In the latter case, probably not. Yet it is in so many ways both the most intriguing first choice — who, after all, would expect the creator of James Bond to allude to the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Charles Secretan? — and the most portentous revision. The decision to eschew the clumsy homage and instead appropriate the dull name of an American ornithologist underscores Fleming’s ruthless pruning of anything that might unnecessarily adorn the instrument he created in 1952.

That creation, and the long story of its making, is at the heart of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an immense biography by Nicholas Shakespeare. Building on earlier efforts by John Pearson (1966) and Andrew Lycett (1995), the book was prompted by the Fleming estate’s willingness to give Shakespeare access to unreleased archival material that illuminates the real-life source material embedded in the Bond novels. That openness may also have been the estate attempt to adjust the dominant view of Fleming as a man who, where he is not defined by Bond, is derided as a misogynistic, alcoholic wastrel with a penchant for whipping who showboated during the second world war and spent postwar summers in Jamaica fantasising about British grit, foreign villains and sexual conquest in exotic locales.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man has plenty of whipping and wantonness, but it adds nuance to a life whose early years seem to have been spent in guileless and unknowing preparation for important wartime work — work for which he turns out to have been unusually gifted. In fact, it is the observation of one journalist — that Fleming, in this moment, with all his gifts and talents finally in use, was a “complete man” — that gave Shakespeare his title.

But what freight it brings to the book: an intimation of comprehensiveness underscored by its bulk and the vivid cultural history woven through it; an implied claim to being definitive bedevilled by the persistent haze of uncertainty around Fleming’s war record. Then there is the dramatic portent — that Fleming, even as he created the character that secured his fame, was somehow lesser or incomplete in those postwar years.

But perhaps that was merely a reversion to form. Fleming’s early life was monied but grim. His miserly Scottish grandfather was a banker who had survived considerable bereavement (three siblings had been buried before he was born, and three more, plus his mother, would follow by the time he turned fifteen) to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Robert Fleming’s greatest stroke of luck, however, was to be a constituent of a young Winston Churchill, who called on him for donations and provided in his friendship a glow of respectability for Robert’s sons, Val and Philip, whom Churchill nicknamed the “Fleming-oes.”

Val, elected a Conservative MP in 1910, fathered four sons — Peter (1907), Ian (1908), Richard (1911) and Michael (1913) — with socialite Evelyn Sainte Croix Rose, whom he had married in 1906. But his influence as a father was defined by his absence. After war broke out, he joined Churchill’s regiment, trained alongside the future prime minister, and was killed while serving on the Somme in 1917.

Robert Fleming is said to have bellowed in grief at the news, Evelyn painted every room in the house black, and Churchill wrote an obituary for the Times, a copy of which, framed and hung above Ian’s bed, gave the eight-year-old a nightly reminder of the greatness that he could never hope to match.

Val’s estate, meanwhile, gave Evelyn enormous wealth, but in terms that invited her to endure a lifetime of dutiful widowhood: should she ever remarry, the money would be immediately transferred to her children. She responded by elevating her dead husband “from an absent, pipe-smoking, deer-stalker to an iconic figure in the clouds with whom she alone enjoyed privileged communication,” writes Shakespeare, in one of many deft summations.

Controlling, insecure and extravagant, she played her boys off against one another, guilt-tripping them and blackmailing them with threats of disinheritance, pulling out all the stops to ensure they might never suffer the consequences of taking responsibility for their actions.

For Ian, this manifested most acutely in endless reprieves from failure and ignominy, and repeated diversions from paths that might well have led him away from Evelyn. He was pulled out of Eton ahead of trouble over a relationship with a girl and sent to Sandhurst with hopes of joining the Black Watch infantry battalion. Out less than a year later after contracting gonorrhoea in a London brothel, he was dispatched to the Tennerhof, a private school in the Austrian town of Kitzbühel, with freshly adjusted plans that he would pursue a diplomatic career.

Distance from Evelyn allowed promise to flower: linguistic versatility, some artistic ambitions, an engagement to a Swiss woman. But on his return his mother stomped on all these green shoots. After his failure to find a position in the Foreign Office she intervened to get him a job at Reuters, where he made a decent fist of covering a famous Soviet show trial of six engineers employed by a British machinery manufacturer. Then he was off again, moving at Evelyn’s insistence to join a firm of merchant bankers in the City.

Fleming had little to no interest in commerce and even less in maths: “I could never work out what a sixty-fourth of a point was,” he wrote. Yet he flourished to the point of becoming a partner at another firm only eighteen months later. The succession of environments into which he had been dropped had given him a charming veneer that allowed him to adapt and conform while keeping people at a safe distance. Even the jaded journalists he tried to scoop in Moscow had been disarmed to the point that they were willing to help him with his boss: one vouched that Fleming was “a pukha chap.”

The elite education and time spent among the privileged had also knitted Fleming into every club and network that was worth knowing about, giving him vast contacts and points of reference that he wielded readily. The “stockbroker” Fleming would talk to clients about investment strategy, wine and dine them at an appropriate club or hotel, and then turn them over to the pointy heads and bean counters in the office who could make the money flow. On the surface (and, to some, that was all there was), all this made Fleming a Wodehouse character: paid too much to do too little, all charm and glamour and self-obsession.

And yet, Shakespeare suggests, Fleming had by this time planted “miscellaneous seeds.” He could speak several languages, had solid journalistic experience, and was friendly with several notably crotchety press barons. He had contacts and networks across the financial, commercial and intelligence worlds. He even had literary credentials, via the reflected glow of elder brother Peter, who had become a successful travel writer, and his own efforts as a collector of first editions of books that had “signalised a right-angle in the thought on that particular subject.”

The book collecting might not have seemed helpful when war broke out in 1939, but the miscellaneous seeds sprouted once Fleming was recruited to the Department of Naval Intelligence as a personal assistant to its director, rear-admiral John Godfrey. His ability to deal with the press and with people — not least his irascible boss — made him indispensable. His myriad contacts became invaluable. His knowledge of distant worlds and their connections made him insightful. But perhaps most surprising of all was his creativity.

In this vein he was much like Churchill, whom Fleming grew to resemble with his polka-dot bowties and “daily prayer” memos (“Pray, could you find out…”). Under Godfrey, Fleming brainstormed all sorts of schemes, many impractical and far-fetched, to gain an advantage over the enemy. For every hare-brained idea — to have a fake U-boat captain send messages in glass bottles railing against the Third Reich, to create a fake treasure ship packed with crack commandoes (which sounds suspiciously like the Trojan horse) — there was something promising. Perhaps most notable was what Fleming took from a little-known novel, The Milliner Hat Mystery: the germ of what became Operation Mincemeat, a successful tactical deception of the Axis powers.

Placed at the near-centre of British intelligence efforts, Fleming had a wide ambit of activity that Shakespeare believes to have extended to a role in the creation of America’s foreign intelligence service. He was hardly the “chocolate sailor” some contemporaries called him. Godfrey certainly thought highly of his assistant. He called Fleming a war “winner” who was owed a debt that could never be repaid, and Shakespeare adds to this the findings of other historians: “It has taken time to realise how central Ian Fleming is,” says one. “What he was doing touched on so much of the war,” says another.

But ascertaining exactly what Fleming touched, and how lightly or heavily, is difficult. Even the claim to Operation Mincemeat is made via inference, analysis of stylistic tics and coincident timetabling. Secrecy is the issue. With friends and colleagues, Fleming was generally reticent about his wartime service; bar the blurred fantasies of the Bond books, he left few hints of his activities. Shakespeare adds to this the need for confidentiality during the war and, later, during the cold war, when archives were both weeded and closed to access. Then there is the material simply lost to time — damaged, forgotten, burned — and the records that are exaggerated or simply mistaken.

None of this is unusual, yet at other times Shakespeare strains to explain Fleming’s absences from records, or even to gainsay what exists and inveigle Fleming’s way in. “Simply because Ian is not listed in the minutes of a high-level meeting,” he writes at one point, “does not mean he was not there in the room.”

Enough well-documented rooms exist to make arguments like this unnecessary. The array of material Shakespeare proffers is enough to convince this reader, at any rate, that Fleming was an active, engaged, important and unconventional wartime player. While Shakespeare labours the point, it also serves to establish a key fact about Fleming’s literary efforts: while James Bond was depicted in a cold war world, with its dubious moralities and shifting principles, he was fundamentally a creature of the second world war and its starker divides between allies and enemies, good and bad.

The oft-made comparison with John le Carré has never been to Fleming’s advantage, but Shakespeare draws out so many connections, echoes and resemblances between Bond and the second world war that any comparison between Bond and George Smiley or between Fleming and le Carré seems like a category error. In fact, given Shakespeare’s attention to literary antecedents, the better comparison is between Bond and characters such as Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, Richard Hannay and perhaps even Sherlock Holmes — Britons who, with vigour, smarts and a willingness to do violence, save the world.

Shakespeare is a restless writer. As though to jolt the reader awake, lengthy passages of third-person past-tense narration suddenly crystallise into the first-person present as he tracks down a long-lost colleague of Fleming’s or a vague acquaintance or — in more self-indulgent moments — the descendent of some vague acquaintance. These moments fold into the story of Fleming’s life the story of the stories — of the Pearson and Lycett biographies of Fleming, and of Shakespeare’s biography.

Shakespeare quotes people crowing about their efforts to mislead his predecessors or their determination to shut up shop: “Poor Pearson,” Godfrey writes, of Fleming’s first biographer, “is like a famished man gazing, his mouth watering, into the butcher’s and confectionary shop windows and having to be content with a stale turnip (or swede) from the greengrocer.”

Shakespeare doesn’t conceal his similarities with Pearson, noting his own eager anticipation of new discoveries. But he adds in the dynamics of his interviews, poignant notes about the contingency of historical research, and observations about the dark material at the heart of the Bond novels.

In one scene he arrives in the rain outside a bungalow at Milton Keynes to interview the last surviving member of 30AU, a wartime intelligence gathering unit set up under Fleming’s influence and operating, effectively, under his command. Bill Marshall is ninety-four years old and feels a decade older. He tells Shakespeare he is a week early but beckons him inside anyway. “Later, I am glad I got the date wrong,” Shakespeare adds. “Bill Marshall will be hospitalised five days after our conversation. Had I come at the right time, I would never have heard what he tells me.”

Inside, Shakespeare listens as Marshall — who only days before has received the Légion d’Honneur and a letter from Emanual Macron praising him as a hero — confesses to murder:

On 26 June, Bill watched as German snipers fired through the windows of a hotel, killing one medical orderly and shooting another through the knee as they attended wounded American soldiers in the street. It was raining when the German riflemen surrendered. Another witness told Nicholas Rankin how not long afterwards he had seen their blood flowing in the rainwater.

Bill grows quiet, withdrawn. “I shot four Germans in cold blood.”

“What did you feel?’

“Nothing. How do you feel seeing two men trying to attend being shot?”

What happened next, whether he was reprimanded or Returned to Unit, he does not say. He has said enough. I think of another character who inherited Bill’s licence to kill. This was the compost out of which James Bond emerged.

Much as he had come into his own, Fleming was in an invidious position by the end of the war. Bound by secrecy, he could not dispel or rebut jibes about him being the “Sailor of the Strand.” He was carrying considerable emotional turmoil: his brother Michael had died in 1940 as a prisoner of the Germans; a serious romantic relationship with Muriel Wright, begun in 1935 in Austria, had come to an end with her death in a German bombing raid in 1944. He could too easily see a future in which the skills and talents he had wielded so well went to waste. He was hardly alone in this plight: in the United States, Allen Dulles described his return to the legal profession as an “appalling thing” after heading a spy network. “Most of my time,” he wrote, “is spent reliving those exciting days.”

