was: far larger, as big as a small Paolo Veronese. The actual figure representing myself, however, was extremely small, a dot in an
urban landscape, and obviously present only to give scale to the vast buildings. Bending close, I saw with some compensatory benefit to my self-esteem that there was now nothing at all anomalous
about the ears: which meant I could have been just about any man my age with small eyes and a neck thicker than his head. And that – on the face of it, as it were – is the evidence of
our acquaintance. But if journalists like to conclude that Jeffrey Smart and I must be bosom buddies, who am I to say them nay?

Yes, me and the painters: you can imagine the group photograph. But what’s wrong with this picture? Me. I shouldn’t be there. I not only never shared their struggle over the long
decades, but for most of that time I knew next to nothing about them. The whole upsurge happened without my knowledge. Though the painters eventually changed the way I saw them and have even
changed the way I see life, they didn’t do it by appealing to my sensitivity. They did it by overcoming my lack of it. And although there were many writers who were less obtuse on the subject
than I was, not many of them were in a position to change the general perception of Australian painting by what they wrote. The painters changed it by what they painted.

In retrospect, that was always the main guarantee of the strength of Australian painting: it didn’t really need writers to say how good it was. Though the painters cared a lot about what
critics said, they cared mainly because critical opinion might affect the sale of their pictures to the public. The law of supply and demand was the measure that mattered. Since the pictures were
bought by people who loved them – and that was especially true in the days when the prices were low, because it always takes a real appreciator to buy an artist’s pictures before there
is an established market for them – the question of where those buyers lived becomes vitally interesting in relation to the larger story of how Australian post-colonial culture relates to the
culture of the old imperial world from which it emerged.

But before we start discussing that subject on a large scale, it might be more fruitful to discuss it in the much more restricted terms dictated by my own knowledge of the visual arts in the
late 1950s, when I was first a student at the University of Sydney. If only I had been a student of painting. Like students of music, students of painting had to learn something. From the life
stories of the Australian painters up until very recent times, it emerges that they all had to submit to the hard disciplines of the craft that underlay the art: they can all prepare canvases, mix
colours, apply a glaze. Above all, they can all draw. And those many hours in the life class they all share. If only writers had a shared experience with the same objective standards: they would
know their own true ranking much better, and perhaps hate each other much less.

As a student of literature I had to submit to no disciplines at all, and spent an unforgivable amount of time fooling around. But it is, or should be, in the nature of a great university to
provide an unwritten charter by which a no-hoper may fool around more constructively than he realises, largely by keeping company with fellow students who are working harder than he is. One of my
fellow students was Robert Hughes. A bit older than I, a lot better looking, and much more gifted in every respect, Hughes in those days was doing as much of drawing and painting as he was of
writing. Nominally he was an architecture student, but he spent most of his time drawing for the student newspaper
honi soit
, for all the other student publications, and, enviably soon, for
the first examples of a new wave of serious periodicals that dealt with the whole of culture all at once. Hughes’s draughtsmanship was dazzling. He could draw anything and anyone in about ten
seconds, like one of those autistic children who can draw whole cities in perspective without lifting the pencil point from the paper. But Hughes’s version of autism involved reciting large
chunks of
Four Quartets
from memory, and his flying line had mentality and character in every inch. He painted with what seemed to me equal authority, although I was no judge. Hughes was,
and the time soon came when he decided he was not original enough, and ought to quit.