Where Dulles went to the CIA, Fleming returned to journalism. In 1945, he took a position in the Kemsley newspaper group, handling a network of foreign correspondents. A journalist Shakespeare interviews recounts how Fleming sat in front of a canary yellow map of the world equipped with tiny flashing light bulbs — one for each man.

Shakespeare cautiously ventures that this might have been cover for continuing intelligence work, but the whole portrait has the tragic comedy of a Graham Greene novel: Fleming’s use of naval intelligence lingo with his journalists, his retention of a code and cipher book in his office, the derisive whispers of younger colleagues that his vaunted contacts were nothing but old duffers. Then, of course, there are the corporate machinations: Fleming took the position with Kemsley, which also owned the Sunday Times, on the intimation that he might become the paper’s editor and the hope that he might even get a seat on the company’s board. He also fantasised that the foreign news service he was managing might one day become a rival to Reuters — at which point Fleming would be a press proprietor in his own right.

If true, it was only ever to be a sideline, for alongside a salary of £225,000 in today’s pounds Fleming negotiated an iron-clad policy of two months of paid holiday each year. He would spend those months in Jamaica, at the rather uncomfortable bungalow he had built and initially named “Shamelady Hall” before choosing a name that harked back to a wartime operation — Goldeneye. Here, in daily bursts of 2000 words, he wrote Bond.

In Shakespeare’s telling, the novels came shortly after a burst of disappointments and disillusionments. Fleming’s hopes of advancement at Kemsley had vanished; his long-term paramour, Anne Charteris, had been divorced from her husband and fallen pregnant (again) to Fleming, necessitating a hasty marriage that neither of them much wanted. With fatherhood imminent, wedlock complete, he was looking back to a life he once had and could still have had — in intelligence, on one hand, but also in literature.

Signs of Fleming’s desire for this life recur in the book, especially during Fleming’s time attending the Tennerhof. There, according to Shakespeare, the youthful Fleming was steeped in European history and literature and imbued with ambitions to write a serious novel in the vein of James Joyce or Thomas Mann. He made attempts to act on those ambitions, planning but then aborting a co-authored translation of Paracelsus and, in 1928, self-publishing a volume of poetry titled The Black Daffodil only to become deeply embarrassed by it. “He took every copy that had been printed and consigned the whole edition pitilessly to the flames,” wrote one of Fleming’s friends.

A factor in Fleming’s constant withdrawals, Shakespeare argues, was his elder brother’s success at writing. “Of course, my brother Peter’s rather brilliant as a writer,” Fleming would say, “but I wouldn’t know how you set about writing a book myself.” In the postwar years, however, his attitude changed. One prompt was his belief that he could better his brother’s effort at an adventure novel; another was his sense that he would not be trespassing on his brother’s turf if he did so. Then there was a sense of resentment, aggravated by his failed hopes at Kemsley, as friends, acquaintances and other writers churned out thrillers and spy novels that, in many cases, claimed experiences and actions Fleming saw as his own to write about — the gag of secrecy notwithstanding.

Perhaps too there was a sense of how he might slip that gag: Shakespeare posits that Graham Greene’s difficulties with the intelligence services — it was felt he drew too closely on his first-hand knowledge — may have influenced Fleming to increase the fantastical elements of the Bond stories even as he drew on the real-life material of his wartime experiences and insights. “I think he wrote the books primarily because he had a great deal of knowledge of things like this within him, and he had to get it out,” says one acquaintance.

It is a conflux of influences that Shakespeare presents with considerable verve. He plays with the book’s internal clock, changes style and tone, moves into scenes and back out of them, and in doing so creates vivid juxtapositions and drama. The chapter on Bond’s first appearance on the page follows immediately on Fleming’s decision to marry to create the convincing argument that Bond was an escape for Fleming as much as for an exhausted postwar Britain:

Suddenly, as he floated over the reef [at Goldeneye], above barracuda he had named after battleships, Ian saw an exhilarating path back to bachelorhood — by creating a contemporary naval hero in the tradition of Drake, Morgan and Nelson, loyal to the Crown, who would reaffirm England as a world power, wipe out the shame of the Burgess–Maclean defection, and re-establish SIS as “the most dangerous” Secret Service in Russian eyes. And he would be a bachelor. “If he were to marry and settle down he would be of little value to the Secret Service.”

A chapter later, Shakespeare is looking ahead again, foreshadowing how Bond would consume Fleming. It was not only that Bond’s fame quickly came to define his author’s public persona; it was also that Fleming became reliant on Bond. Advised that it was no good to write just one book, that he had to “hit the nail again and again with the same hammer until it’s driven into the head of your potential public,” Fleming became a factory working on a one-year schedule, the brunt of the work to be done during a spell at Goldeneye.

Fleming went into this routine clear-eyed, seeing it as wholly compatible with his working life as well as a path out of financial difficulties caused by a spendthrift Anne. As he wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape during negotiations over Casino Royale, “I am only actuated by the motives of a) making as much money for myself and my publishers as possible out of the book, and b) getting as much fun as I personally can out of the project.”

But the fun, in Shakespeare’s telling, dwindled as the money poured in. Lawsuits over film and television rights, accusations of plagiarism, negative reviews and laughter from friends all corroded this late-life literary success. Then there was Fleming’s knowledge that, at some point, he would run out of material. Philip Larkin famously detected in the posthumously published Octopussy (1966) an allegory for how Fleming had used his war experiences as treasure off which to secure his heart’s desires — Bentleys, caviar, Henry Cotton golf clubs. It was acute insight that Shakespeare agrees with. “This was the draining exchange,” he writes. “Once Ian gave birth to Bond, he relied heavily on the hard-earned secret capital of the war. Each book was a different slice of stolen gold until the material ran out.”

The poor quality of Octopussy and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), also published after Fleming’s death, suggests Shakespeare’s assessment is right. But at play in the preceding Bond books too is a sense of Fleming butting up against the limits imposed on a writer tilling in a single genre. For Your Eyes Only (1960) abandons the novel form in favour of the short story, one of which — the horribly titled “Quantum of Solace” — eschews gunfights and villains in favour of a parable about marital compassion delivered after a disappointing dinner party in a manner reminiscent of Somerset Maugham. The response to this deviation was lukewarm at best.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), meanwhile, is unique among the Bond novels for being framed by a meta-fictive introduction from Fleming, for adopting the first-person perspective of a woman, and for its brutally sleazy and violent story. The book contains the most rounded and complex of Fleming’s female characters, but its reception was so virulently hostile that Fleming, taken aback, suppressed a paperback edition, refused to allow anything but the title to be used in the film adaptations, and went back to his safe patch with the Bond that followed, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963).

One might wonder whether Fleming still yearned to write something that his younger, more highbrow self would have been proud of, and whether he had come to believe that, thanks to Bond, he could not. If so, it is all the more tragic for being a knowing compromise signalled by the early change he had made to the draft of Casino Royale.

A homage to a nineteenth-century philosopher was never going to fit into that work, into that world, and Fleming saw it quickly. He slashed a blue line through Secretan and above it wrote a new name. His protagonist would introduce himself bluntly, almost monosyllabically: “Bond. James Bond.” •

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
By Nicholas Shakespeare | Harvill Secker | $42.99 | 830 pages

The post Grand days appeared first on Inside Story.

Thus, in 2013, while working on his biography of David Cornwell — known the world over as John le Carré — Sisman understood immediately what Cornwell was saying to him in the following letter:

It is no coincidence that in Spy [Who Came in from the Cold], A Perfect Spy, and A Constant Gardener [sic], the protagonist kills himself. Ditto The Tailor of Panama. Enough?

As Sisman writes with considerable understatement in his latest book, The Secret Life of John le Carré, “I was alarmed.” His project was at risk and his subject was hinting that he might kill himself.

Cornwell’s letter was triggered when Sisman revealed that he had accumulated evidence of Cornwell’s repeated infidelity during his marriage to his second wife, Jane Cornwell (née Eustace). Some of the relationships in question were shortlived, some never even consummated. Some were conducted almost entirely via letters, with only one or two meetings in the flesh. More than a few were of a long duration and had a significant effect on both Cornwell and the women with whom he had the affairs. Common to all was fervent passion on Cornwell’s part, an insistence on secrecy, and evasion and dissembling as he extricated himself from relationships when they came to demand he make honest choices.

Sisman had not gone hunting for this material. Word of one affair arrived during a drunken discussion at a party about the merits of various Proust translations. Word of another came from Cornwell’s half-sister. Another Sisman came across while reading letters in Cornwell’s home. He heard of more still from Cornwell’s friends. Sisman was not wholly interested in this part of Cornwell’s private life, per se, and nor did he initially think that the affairs were important. And yet he saw a connection with Cornwell’s oeuvre: “I could scarcely ignore the fact that betrayal was a current theme of his work.”

Over time, as he learned more about these affairs and detected their influence in Cornwell’s fiction — in how characters resembled lovers and how Cornwell took new lovers for each new book and discarded them shortly afterward — Sisman became convinced of their importance. Cornwell’s behaviour was a key to his fiction, unlocking a duality and tension that seemed necessary for Cornwell to write. According to his lovers, Cornwell went out of his way to provoke this tension: he insisted on using dead letter boxes for correspondence, recorded his lovers’ addresses and phone numbers in code, would mislead taxi drivers about their destinations, and would give the women cash to book trips and holidays so that he could evade his wife’s scrutiny.

Sisman and Cornwell had enjoyed a relatively fruitful relationship since Sisman’s proposal, in 2010, to write the biography. Cornwell, cautious at first, had been “very divided about how to respond.” His messy private life was in conflict with his wish that Sisman write “without restraints.”

His fears had been assuaged by a formal agreement between the two men in which Cornwell agreed to grant access to his archives, offer introductions and be interviewed at length. Sisman, in turn, agreed to allow Cornwell the opportunity to correct factual errors and advise whether “any passages should be amended or removed on the basis that they do not give due respect to the sensitivities of living third parties.” Introductions that Cornwell readily supplied testified to his willingness to live up to this agreement. “I have put my trust in him,” Cornwell told an old friend and former lover. “I have no editorial control over what he writes, beyond checking dates, places, & bald facts.”

In the early days, Cornwell seemed pleased by Sisman’s efforts. “Wherever you’ve been, you’ve left a benign impression, for which I am very grateful,” he wrote him, in January 2012. “I can’t imagine how I will come out of it, but I think that’s what drew me into it: the notion that this was never something I could do for myself, & that somehow, whatever the outcome, this was going to be a gift of sorts to my children; a gift of truth, insofar as there ever is one, & it can be told.”

And yet, by the end of the year, as Cornwell learned that Sisman had contacted at least one former lover, Cornwell’s pleasure and peace of mind vanished. “I admire your work & your tenacity; I would wish that in your position I would show the same acumen; I have a genuine respect for your tact & integrity. I also have a sense of, on the strength of recent experience, of impending disaster in my life — i.e. in the lives of those I hold most dear — and I can’t allow any more time to pass without expressing it to you, and indicating to you the heavy footmarks of your recent explorations.”

Cornwell wanted to revise the terms of their agreement, principally to make the biography “authorised” and thereby, presumably, denuded of the material about his infidelities. Sisman resisted, but Cornwell’s intimation of suicide meant he couldn’t ignore the grave implications of continuing without compromise. An uneasy détente followed when Cornwell seemed to “calm down” and recover his composure. Sisman continued to work, but there was no denying that the relationship between biographer and subject was changing.

Sisman mentioned he had met with another of Cornwell’s lovers; Cornwell mentioned that he was contemplating writing a memoir — a book that could overshadow or gazump Sisman’s biography. Sisman responded by proposing a shorter first volume that would be published before Cornwell’s memoir and then, after Cornwell’s death, publishing a second volume that would cover Cornwell’s life after the end of the cold war. Jane Cornwell, meanwhile, suggested her husband’s patience with the whole project was flagging: “The constant pressure for more sessions with David may make him feel that he has to draw a line and say, That’s enough.”

“We feel we are living with a ticking bomb,” Cornwell soon told Sisman, and over the year that followed Cornwell made repeated efforts to dispose of the bomb. He took exception to the proposal for two volumes (from fear that it would suggest, as many critics already did, that he had lost his subject when the cold war ended), pushed again and again for a change in the agreement with Sisman, then shelved his memoir and agreed to go back to the original plan.

When he was given the draft manuscript, Cornwell was predictably dissatisfied with its conclusions, tone and implications. “You can’t expect me to enjoy, least of all applaud, my own trivialisation,” he wrote. At one point Cornwell complained that the book was “all warts and no all,” and became suspicious and panicked: “There are glaring omissions that almost seem deliberate. There are a string of small calumnies and one or two large ones.”

Cornwell used every advantage he could, it seems, to push Sisman into changes. He claimed that the biography could hurt the forthcoming “sensational years” in his career and implied that Sisman’s project was responsible for the limp, heartless novel that he had laboured over and then shelved: “It’s pretty clear to me that my (exaggerated) apprehensions about the biography played a part.” In the background of these negotiations and arguments, for Sisman, lurked predecessors who had failed to produce the goods: the journalist Graham Lord, whose effort had been sued into disappearing, and Robert Harris, the journalist-turned-novelist who had been encouraged, then discouraged, then monstered into silence. There was also the possibility of Cornwell’s withdrawing his cooperation and waiving of copyright, which would all but kill Sisman’s book.

In the face of all this, Sisman hedged, acquiesced, resisted. He compromised on little things, deleting references to “Huns” and “Krauts” in Cornwell’s correspondence out of deference to his German readership. He took in edits, tweaked passages. At times he pointed out to Cornwell that, in taking exception to something, he was disputing himself: “You asked me in your list of the questions what my source was for saying that you had fallen out of love with Ronnie [Cornwell, David Cornwell’s father], and at the time I couldn’t remember, so I took this out,” Sisman wrote, in May 2015. “But I have just stumbled across it, at the beginning of the last section of your wonderful New Yorker article…”

Sisman was understandably feeling “divided in two.” He was grappling with the competing duties he owed — to truth and transparency, to his subject and the imperative to ameliorate the prospect of harm, to the ownership of the book he was writing — yet he also simply wanted to get the job done. His work was being chipped away, his energies were flagging. He wanted “simply to get to the end of the process, one way or another.” He got there in October 2015, when John le Carré: The Biography was published by Bloomsbury.

“I’m sure you’re having a great time, so enjoy it,” Cornwell wrote him, on the day of publication. “What’s done is done.”

Cornwell had, in many ways, won out. As Sisman recounts, reviewers of John le Carré, while otherwise praising it, noted that the detailed and relatively open account of Cornwell’s life changed profoundly in its second half, just as Cornwell married Jane Eustace. “At a certain point,” wrote Theo Tait in the London Review of Books, “the reader is banished from Cornwell’s life.” Certainly, from page 320 — exactly halfway — the book becomes repetitive and distant: yet another novel, yet another dust-up with publishers and literary agents (Cornwell was perennially dissatisfied with the publishing industry), yet another award, yet another film or television adaptation, and yet more grumblings from Cornwell about snubs from the “literary establishment.” Hanging over all this were two weighty paragraphs, full of portent but shorn of the information and evidence that might have backed them up, on page 320:

In Jane [Eustace], David had found a helpmeet, a companion, who would support and encourage him in his writing for the rest of his days. She recognised from early in their life together that she would have to share him with other women. The restless, self-destructive search for love is part of his nature. It has led him into impulsive, shortlived affairs; none of them has threatened the stability of his relationship with Jane. “I think we’re more monogamous than most couples,” he told one guest. For him, she would always be his best friend, his wise counsel and his anchor through every storm.

David’s infidelities have created a duality and a tension that became a necessary drug for his writing, often brought about by deliberate incongruity. The secrecy involved and the risk of exposure have themselves been stimulating, bringing a dangerous edge to the routine of everyday existence. From an early stage in their relationship Jane has suffered David’s extramarital adventures, and tried to protect him from their consequences. Though it has not been easy for her, she has behaved with quiet dignity. “Nobody can have all of David,” she said recently.

That comment of Jane’s, Sisman suspects, was dictated to her by Cornwell as an answer to the indignities she had been forced to bear by her husband and his biographer. It was, of course, also a message to Sisman — that he would not be permitted the full life he was hoping to depict. Perhaps too it was a message to the public-at-large that, no matter the claim John le Carré: The Biography made to being definitive, it was not the whole story,

If that message was too subtle, Cornwell made sure to underline it. Within ten days of publication of Sisman’s book, Cornwell announced the revival of his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, to be published the following year. Sisman knew immediately that the announcement’s timing had been designed to damage his biography. Correspondence in the posthumous A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré (2022) confirms this: writing to Tom Stoppard, Cornwell called his memoir a “sort of antidote to Sisman,” and in the introduction to Pigeon Tunnel he conspicuously pulled rank on his biographer:

A recently published account of my life offers thumbnail versions of one or two of the stories, so it naturally pleases me to reclaim them as my own, tell them in my own voice, and invest them as best I can with my own feelings.

Yet Cornwell still hadn’t exhausted his ambivalence about Sisman’s biography. It is possible to detect his feelings in A Legacy of Spies (2017), in which an aged Peter Guillam, former right-hand man to spymaster George Smiley, is called from retirement to answer for the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1962), the book that made Cornwell’s career. Amid interrogations and documents exposing again and again the gap between reality as recorded on paper and as Guillam recalls it (or, at least, is willing to explain it), Cornwell writes of the fugue that sweeps over the former spy:

Humiliation, certainly. Frustration, bewilderment, no question. Outrage at having my past dug up and thrown in my face. Guilt, shame, apprehension, any amount. And all directed in a single blast of pain and incomprehension…

For Sisman, this and the other novels that Cornwell was now writing were “less interesting and more formulaic” than his earlier works and unwittingly betrayed the absence of tension in Cornwell’s life as he aged. By now in his eighties, his lovers were infrequent. “Without a new muse for each book, his inspiration dried up.”

And while the le Carré novels kept coming — angrily railing against Brexit and the dangers of populism, each one more uneven and slighter than its predecessor — Sisman was aware that his dealings with Cornwell were likely soon to change. Since 2010, his relationship with Cornwell had fulfilled a basic tenet of biography. As he puts it: “The subject is, almost by definition, the senior figure; the biographer is in a subordinate position. Each is thinking about posterity. In any agreement between them there will be an element of quid pro quo: while the subject remains alive he or she retains some measure of control, even if the restraints are rarely visible.” Once the subject was dead, however, that changes: “The biographer is likely to have the last word.”

Thus, three years after Cornwell’s death and two years after Jane’s, we have Sisman’s Secret Life of John le Carré. The book is not a substitute for the biography, nor a condensation of that book. It is, Sisman writes, a supplement to it, containing the material he felt obliged to cut and information that has come to light since. The idea was seeded by Cornwell’s eldest son, Simon, back in 2014–15 when tensions between Cornwell and Sisman were at their height: “He fully agreed with me that David’s relations with women were key to a full understanding of his work, and proposed that I should keep a ‘secret annexe’ for eventual publication in some form after both David and Jane were dead.”

At its most obvious, the Secret Life goes a significant way to backing up the pregnant paragraphs that Sisman wrote but could not provide evidence for in the original biography. In considerable detail, he tracks Cornwell’s infidelities and their influence on his fiction. He establishes correlations between lovers and characters — journalist Janet Lee Stevens was central to The Little Drummer Girl (1982), activist Yvette Pierpaoli was the model for Tessa Quayle in The Constant Gardener (2001) — and shows Cornwell’s awareness of their influence on him. His infidelities, Cornwell admitted to Sisman, were not a “dark part” of his life, separate from his work, “but, alas, integral to it, & inseparable.”

A good deal of it is dark. While still married to his first wife, Cornwell lured Liz Tollinton, a typist in MI5, to become his secretary and then seduced her. After six months during which she attempted suicide, he bought her a ring that she wore on her engagement finger — then he dumped her as both lover and secretary. He seduced the family au pair, who fell pregnant and suffered a miscarriage, and accused her of wanting to sell his secrets to newspapers. American journalist Janet Lee Stevens had an affair with Cornwell and was killed in the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut while pregnant with a child that might have been his.

Cornwell was also mercurial with Sue Dawson, a researcher who met him during recordings for his audiobooks and become his lover afterward. During a long-running affair, he once leapt onto Dawson, pinned her down with his forearm on her throat and accused her of walking in such a way that his wife might hear, through the telephone, her heels clacking on the floor. Dawson observed that Cornwell took as much satisfaction from reading his own work as he did from sex; after their affair, when she considered writing a memoir, he sued to ensure it would not see the light of day (it was published in 2022 under a pseudonym).

“Much of David’s behaviour described in these pages is reprehensible: dishonesty, evasion and lying, for decade after decade,” Sisman writes. “Does it lower him in our estimation to know that he lied to his wife? Yes, of course it does; it is natural to feel dismay when those whom we admire behave less than well. But few individuals would be comfortable in subjecting their private behaviour to public scrutiny.”

Nor would all biographers be so comfortable exposing the ups and downs of their relationships with their subjects. In this vein, The Secret Life of John le Carré fits into an admirable tradition of biographers writing, with apparent candour, about the tensions and ethical problems of the form. If he is not as self-flagellating as James Atlas in The Shadow in the Garden (2018), nor as revealing of his own doubts and regrets about his own choices during the years working on Cornwell’s biography, Sisman is remarkably forthcoming about his subject’s interventions. Excerpts from letters are abundant, and photos of these and typescripts of his own manuscript — with Cornwell’s handwritten edits — offer insight about the long and wearying struggle of writing the biography of a living person.

It is frequently fascinating, always salutary, and a fitting reminder of Samuel Johnson’s declaration of the biographer’s duty: “If we owe any regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.” •

The Secret Life of John le Carré
By Adam Sisman | Profile Books | $32.99 | 208 pages

The post The biographer’s last word appeared first on Inside Story.

In Wifedom, Anna Funder — award-winning writer of the non-fiction Stasiland (2003) and novel All That I Am (2011) — strips everything from the edifice on which George Orwell’s reputation has stood and finds beneath it his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy: unthanked, unloved, neglected and certainly exhausted. She was also, as Funder relates, an intelligent and discerning woman whose energy and promise were fed upon and ultimately drained by her husband.

A graduate of Oxford who started her own typing agency while studying for a master’s degree in psychology at University College London, Eileen married a moth-eaten and prematurely aged Orwell in 1936 after they met at a party at a friend’s house. For the next nine turbulent years, she worked to financially support his writing while keeping house for him and directly aiding his work by editing, typing and advising.

While doing so, she bore an enormous number of indignities. Almost without exception, Orwell gave his needs and desires higher priority than hers. He rarely lifted a finger around the house and his work kept them on the edge of penury. He was repeatedly, callously, unfaithful. He also persistently erased her contributions.

Much of this was evident from the earliest days of their marriage when they settled in a damp, cramped cottage in rural Hertfordshire. In the seclusion of a room upstairs, Orwell wrote and wrote and wrote, and Eileen — despite having a thesis to finish — was kept on her feet from dawn to dusk, cooking, cleaning, attending to the shop they purported to run, and editing her husband’s work at night — by candlelight — while he, upstairs, made use of the only paraffin lamp.

Then Orwell decided to go to Spain to join the socialists in their bitter civil war against the fascists. His experience as a soldier provided a hideous scar for his neck and the material for Homage to Catalonia, and also became another conspicuous occasion on which Orwell wrote Eileen out of history. Bored by the prospect and dreading the back-breaking labour required to keep the Hertfordshire home running, Eileen followed him to Spain.

Formally she was a lowly typist in the offices of the Independent Labour Party; in reality, her duties required her to lift her eyes much higher than the keys of her Olivetti. She worked variously as an organiser, banker, logistics manager, newspaper and radio editor, writer, producer and more besides. It was work every bit as dangerous — if not more — as Orwell’s, particularly as the tide of the civil war changed; quite likely it was more important work than his, too. Nonetheless, despite her saving Orwell’s life and enabling their escape from Spain, Eileen’s presence and contribution were all but expunged in Homage.

Back in England, Eileen worked at all manner of jobs to make ends meet, including a lengthy stint at the information ministry during the second world war. She continued to keep the house, and she continued to carry the load of her husband’s whims and sometimes callous wishes, including his affairs with her friends and the couple’s adoption of a child, Richard, in 1944. She provided invaluable advice on her husband’s writing during the period when he produced Animal Farm and a succession of essays that became classics, while suffering from tumours that caused her to bleed and faint at disturbingly frequent intervals. During an operation to remove those tumours, she died, aged thirty-nine.

Orwell, who was in Europe reporting on the war, quickly cast about for a new wife — or, really, a replacement live-in servant. He proposed to at least four women and began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in the Jura house that Eileen, in one of her last acts, had arranged to rent for them. That book was the death of him but the birth of his enormous reputation: seven months after it was published, he died, aged forty-six.

Most of the facts of Eileen’s life make for grim reading, and they are of a kind with the lives of other women with famous writer spouses. The question Funder poses about Eileen is one that could apply just as easily to Jane Welsh (wife of Thomas Carlyle), Catherine Hogarth (wife of Charles Dickens) and Elizabeth Howard (second wife of Kingsley Amis), among others: why did an intelligent, brave and insightful woman become so ground down? In crude terms, how did Eileen not tell Orwell to take his aspidistra and fuck off to Wigan Pier?

Funder’s answer, in short, is patriarchy. It is her awareness of its insidious influence in her own marriage — in how the equal share of the work of life and love has become unbalanced, with the result that her sense of self was being crushed — that prompts her to turn to Orwell’s writing in the first place. She admires his work, the way he illuminates power and its dynamics, servants and masters. “I would read Orwell on the tyrannies, the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his time,” she writes, “and I would use him to liberate myself from mine.”

But that reading of Orwell is not so freeing. She is disconcerted by a stray passage on the dirtiness of women and their “terrible, devouring sexuality.” That it appears to have been written about Eileen troubles her. That the six biographies of Orwell produced between 1972 and 2003 neither explain it nor even really explain Eileen causes Funder’s concern to harden into something approaching suspicion. She begins to wonder about why this woman has been pushed to the periphery. “In the end,” she writes, “the biographies started to seem like fictions of omission.” To what extent, she asks, are these biographies influenced by patriarchy?

With this question in mind, Funder uses these works, Eileen’s letters, and Sylvia Topp’s 2020 biography of Eileen to guide a new reading of her life and her marriage to Orwell. Funder studies how the weft of the facts — as they have been established, and can be established — combine with the warp of those Orwell biographies: what is left in, what is taken out, what the biographies disguise and downplay. Funder reads to see the gaps where Eileen might be apparent: “The way the text buckles and strains to avoid her is the way I can see the shape she left.”

The buckles and strains she notices are striking. Funder spotlights passages and techniques by which Orwell’s biographers portray a great man doing everything alone and women as little more than nursemaids or helpless victims, if they are acknowledged at all. Omission is one method; another is the manipulation of chronology, so that cause and effect are separated and the credit for action is denied to the women who act. The most pervasive — ironically, considering Orwell’s famous injunction on it — is the use of the passive voice. In Orwell’s biographies, this is frequently wielded to erase Eileen’s financial and domestic labour, which created the conditions in which Orwell could write, as well as her courageous actions. As Funder writes, “Manuscripts are typed without typists, idyllic circumstances exist without their creators, an escape from Stalinist pursuers is achieved.”

The outrageousness of Eileen’s erasure is compounded by the biographers’ apparent over-reliance on Orwell’s versions of events, most notably in his claim to have had an open marriage. Funder espies a convenient fiction that Orwell told and his biographers swallowed because it preserved an untroubled decency that they projected onto his character. The claim that Eileen also had extramarital affairs is another convenient story, Funder argues: “One revolutionary tryst would transform the Orwells’ marriage to an ‘open’ one in which infidelity was the deal. It wasn’t.”

For these reasons (and more), readers with only a casual acquaintance with Orwell’s life will find in Wifedom a brutal dispelling of any image of a virtuous and decent Orwell, a wizened Saint George whose “wintry voice of conscience” is still heard in debates over totalitarianism, bureaucratic obfuscation, social oppression and colonialism. It will, for those readers, be a harrowing account — yet another, to go up there with Carmela Ciuraru’s Lives of the Wives or Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives — of how a monstrous and entitled man took from a woman everything that he should not have. Deepening this tragedy will be the apparent complicity of Orwell’s biographers, and their willingness to consign Eileen to the periphery, if not the shadow, of the biographical spotlight.

Wifedom is a forceful and powerful book, relentless in its advocacy for Eileen and the horrifying injustices done to her. It is also salutary for biographers — a thumping reminder to broaden the spotlight of their inquiry, to peer more closely at the forces at work on their subjects and themselves, and to be ever more careful about the implications of their prose and the benefits they grant their subjects.

Yet for all its close reading, Wifedom is also curiously uninterested in what makes biography a uniquely charged genre to work in. While a biography is concerned with a single subject there is a tension in the simultaneous need to take in the people, institutions and forces that shape the life. A biographer’s sources are much less than everything and they can only work with what they can get, yet they must at some point decide they have enough source material to make a judgement.

Biography, for all its empiricism and evidential rigour, is subjective in nature. While there is a narrative tug to assume a god-like omniscience, there is also an ethical tug to admit to gaps, ambiguities and possibilities. It is axiomatic that no biography is ever definitive, yet it is less well understood that biographies have a shelf life which, if not quite as short as a carton of milk’s, certainly gives the same sour smell when it is exceeded.

Wifedom ignores much of this in its treatment of the Orwell biographies. After their first mention, Funder never again identifies the books or their authors by name except in her endnotes. In anonymising the biographies in the text of her book, she plasters them with a homogeneity that erases how their authors contended with the inevitable tensions and imperatives. One effect is to suggest that the biographers were entirely of the same mind and view and all had the same evidence to hand.

While the biographies are all written by men, and may treat Eileen with less than her due, they are also profoundly different in focus, depth and outlook, and deal with very different ranges of sources. They make for conflicting accounts, and indeed the writers have conflicted with one another. When Peter Stansky, the co-author of the first Orwell biography (1972 and 1979), was once approached at a conference by Bernard Crick, author of a 1980 biography of Orwell, he briefly wondered whether they would come to blows. Crick, however, pointed out that another Orwell biographer was soon scheduled to speak. “Shall we bury our hatchets,” he began, and paused, “… in Jeffrey Meyers’s skull?”

All these men had hatchets. None had an interest in upholding the Saint George figure canonised in Christopher Hollis’s enormously influential Study of George Orwell: The Man and His Works (which goes uncited by Funder). That figure took root and went without an advocatus diaboli for a considerable period because of the unwillingness of anyone to challenge Orwell’s deathbed opposition to any biography at all and his second wife Sonia’s determination to uphold that wish.

Yet palpable across the six biographies published between 1972 and 2023 is a willingness to assail the saintly halo and draw attention to Orwell’s myriad flaws. None of the six biographers is reticent about Orwell’s infidelity, his potential repressed homosexuality, his chauvinism and his racism, among other matters, yet the strength of the criticism for him on these and other fronts increases noticeably in volumes closer to the present day. This reflects, I think, both the increasing size of the Orwell archive — which has just resulted in a new, expanded edition of D.J. Taylor’s biography (reviewed by Peter Marks for Inside Story) — and the new questions biographers have been spurred to ask by societal changes. If these biographies have not wholly dispelled the popular image of Orwell, it has not been for lack of trying.

They certainly have their blind spots, but they are not wholly blind to Eileen’s significance and Orwell’s treatment of her; nor are they uniform in what they do perceive. Funder admits this in a comment she consigns to her endnotes: “[Jeffrey] Meyers is the only biographer to address directly who did the work.” She quotes him, too: “Orwell enjoyed this hairshirt existence [in Hertfordshire], but Eileen, who did most of the work, suffered terribly.” Crick points to how friends and acquaintances understood Eileen:

Her friends are vehement that she understood people far better than George, and that her range of interests was almost as wide. They were not to be perfect together, but always a good match. She fought his fights and looked after him as well as he would allow — although she was a woman careless of creature comforts herself. She indulged, even enjoyed, his eccentricities. Brenda Salkeld thought well of her, believed her to be the kind of woman George needed. Some of Eileen’s friends, however, were not so sure that George was the right man for her, and were puzzled that such an emancipated and forceful woman was so willing to play second fiddle to what appeared to be a rather self-absorbed and gawky minor novelist.

In his 2003 biography, meanwhile, D.J. Taylor points out that Orwell obscured Eileen’s presence in their life: “One could read Orwell’s account of the time they spent together in Morocco — sedulous nature notes and climatic observation — without ever realising that another person was there.” Taylor was also aware enough to write that, in the retrospective glare of Orwell’s reputation, Eileen “never quite exists in her own right.”

One way that Funder has Eileen exist again is by extensively quoting a batch of letters, discovered in 2005, that Eileen posted to a friend during her nine years of marriage. Those letters formed the core of Sylvia Topp’s 2020 biography of Eileen (which reaches very different conclusions from Funder’s) and were also critical to Funder’s decision to eschew a novel about Eileen. “A novel was impossible now, because it would devour the letters as ‘material’ and privilege my voice over hers,” she writes. The solution was to have it both ways: to “make her [Eileen] live and at the same time reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her.”

The latter half of this sentence accounts for the close readings of Orwell’s biographies and for the sections of first-person memoir-cum-travelogue-cum-polemic; the first half accounts for what Funder calls “a fiction that tries not to lie.” These are scenes, or vignettes, for the most part centred on the letters Eileen sent, quoting the letters and surrounding them with novelistic texture and evocation. Funder suggests that the imagination informing this — the flesh she adds to fact’s bones — is modest, built on factual knowledge of what was happening. “Mostly,” she explains, “I supply only what a film director would, directing an actor on set — the wiping of spectacles, the ash on the carpet, a cat pouring itself off her lap.”

One such scene has Eileen and Orwell sitting in an inn in the Atlas Mountains in 1938, eating stew and drinking tea. Orwell eyes some young Moroccan women outside, and then tells Eileen that he has been working so hard:

“I deserve a treat,” he says, blowing a thin stream of smoke away from her.

A small thing inside her turns to stone. He doesn’t mean her. She forgets to breathe, then does. Closes her mouth. He says he wants one of these Berber girls, “just one.”

“And from me you want?” she says.

“I just thought I should tell you.”

At this, I had a shudder of disgust so strong I had to close the book. The scene is excruciating — in the torment it evokes in Eileen, in the gross and dehumanised entitlement Orwell claims, and in the leaden weight it settles on Eileen while she waits for Orwell’s return afterward. It is an apt example of Funder’s power and formidable talent as a writer.

But this scene is also troubling for precisely that reason. It includes more than just some modest filmic details. The dialogue and Eileen’s reaction are all made up. Its power, especially in that dialogue and imagined reaction, is so enormous that it easily withstands the disclaimer that Funder immediately follows it with: “I am imagining these details, but because this is what happened, there must have been some kind of scene.”

Is it what happened, though?

Funder cites two sources. First are the 1982 memoirs of Tosco Fyvel, who wrote of Orwell telling his wife during the second world war of his attraction for “young Arab girls” and Eileen’s permission for him to “have one of these girls on just one occasion.” Second are the 1970 memoirs of Harold Acton, which recounted, in paraphrased terms, a conversation with Orwell in 1945 in which Orwell had spoken about the beauty of Burmese and Moroccan women and then “admitted that he had seldom tasted such bliss as with certain Moroccan girls.”

This is the sum of it: two recollections independently made twenty-five years after the event of paraphrased conversations about events taking place a minimum of five years before that. Only Fyvel’s makes a specific mention of the incident; the other alludes to something like it only. Fyvel’s also suggests some ambiguity: “True or imagined? It hardly mattered.”

Funder is scathing of that (“I bet it mattered to her,” she writes of Eileen’s reaction), yet there is a very real question to be asked: are these recollections strong enough to support the scene Funder writes? Are these strong enough to declare, as Funder does, that “this is what happened,” that this is “fact”?

Certainly they are strong enough, and of sufficiently grave import, to warrant inclusion and discussion in a biography, with evaluation from the biographer about how the reader can understand them one way or the other. And this is indeed the approach largely adopted by Orwell biographers Stansky and Abrahams (1972 and 1979) and Crick (1980), who had only Acton’s recollection to work with. All are sceptical, but don’t cast the matter wholly aside. Nor is Stansky and Abrahams’s “8-pt footnote,” as Funder calls it, quite as far banished and hidden as she implies: it is printed in the body text of the book.

What is also not noted by Funder is that the biographers after 1980, working with the benefit of Fyvel’s memoir, give the claim more credence. Meyers (2000) implicitly accepts that it happened, offers a rejoinder to Stansky and Abrahams’s caution, and grants an expansive ambiguity about Eileen’s reaction. “Eileen may have allowed Orwell to go with a prostitute,” he writes, “but it must have made her unhappy and hurt their marriage.” Gordon Bowker (2003) and Taylor (2003) implicitly accept it too, though Taylor suggests that Orwell’s disclosure to Fyvel gave “an odd gloss to an otherwise conventional relationship, the thought of shadowy, secret recesses stretching away beneath the surface of their public lives.” Funder is critical of this sentence, seeing it as an unwarranted attribution to Eileen of secret recesses, yet a plainer reading is that Taylor is merely relaying Fyvel’s projection of those recesses.

None of the Orwell biographers declares emphatically that it happened. None of them denies with the same feeling that it did. Nonetheless, Funder finds their treatment wanting, accusing them of trying to “excuse Orwell’s behaviour” and “transmute fact to a rumour.”

“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” Orwell once wrote. Wifedom follows that advice to a tee. In its exploration of Orwell and Eileen it finds considerable evidence for a man undeserving of the pedestal on which he has been placed and a woman who has been unfairly cast aside. It will prompt a better reckoning for Orwell scholars and it will be salutary for writers working with other subjects. But, in time, it too will be seen as an instalment in an arc that ultimately bends towards greater illumination. •

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
By Anna Funder | Hamish Hamilton | $36.99 | 464 pages

The post Buckle and strain appeared first on Inside Story.

Somewhere between 150 and 200 people showed up, and the party quickly degenerated into fighting, much of it at Mailer’s instigation: he greeted at least one guest at the door with an invitation to box. The drunk host tried to fight George Plimpton, assaulted another man who in turn punched him in the jaw and drenched his shirt in blood, then left the party. He returned, left again, and returned finally at 4.30am, by which time there was barely anyone left.

Without warning, Mailer approached his wife, Adele, and stabbed her with a penknife: once in the back and once, thrusting upward, from the front beneath her lower ribs. Shocked friends lay her down and called a doctor, who in turn called an ambulance that took Adele to hospital for life-saving surgery.

To attend to Mailer, meanwhile — who had begun scribbling in a diary — his friends called a psychiatrist and then drove him around in a car, hoping to calm him down. They also began to obfuscate about what had happened (one, seeing Adele off in the ambulance, told her to tell anyone who asked that she had fallen on a broken bottle). They sought out a retired detective who told them that police enquiries would be best frustrated by Mailer’s leaving New York: Mailer volunteered to go to Cuba. Then they took him to the hospital where Adele lay recuperating. “Do you understand why I did it?” he asked her, as she begged for him to be taken away. “I love you and I had to save you from cancer.”

That afternoon Mailer went to a television station to record an interview for his mayoral campaign, where he talked about knives as symbols of manhood and laughed off questions about his black eye. He met briefly with a doctor and then returned to his apartment. There he was arrested and, after being formally charged, detained in a psychiatric hospital.

By February 1961, Adele was refusing to make a police complaint or sign a letter agreeing to formal charges. With the police stymied by Mailer’s friends, the matter was downgraded: by March he was facing only a charge of felonious assault, for which he would eventually receive a three-year suspended sentence.

In the meantime, he gave a reading to an audience at the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural centre in Manhattan. The event had been organised much earlier, when Mailer was known predominantly for his bestselling novels, his idiosyncratic column in the Village Voice and his controversial essays and polemics. But it was his assault on Adele that most interested his audience. With the charges still pressing, and Mailer’s mayoral campaign not yet ended, there was an air of expectation, of anticipation, among those present. What would he say? What would he read?

The answer shocked. Noting he had written nothing but poetry since November past, Mailer read the following words:

At these lines, the centre’s educational director ordered the curtain lowered.

A curtain call of some kind is probably appropriate for Mailer, who died in 2007, aged eighty-four, leaving behind six wives, nine children (one of them adopted) and a shelf’s worth of books: thirteen novels, nine works of what Mailer calls non-fiction, two volumes of poetry, a screenplay, a play script, a book of short stories and more besides. Much like John Updike and Philip Roth, two other giants of mid-to-late-twentieth-century American letters, Mailer’s literary reputation has shrunk as much as his personal reputation.

While some of his works retain their fame and admirers — The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner’s Song (1979), in particular — others have been re-evaluated against contemporary standards and found wanting or beyond the pale, much like their author.

Last year, Mailer’s long-time publisher Random House declined to publish a posthumous collection of Mailer’s essays after staff objected to the inclusion of “The White Negro,” a provocative and distasteful essay about (among other things) minority groups as models for resistance to totalitarianism. “You can’t cancel Norman Mailer,” his son said, and as if to prove it the collection was picked up by Skyhorse, the US publisher that has made a specialty of publishing books dropped — or “cancelled” — by mainstream publishers. (Other titles on the Skyhorse list include Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing and Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography.)

Rehabilitation may yet come for Mailer’s literary works, but if it does it will owe nothing to Richard Bradford’s new biography, Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer. An English literature academic at Northern Ireland’s Ulster University, Bradford apparently comes well credentialed: he has written or edited more than thirty books, lives of John Milton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis, among them.

Yet most of Bradford’s biographies bear unmistakable warning signs: produced quickly to coincide with anniversaries and using the first-hand research of earlier biographers whom Bradford treats gracelessly rather than gratefully. His books are prone to sweeping judgements, pocked with repetition, errors and inconsistencies, scornful of artistic successes, damning rather than insightful, and depressing as examples of the belief among publishers that any book about a famous person will sell, irrespective of its flaws.

The most notable aspect of Bradford’s biographical practice, though, is his palpable disdain for his subjects. His Ernest Hemingway (2019) is a mendacious liar and artistic failure; his George Orwell (2020) is a depressed clod with feet of clay; his Patricia Highsmith (2021) is an unredeemable grotesque. Bradford’s dislike seems so avid that it is possible to empathise with Martin Amis’s dismay, voiced after reading the first draft of Bradford’s biography of him: “It is quite something to have a biographer who is even more hostile and mendacious than even the scurviest of tabloids.” It is yet another to then think, as Bradford did: “That would make an eye-catching cover blurb.”

Tough Guy is consistent with the above. It has been published to coincide with the centenary of Mailer’s birth and comes hard on the heels of Bradford’s Hemingway, Orwell and Highsmith. It is drawn almost entirely from earlier Mailer biographies, to the point that when Bradford refers to archival or unpublished material he invariably cites the stocky biographies by Peter Manso or J. Michael Lennon (whose cover image Tough Guy also filches).

The inconsistencies, errors and repetitions accumulate: Mailer stabs Adele in the kitchen on page two and in the dining room on page 152; we are told the story about Mailer starting a fight over his poodles Tibo and Zsa Zsa three times. Tough Guy is cluttered with abrupt dismissals and declarations of absolute truth, making the same banal argument for 300 pages: namely, that Mailer was a self-aggrandising narcissist who mined his own life for his work.

The Fight, Mailer’s account of Foreman vs Ali, aka the Rumble in the Jungle, is “an exercise in self-aggrandisement.” Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer’s swollen spy novel, is less about the CIA than “a labyrinthine extension of Norman Mailer.” On Mailer’s final novel, The Castle in the Forest: “He chose to write about Hitler because he had exhausted all other exhibitions of literary self-aggrandisement.”

The big claim of Tough Guy, the ostensible rationale for its existence beyond the centenary, is that “Mailer’s life comes as close as possible to being the Great American Novel; beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive.” Tossed out in the introduction like bait, it’s interesting enough to warrant turning the first page. But after Bradford’s failure to take it up again, to expand on it or substantiate it in any way for 300 pages, the claim seems less like bait and more like an undersized fish: best thrown back in the water.

The PR guff advertises Tough Guy as “merciless” and in every way this is true. The book is joyless and unremitting in its efforts to take Mailer down. Bradford allows no disreputable incident to pass without condemnation, no mitigating circumstance to ameliorate judgement, and certainly no achievement to escape without belittling. Given Mailer’s behaviour, there is much to work with. Even so, Bradford’s contempt for his subject is notable.

Take The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s first novel, about a platoon of marines fighting against the Japanese in the Pacific during the second world war. Written when he was twenty-five, The Naked and the Dead sold 70,000 copies, was adapted into a film, launched Mailer’s literary career as if he had been “shot out of a cannon” (as he put it) and was described by George Orwell in 1948 as “the best war book of the last war yet.”

In the longest consideration he gives to any of Mailer’s titles, Bradford stresses the real-life counterparts to characters and the letters Mailer sent home from the war and then recycled. He points to similar passages, notes critically where words have not changed, derides suggestions that Mailer had portrayed something more universal than his own impressions, and declares that everyone in it “carries a trace of Norman Mailer” (there’s that self-aggrandisement again). The Naked and the Dead, Bradford judges finally, was acclaimed “not so much for its intrinsic qualities” — about which he says nothing — but because it launched a “brutally realistic subgenre of military fiction.”

Anyone expressing admiration for Mailer’s work gets similar treatment. The Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award but Bradford regards the judges and critics who praised it as “cultural mongrels.” The Executioner’s Song won another Pulitzer but is an exercise in condescending literary ventriloquism and was celebrated by “critics who saw themselves occupying the intellectual high ground.” One Mailer biographer terms Marilyn: A Novel Biography (1973) exactly that — a novel biography — but Bradford begs to differ: “A more accurate description would be verbal masturbation.”

“Bradford strikes again,” the blurb tells us. No, he doesn’t, and even if he did this is not a virtue to aspire to. The blows Bradford lands on Mailer are well telegraphed by the supercilious tone and land feebly in predictable places. Reading this unrelenting crusade to lay Mailer out on the canvas only reminded me of how, in the 1950s, Mailer paid former professional boxers to spar with him. He became convinced that he held his own with them, but in truth they were pulling their punches and Mailer’s own blows were only moderately effective.

The titular tough guy of this book is supposed to be Mailer, but it seems better applied to its author. His publisher calls this book “unique, snappy, and convincing” but it is limp, trite and alienating. In any event, to be proud of a biography that claims to extend no mercy, which glories in striking at a subject, is bizarre.

Mailer was a pugnacious and controversial writer whose work was often maddening and indulgent. But his propensity for causing outrage was, to some extent, cultivated and affected so that he might extinguish, once and for all, the “last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable — the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.”

A more thoughtful biographer might have pursued this line of enquiry, which comes via Mary Dearborn’s 1999 Mailer biography. (Bradford misnames her “Dearlove.”) A more judicious inquiry might also have provided more empathy than this book extends. It might have found more light and depth in the contradictions of a man who could be violent, offensive, quarrelsome, brutal, compelling, insightful, illuminating and needy — sometimes all at once. As Mailer wrote to Hemingway, in 1955, enclosing a copy of his second novel, The Deer Park:

Because finally after all these years I am deeply curious to know what you think of this.

— but if you do not answer, or if you answer with the kind of crap you use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-nosers, etc., then fuck you.

Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer
By Richard Bradford | Bloomsbury | $42.99 | 304 pages

The post Traces of Norman Mailer appeared first on Inside Story.

“The funny little man,” Perkin told a colleague, “has convinced himself that he is a brilliant success and sees himself winning handsomely in November and remaking the nation in the following three years; leading them” — the Coalition — “to victory in 1975, and then retiring with honours thick upon him. God save us all!”

To modern readers, McMahon’s hopes seem as preposterous as they did to Perkin. Most accounts of his government use the same adjectives — incompetent, reactive, hapless, embarrassing — and follow the same line: nothing of consequence was achieved between 1969 and 1972, and the election of the Gough Whitlam–led Labor Party was never in question.

This view has several effects. One is to diminish Labor’s genuine achievement in 1972, when a party scarred by twenty years of discord and electoral failure convinced voters that the vision, policies and leadership Australia needed were to be found among its MPs. Another is to render the years from 1969 to 1972 as a shapeless interregnum between the going of prime minister Robert Menzies and the coming of Gough, an antipodean Dark Ages during which nothing really happened. The last is to leave our understanding of those years profoundly incomplete by failing to take seriously the efforts of the Coalition government to govern during a period of immense change.

While confident of victory, Whitlam always insisted the 1972 campaign was a live contest. And while he was never backward in adducing McMahon’s flaws, he also perceived an opponent more wily than popularly imagined. As prime minister, Whitlam argued, McMahon had tried to “bestride two horses”: “He claimed to be the real heir to Menzies, yet he also claimed to recognise and accept the need for change in a changing world.” And the result? “This balancing act he did with some skill.”

A “balancing act” is one useful way of understanding the Coalition government’s actions during 1969–72, of seeing how it tried relentlessly, first under John Gorton and then under McMahon, to manoeuvre itself into a position where another election victory might be possible.

At a distance, the events following the 1969 election are confounding: the leader of the victorious party was immediately challenged by two of his own ministers.

With the benefit of hindsight, the 1969 election result — which resulted in the Coalition’s loss of sixteen seats — confirmed the waning fortunes of a government in office for two decades. At the time, though, it seemed more like a stern rebuke to prime minister John Gorton. Vaulting him from the Senate into the prime ministership after the unexpected death of Harold Holt, Gorton’s colleagues had elevated him in the belief that he possessed sound and sorely needed political judgement, and that his ability to perform on television would be compelling to voters.

The two years that followed brought both beliefs into question. Gorton’s ambivalence towards some of his colleagues and his tendency to unilateral decision-making antagonised many within the government and increasingly alarmed those outside it. Strong-willed and confident, he rarely backed down: “John Grey Gorton,” he rounded on one impertinent senator, “will bloody well behave precisely as John Grey Gorton bloody well decides he wants to behave!”

After a strong start, moreover, Gorton’s abilities as a public speaker seemed to desert him over the course of 1968–69. Tortuously convoluted prime ministerial statements became so much the norm that Whitlam took to ridiculing Gorton simply by quoting him verbatim. As one famous example ran, “On the other hand, the AMA agrees with us, or, I believe, will agree with us, that it is its policy, and it will be its policy, to inform patients who ask what the common fee is, and what our own fee is, so that a patient will know whether he is to be operated on, if that’s what it is, on the basis of the common fee or not.”

Amid these personal shortcomings were more serious policy disagreements. During the 1969 campaign, Gorton had gestured towards traditional Coalition strengths as well as “new horizons”: alongside hawkish statements on national security and tax cuts, he promised increased spending on education, a new Australian film school, and reforms to healthcare. But his statements about defence did little to assuage suspicious hardliners in his own party and in the avowedly anti-communist Democratic Labor Party, which generally backed the government. And his moves to withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam failed to mollify the anti-war protesters who took to the streets in successive moratorium marches.

Gorton’s domestic policies, meanwhile, many of which included an empowered Commonwealth reaching into matters traditionally the purview of the states, antagonised state premiers and colleagues whose fidelity to federalism was a matter of faith.

All this fed into the leadership challenge launched less than two weeks after the election. While treasurer McMahon and national development minister David Fairbairn failed in their bid to displace Gorton, the fissures their challenge exposed didn’t close over. A ministerial reshuffle to blood a younger generation of MPs — including Malcolm Fraser, Billy Snedden and Andrew Peacock — spurred suggestions of cronyism. Backbenchers attacked government legislation in the privacy of the government party room and the public spaces of the House and Senate.

A poor showing at the half-Senate election, late in 1970, was followed by an unsuccessful party-room motion for Gorton’s resignation; then a murky series of press reports in March 1971 spurred Fraser to resign as defence minister and savage Gorton in the House. A confidence vote on Gorton’s leadership tied; Gorton resigned as prime minister; McMahon was elevated to the top job; and — farcically — Gorton was elected, if only for a short time, to the deputy party leadership. As one reporter exclaimed after the last of these events, “You must be joking.”

The bitterness engendered by these developments lingered. Trust was non-existent, whispers of further leadership spills continued, and policy disagreements were so pronounced that the break-up of the Coalition was even broached. In McMahon, the government had a leader who had done much to sow the seeds of this turmoil and who, in office, would sow more still; but, again in McMahon, it had a politician with twenty years of experience at the highest levels of government who was willing to do all he could to stay in office. As governor-general Paul Hasluck wryly remarked, McMahon would “not be cumbered either by ideals or principles” in pursuing that goal.

McMahon’s at-all-costs attitude surfaced conspicuously when he began shifting and tacking on the question of whether Australia should extend diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China, abandoning its long recognition of the Taiwan-based Republic of China and the fiction that the latter remained the sole, legitimate government of China.

In 1958, as a relatively lowly minister, McMahon had argued that the People’s Republic should not be admitted into the international community until it had renounced the use of violence; as minister for external affairs, in 1970, he agreed that the country could not forever remain on the periphery but insisted on putting conditions on any kind of recognition or engagement. His view was influenced more by domestic political circumstances than any moral or strategic factor: “Remember, please, that we have a DLP,” McMahon told deputy secretary Mick Shann, “and that its reaction must be considered!”

By the time the Gorton cabinet reviewed its relationship with the People’s Republic, in February 1971, its resolution was similarly timid: it accepted that the government in Peking (as Beijing was known) was engaging with the international community and that Australia’s policy of diplomatic recognition would have to be reappraised — but decided that it would, for the moment, follow the lead of the United States.

The consequences of this hesitant ambivalence began to play out a month after McMahon became prime minister, when Whitlam sought an invitation to visit Peking. McMahon attacked him on grounds of naivety for engaging with a government that had not yet renounced violence; then, when Whitlam’s invitation to visit was granted, announced that his government would “explore the possibilities of establishing a dialogue” with Peking.

In the space of a month, McMahon had put his government astride two horses, of opposition and of engagement. He still believed the government to be riding high when Whitlam visited China in July. Criticising the Labor leader for his “instant coffee diplomacy,” he told a gathering of Liberal Party members that China “has been a political asset to the Liberal Party in the past and is likely to remain one in the future.”

That future was terribly short-lived. Within days of Whitlam’s visit, US president Richard Nixon announced he would visit China the following year. McMahon sputtered. He told the press that “normalising relations with China,” as Nixon was doing, had been his government’s policy all along, but in private he was angry and embarrassed, aghast that he had been so publicly undercut. Lashing out, he sacked his foreign minister and criticised Nixon. In the eyes of the Americans he was “on edge and almost frenzied in trying to stay on top of his job”; to the British, McMahon knew already that he was “not much good in the part” of prime minister.

McMahon eventually conceded that his government had failed on China. He was aware that Whitlam had won considerable plaudits and that he himself had looked a fool. Yet he continued to try to ride the two horses. He explored accompanying Nixon to Peking; he tried to find a halfway point between complete aversion and the diplomatic recognition Whitlam had promised. Rebuffed by the Chinese, he was then rebuked by DLP leader Vince Gair, who denounced the contest over who was more “ahead” on the issue of China. Stung, McMahon refused an invitation for army minister Andrew Peacock to visit China as part of an unofficial business party.

When the People’s Republic was admitted to the UN General Assembly and took a seat on the Security Council late in 1971, McMahon’s attempt to reconcile opposing pressures finally came to an end. Resiling from engagement with China was no longer an option, and yet China would not accept anything less than diplomatic recognition. The horses had bolted.

Another attempted balancing act came in the middle of 1971 when the South African government sent an all-white Springboks rugby team to Australia. Foreshadowing an October tour by South Africa’s cricket side, the Springboks became a barometer of how fast public opinion could turn on an issue. A Gallup poll taken in March 1971 had found that almost 85 per cent of Australians thought the South Africans should come, and most members of McMahon’s government believed, as Menzies did, that the cancellation of a South African tour of England in 1970 had been a surrender to the “threats of a noisy minority” and were not willing to do likewise.

McMahon genuflected to respectable opinion by making much of his disappointment that South Africa had sent a whites-only team, but he baulked at any real response. “We believe that the [all-white] policy in respect of teams is unfortunate, but it is nevertheless a South African matter, and not our matter,” he said privately during what happened to be the UN International Year for Action to Combat Racism and Race Discrimination.

Having effectively condoned a racially selected team, McMahon’s government then directed that Australia abstain from voting on a UN resolution condemning the application of apartheid in sport. It then helped sustain the tour by making available an RAAF aircraft to ferry the Springboks around the country after the ACTU and its president Bob Hawke promised to impose a “black ban” on the tour. “We are not going to be beaten here,” McMahon said privately.

Disruptive protests met with furious responses from Liberal–Country state governments. Victorian premier Henry Bolte called the demonstrators “louts and larrikins”; Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen government declared a state of emergency so as to more easily crack heads. Amid the barbed-wire barricades, smoke bombs and police batons, McMahon mused about calling an election with a law-and-order theme.

By the time the South Africans left, the weight of public opinion had shifted completely. McMahon’s own ministers were against an early election and dreaded the prospect of a repetition of the controversy when the South African cricketers arrived in summer. Not willing to admit defeat, the government refused to decide whether that tour should take place. It threw the ball to Sir Donald Bradman, chair of the Australian Board of Control for International Cricket, leaving it to him to make the necessary decision to call off the tour.

Yet another example of McMahon’s balancing act emerged at the end of 1971, when he made clear to a cabinet committee that he supported applications from Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory for leases on consolidated lands, provided they could satisfy criteria related to their association with the land. Had this been translated into government policy, it would have been an acknowledgement that a traditional association with the land should be a basis for land rights claims. His view diverged from those of the cabinet committee members considering the government’s approach to Indigenous issues. The fact that McMahon’s subsequent wavering failed to bring them around was reflected in their decision in late December 1971.

When McMahon issued a statement on Aboriginal policy on 26 January, it featured a gaping hole. The new objectives, though laudable, were overshadowed by the government’s failure on land rights. McMahon announced the creation of a new form of lease but ruled out land claims made on the basis of traditional association. The reason? To do so would introduce a “new, probably confusing component, the implications of which could not clearly be foreseen, and which could lead to uncertainty and possible challenge in relation to land titles elsewhere in Australia which are at present unquestioned and secure.”

The attempt to hew to a conservative course — rejecting a traditional association with the land — and simultaneously announce updated objectives for government policy fell flat. The timing hardly helped: McMahon’s statement came on a day traditionally considered a day of mourning by Indigenous peoples. The statement spurred one of the striking images of that year: four Indigenous men sitting beneath an umbrella as the sun rose on the lawns outside Parliament House the following day, a sign strung up beside them reading “Aboriginal Embassy.”

Failures like these left the government far from the “first, fine, careless rapture” that Menzies had suggested was necessary to stay in office. “There is an imminent feeling of decay about the place,” recorded Liberal MP Bert Kelly when parliament resumed late in February 1972.

Blame for the government’s woes fell almost entirely on McMahon. As Kelly asked his diary, “What the devil do we do next? We’ve got Billy McMahon elected as our leader and obviously he is not doing it at all well and everybody knows this. What we can’t think of is, how do we get rid of him? I suppose the only hope we have is that he suddenly drops dead one day.”

The unrest stirred by dire polling, as well as whispers that John Gorton might try to supplant him, didn’t bring out the best in McMahon. “Christ, he must be mad,” said one MP, after one blundering parliamentary debate by the prime minister. “What is wrong with him?” asked another.

Everything the government and its prime minister did seemed to end in disaster. McMahon’s late-1971 trips to the United States and Britain had been memorable for a mangled toast to his hosts, his wife’s revealing dress and Richard Nixon’s inability to remember his name. A swing through Southeast Asia early in 1972 became an “excursion to blunderland,” declared a Canberra News journalist, extinguishing any hopes of making defence and foreign affairs a centrepiece of a re-election campaign.

But ministers also shared in the blame, with no small number of blunders and public spats occupying headlines. Some ministers dithered; others were disengaged. David Fairbairn regarded the five months he spent as education minister, in 1971, as hard and unrewarding, and departed the portfolio admitting he had not achieved anything.

Environment minister Peter Howson, meanwhile, citing the lack of an explicit directive, did himself no favours when he refused to lend Australia’s support to New Zealand’s criticism of renewed French nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1972, putting the government at odds with public opinion. (A belated move that mainly suggested the government was going along with the public for craven reasons.)

The economic outlook also proved difficult for the government. The Coalition had been nearly broken by a currency revaluation forced upon it when the Smithsonian Agreement — which pegged currencies to the US dollar — came into operation in December 1971. Slowing economic growth and rising inflation spooked treasurer Billy Snedden and McMahon, who were soon at loggerheads over how to get the economy moving in time for the election. The government was caught between the competing objectives of economic rigour and voter-attractive spending.

After a tough budget in 1971, the increased pensions and reduced personal income taxes in the government’s April 1972 mini-budget suggested a new focus on the pending election. As deputy prime minister Doug Anthony admitted, “I wouldn’t be very honest if I said that this [the election] isn’t in the back of our minds.” The budget proper, issued in August, was even more electorally focused: “Taxes down; pensions up; and growth decidedly strengthened,” as Billy Snedden remarked.

The attempt to find a way between change and stasis often saw progress. Under customs minister Don Chipp, the government liberalised censorship policy yet also refused to authorise the publication of Philip Roth’s controversial novel Portnoy’s Complaint in Australia — only for a monied publisher to embarrass the government by evading its jurisdiction and publishing the book anyway. The government was ignominiously forced to remove its ban on Portnoy in 1971, and the following year an attempt to hold the line on the banned Little Red Schoolbook foundered when activists smuggled it into the country and began distributing free copies. Chipp insisted that the government remove its ineffective ban, but Malcolm Fraser and other ministers continued to protest that the book “undermined family and society.”

Other initiatives came too, on an unexpectedly broad front. Writing a decade later, Donald Horne wondered whether McMahon was too busy “plucking policy out of passing straws” to know what he was doing. But in terms of results, Horne conceded, the government modernised the political agenda in a significant number of ways.

Although the government resiled from passing a wholly new Trade Practices Act, it did initiate new laws preventing foreign takeovers. It withdrew the last Australian combat troops from Vietnam, leaving only 128 members of the Australian Army Training Team in the country. It joined the Five Powers Defence Arrangements and the OECD. It passed the Childcare Act, which allowed the Commonwealth to intervene in the childcare sector and helped transform it into a profession supported by research and grants. It increased education spending and the number of scholarship places at universities and TAFEs.

The government also adopted the “polluter pays” principle for environmental protection, and began giving the Commonwealth the capacity to intervene in environmental matters. Howson, for all his grumbles that he had been given responsibility for “trees, boongs and poofters” as minister for the environment, Aborigines, and the arts, was nonetheless the first person to be appointed with explicit responsibility for these policy areas.

Notably, too, the government released its own urban and regional development policy. This was partly in response to Whitlam’s well-established interest in this area, but also a recognition of public demand for Commonwealth action. Meeting that demand required the government to overcome its longstanding aversion to Commonwealth intervention in state responsibilities.

Housing minister Kevin Cairns’s priority was “to seek agreement at all levels that an urban policy is needed” — rather than to actually devise a policy — but McMahon pushed for both the agreement and a policy. He reserved to his authority and his department responsibilities traditionally held by state governments, and then, in September, pushed cabinet to create the National Urban and Regional Development Authority to foster a “better balance of population distribution and regional development in Australia.”

When he introduced the legislation, McMahon stressed the significance of the change that was now manifest: “It marks our recognition that there is a direct contribution that the Commonwealth government can make in national urban and regional development.” It also showed that the government had an answer to Labor’s policies in this area.

“We should be able to tell people where we stand and where we are heading,” McMahon had written in August 1971. Here, perhaps, was the government’s approach in a single phrase: stasis and movement. When McMahon went to Government House to seek a dissolution of parliament, he felt sufficiently confident that his two-pronged approach would be enough to see the government returned. To Paul Hasluck, he predicted the Coalition would pick up two seats in Western Australia and two seats in New South Wales — and perhaps even three in Victoria. He didn’t envision losing any seats except, perhaps, that of Evans, held by Malcolm Mackay.

That prediction was somewhat redeemed: the Coalition picked up two seats in Western Australia and one seat apiece in Victoria and South Australia. But it lost six seats in New South Wales, four in Victoria, and one apiece in Tasmania and Queensland, with the result that Labor took office with a nine-seat majority.

It was a closer result than many would like to think. The rural gerrymander meant that around 2000 votes distributed across five seats could have allowed the government to cling to office. In such an event, the first steps in McMahon’s forecast to Perkin may well have been vindicated.

Why the close result? Some have pointed to the electorate’s innate conservatism, especially after twenty-three years of Coalition rule. Few have suggested that McMahon might have been a factor in limiting the swing — but one of them was his successor as prime minister. Without McMahon’s skill, tenacity, and resourcefulness, Whitlam later wrote, Labor’s victory in 1972 would have been “more convincing than it was.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post “God save us all!” appeared first on Inside Story.

When ordinary voters are placed so insistently on the outside, cynicism is bound to be pervasive. The political class, for all its platitudes about working families, is seen as detached from everyday concerns.

As Frank Bongiorno writes in his new book, Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia, “Some of us are expected to be content with a place at the back of the grandstand, with little hope of our voices carrying to other spectators let alone those heroic figures competing in the arena.” And yet, as he shows, the interplay between spectator and player is greater than those terms might imply. The contest plays out as much in the stands as it does in the arena, and the results affect us all.

Bongiorno illustrates the point by describing 2014’s memorial service for Gough Whitlam. In front of 2000 people in Sydney Town Hall, dignitaries and speakers ranging from Noel Pearson to Cate Blanchett celebrated the influence and achievements of Australia’s twenty-first prime minister. Outside, watching the service on a giant screen, were people happy to tell the TV cameras how Whitlam’s achievements had manifested in their lives.

The abolition of tuition fees had allowed some of them to attend university. The final removal of race as a criterion in immigration policy and the passage of the Racial Discrimination Act had helped to reduce prejudice. Politics had sought them out, Bongiorno writes, and become entangled even in lives imagined as “purely private and disconnected from its demands.”

Exploring how politics has been done on this continent, from deep time through to the modern day, Dreamers and Schemers is a sweeping history that feels especially apt in the wake of the pandemic and this year’s federal election. Dismay with political institutions and processes followed hard on a renewed awareness of what government can do, mixing an exhausted cynicism with a nascent sense of hope. To what extent do Australians need to dream right now? And to what extent will they need schemers to make those dreams real?

Frank Bongiorno is one of Australia’s most versatile, lively and prolific historians. He has reached into the bedroom to explore the sexual mores of Australians, probed the imperfect humans who wore the power suits of the 1980s, and investigated the furious currents of thought and action that shaped the Labor Party. His writing — whether at book length or in shorter pieces for this magazine and others — is characterised by its reach, its wry tone and its humanity. People are always at its heart, the powerful and deprived alike given clear-eyed appraisal.

Dreamers and Schemers is built on an immense variety of sources and is replete with colour and personality — including some personalities whose behaviour might suggest Australia’s aversion to its politicians is well founded.

Who, after all, could respect John Norton, the editor turned politician who urinated on the floor of NSW parliament, repeatedly assaulted his wife, was frequently drunk in public, and ran a scandal rag whose egregiousness exceeded the modern-day Daily Mail? How to explain the election of Tom Ley, who almost certainly murdered three people in Australia, before being convicted in Britain of the murder of his mistress, to both the NSW and the federal parliament? And what about the halo that attached to Joh Bjelke-Petersen, that corrupt hillbilly dictator of the moonlight state, who was knighted for “services to parliamentary democracy” and whose death was marked by a state funeral?

Amid this parade of the conniving and vile, though, Bongiorno draws attention to figures whose influence is more nuanced and significant than a “shilling life,” in W.H. Auden’s phrase, might let on.

George Reid was dubbed “Yes–No Reid” for his equivocation on Federation, despised by Alfred Deakin for his opportunism, and relentlessly satirised by cartoonists as a monocled glob on stubby legs; yet a case can be made that he was responsible for the union of liberalism and conservatism that still colours non-Labor politics, and for the final iteration of vital clauses in the Constitution. Stanley Bruce is chiefly remembered for wearing spats and losing his seat — along with his government — in 1929, but in office he also consolidated an alliance with the Country Party that has been maintained by the non-Labor parties.

Peter Beattie, meanwhile, might well be the “media tart” who cravenly praised Bjelke-Petersen at that state funeral, but back in 1971 he was beaten by Queensland police while protesting the racially charged Springboks tour that Bjelke-Petersen had facilitated. And his election as that state’s premier, in 1998, opened space for a compromise with the Howard government over the High Court’s Wik native title decision.

Rather than dividing people like these into his titular categories, Bongiorno is interested in the expectations Australians have of their politics — utilitarian and practical, abstract and big-picture — and how those expectations have receded and resurged, failed and been surpassed. The politics of Bongiorno’s history is made up of “ideals, visions, and dreams,” yes, but also of “roads, bridges, and electric wires.” The ideal political actor is one who brings both together, who can build castles in the air as well as on the ground.

One of the reasons Whitlam’s death was so notable, in Bongiorno’s telling, is that it threw into relief the narrowness of the contemporary political class. The “old man” whom Pearson eulogised was someone who could speak to dreams and schemes — of a mature and independent country but also of lives made “happier and more enjoyable for people in small and, some might say, unusual ways.” A man who could sign international treaties and return stolen land by pouring soil into Vincent Lingiari’s hands, but also talk of improving bus services and extending municipal sewerage.

Bongiorno has an eye for the surprising detail, the epigrammatical summation and the illuminating remark. In the 1950s, prime minister Bob Menzies finds, as many do, that Vegemite jars make perfectly good drinking glasses, and Pattie, his wife, forages for mushrooms in the paddocks surrounding the Lodge. In the 1980s, Queensland’s Russ Hinze is “a morbidly obese, deeply corrupt, and yet highly capable Gold Coast politician.” Observing Alexander Downer’s faltering leadership of the Liberal Party in 1994, colleague Peter Reith confides in his diary that “the shine is coming off his balls” — cricket balls, that is.

Dreamers and Schemers maintains its shine. It is provocative and illuminating, underscoring political scientist James Walters’s claim that contemporary debate is “always a hostage to history, even when unconscious of it.” In the deeply resonant passages that open the book, Bongiorno notes the early European writers who, “through a glass darkly,” observed sophisticated political arrangements in Indigenous societies and yet denied they had government. He points to the way seniority, ceremony and contest underpinned pre-contact political life.

The “kind of magic” practised by the British — a planted flag and assertion of sovereignty that supposedly changed the country’s status — didn’t mean the end of this political life: as Bongiorno notes, the early colonial authorities assumed the existence of Aboriginal law and its ongoing force, as well as the many coexisting sovereignties on the continent. But the cracks emanating from where that flag was planted spread far: the British claim to territorial sovereignty soon became exclusive and encompassing of land and people. Campaigns of murder, deprivation, intimidation and destruction followed — as did the activism of Indigenous peoples.

Two of the most affecting examples of that activism are presented sequentially: Wiradjuri men Jimmy Clements and John Noble’s presence at the 1927 opening of Parliament House, and Yorta Yorta activist William Cooper’s 1937 petition seeking direct representation in parliament, enfranchisement and land rights. Clements and Noble’s attendance in the presence of the future King George VI was a reminder of “a sovereignty unceded, in a moment when White Australia was engaged in ceremonial performance of its own claims to possession.” The failure of Cooper’s petition — sent to the same man, now the King — lent considerable moral power to the campaign he subsequently launched with Bill Ferguson and Jack Patten to recast Australia Day as instead a Day of Mourning.

Bongiorno never underplays the obstacles to a real reckoning with the dislocation, violence and deprivation visited on First Nations people, but he also points to their resilience and adaptability, which he suggests is keenly apparent in the push for constitutional recognition and in the record number of First Nations people now in the parliament.

This is of a piece with the optimistic argument that pervades Dreamers and Schemers: that, in times of crisis, Australia’s myriad political actors, systems and institutions have been resourceful enough to adapt and pull through.

In the 1890s, economic depression in Victoria was followed by a shearers’ strike in Queensland that helped give birth to the Labor Party. Labor’s ascendency anticipated the growing domination of class politics across the colonies, but the emergence of Georges Reid (1894–99) and Turner (1894–99) saw stable government in New South Wales and Victoria.

Suffrage for women, introduced in South Australia in 1894, was debated in New South Wales and Victoria, but the only colony to enact it before Federation was Western Australia. The movement towards Federation meanwhile became stronger — inflected, perhaps, by a fin de siècle optimism that spurred one clergyman to tell his congregation they would be “entering a new life” come 1 January 1901.

Other moments of crisis — the second world war, for instance, and the economic upheaval of the 1970s — revealed a similar capacity for renewal. This account is never without nuance: Bongiorno makes note of the gaps, vicissitudes and regressions that mark events later often celebrated uncritically.

Bongiorno cites Sydney feminist Rose Scott’s criticism that Federation would create a parliament that was elitist, centralist and distant from the communities and families and homes in which women lived. The failure of successive women who tried to be elected to that parliament over the next forty years tends to bear out Scott’s point, which Bongiorno reinforces by noting that even the architecture of Parliament House was hostile: when Dorothy Tangney and Enid Lyons arrived in Canberra in 1943 as (respectively) a senator and an MP, a separate bathroom had to be found for them — “set well apart from the men’s.” Scott’s criticism continues to reverberate when Bongiorno describes how Julia Gillard’s “misogyny speech” in 2012 was regarded in the Canberra press gallery as a cynical ploy but outside it as a genuine and accurate account of the sexism routinely experienced by women.

Dreamers and Schemers can be read as a rebuttal of claims that an “Australian crisis” has manifested in a turnstile prime ministership, hysterical and polarised public debate, and a public service impotent and leaderless in the face of complex problems. Far from being pollyanna-ish, though, Bongiorno’s optimism is grounded in the existence of people “willing to resist complacent utilitarian appeals to majority interests and consensus opinion,” people who refuse “to accept injunctions merely to tinker rather than transform.”

In this way, May’s election results might presage a renewal of the nation’s “creative energies.” The Morrison government’s cynicism and tribalism had seemingly exhausted these energies, but reinvigoration came with the election of a Labor government promising a new politics, the election of teal independents demanding action on climate change (the problem most emblematic of policy paralysis in Australia), and the unprecedented diversity of the new parliament.

“Dreamers imagined that a new era of political creativity might be just around the corner,” Bongiorno writes. Ever judicious, he adds a caveat: “Even as the schemers manoeuvred in their familiar patterns.”

Many years ago, a retired John McEwen made a point of prefacing an oral history interview with the caveat that his perspective on the events he had seen, as leader of the Country Party, long-time deputy prime minister, and temporary prime minister, was limited. “The spectator,” McEwen insisted, “sees more of the game.”

In Bongiorno, we have a spectator whose knowledge is keen, whose outlook is expansive, and who wields his pen with elegance to deliver insight. Thanks to Dreamers and Schemers, we see much more of the game of Australian politics. •

Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia
By Frank Bongiorno | La Trobe University Press | $39.99 | 480 pages

The post Vision splendid appeared first on Inside Story.

That said, a question has always needed to be asked about Holt’s death. Why did he go into the surf? The water was crashing into the rocks; the ocean was heaving; the tide was inexorably strong. To enter the waters was profoundly dangerous. Holt’s colleagues were mystified. “I will never quite understand,” his predecessor as prime minister, Bob Menzies, declared. Friends were similarly perplexed. “God only knows why,” said one.

The question gives any biographer of Holt a key task: to play God and explain why a man occupying his country’s foremost political office, who knew well the dangers of the waters before him and could feel in every movement of his sore right shoulder the limitations of his body, decided to walk into the surf in his sandshoes and bathers to be carried away like a leaf.

In Harold Holt: Always One Step Further, his latest biographer, Ross Walker, makes no pretence of omniscience. “When we try to understand the motives underpinning a person’s behaviour,” he writes, “we are always operating in the orbit of surmise.” With this caveat made, Walker offers an intimate, eloquent and persuasive account of Holt’s behaviour and character from his youth to his sudden death. He restores much life to this short-reigning prime minister and movingly tracks Holt’s steps down to Cheviot Beach, to the sands where his footprints cease, to the waters in which he disappeared.

As a biographical subject, Holt is an unpromising figure. He left few personal papers and confided in fewer still of his contemporaries. Beyond those that appear in the public record, his opinions, beliefs and feelings vanished with him. Information about his early life has for many years been especially limited.

Writing nearly two decades ago, Frame found the surviving material so meagre that he felt he could only draw a “broad outline” of Holt’s youth, and so dispensed with pre-parliamentary life in fewer than twelve pages. Walker adds depth and detail to this outline with a combination of new material and an expansive and empathetic reading of the facts at hand.

Born in 1908, Holt became accustomed early to insecurity. His father, a handsome wastrel, moved through successive careers as a teacher, hotelier and theatre manager, divorcing Holt’s mother in 1918 and later — to his son’s horror — marrying a woman Holt himself had been seeing.

Young Harold was shuttled between relatives and schools, always on the move, until he landed at Melbourne’s Wesley College, which he attended from 1920 to 1926. This constant flux, Walker argues, was the spur for the charm that Holt wielded so successfully in his political career: “When you had to keep re-establishing yourself in a succession of different environments, it was an asset to be able to please others.”

Holt’s amiability was a shield against the blows that marked his time at Wesley. At sixteen, he grieved his mother’s death in the dormitory. In spite of his better claim to the top position, he accepted the deputy school captain’s position with grace. Made acting captain at the last minute, a gratified Holt had to stand before his peers and sing of their imminent departure from a school that had provided the first real sense of security in his life: “Although the time has come for us to part, you’ve still your corner in my heart.” But knowing that no-one was in that audience for him gave Holt a profound feeling of loneliness which he never forgot.

But soon, as a law student at Melbourne University, he found the woman who alleviated it. Zara Dickins, confident, wilful and artistically minded, came from a stable family background and desired to stand on her own two feet. The pair were a good match. But their relationship was interrupted by the nonchalance born of Holt’s need for self-protection (“You’ll do me for a few weeks,” he told her), by his romance with the woman his father would soon marry, and by Zara’s marriage to an English cavalry officer with whom she would have three children. By the time their relationship resumed, this time for good, Holt was in parliament and the world was on the cusp of war.

Walker sketches this period using scenes, dialogue, evocative descriptions and thematic markers that help readers see Holt and his surrounds. The result is compelling, but at times skips too lightly around what should be explained. At university, for example, Holt was already intent on “making a difference” in politics. Why he wanted to, and what difference he might make, is neither raised nor answered. Holt might well have joined the United Australia Party (UAP) because of what he saw as its “easy tolerance of all political beliefs,” but the expressions of his political beliefs cited here would have seen him welcomed into any party. “There are so many things that should be done in this country,” he said on one occasion. “It’s a wonderful country, and we’ve got to open it up, expand it.”

Evidence of the lack of hard facts and detail recurs. After earning honourable scars for the UAP at the 1934 federal election and the 1935 Victorian election, Holt was elected to the federal parliament, aged twenty-seven, in 1935. He was briefly a minister in 1939, then again in 1940 after a plane crash killed three ministers in the precariously balanced Menzies government of 1939–41. As labour and national service minister, he negotiated with unions and employers, introduced the Child Endowment Act, and eventually argued for Menzies to yield the prime ministership to Arthur Fadden. All are noted. But how Holt negotiated, why he championed the act and what he felt were Menzies’s deficiencies as leader are missing.

Walker presents us instead with more intimate scenes. Holt’s famed affinity with the water came relatively late, after the children he raised with Zara introduced him to spearfishing and accompanied him on early-morning dives. The water gave this urbane city solicitor turned politician a new sense of solitude and space; without it, he said, “I would go bonkers.”

The desire for regular retreats to the ocean was impetus for the house he and Zara built at Portsea and another they bought at Bingil Bay in Queensland; it was also his way of dealing with uncertainty. The risk in skindiving, Holt remarked, was “part of the attraction,” something to be enjoyed. As Walker argues, in a sentence pregnant with meaning, “Experience had taught him that life was inherently insecure, so why not enjoy risk rather than fear it?”

Risk attended Holt in the years that followed. Resuming the labour and national service portfolio in 1949, he won plaudits for his adroit handling of industry, and in 1956 became deputy leader of the Liberal Party and thereby heir apparent to Menzies. But his ascent was never as assured as some have claimed: he only narrowly beat Senator Bill Spooner in the ballot for deputy and, as treasurer from 1958 to 1966, his prospects were greatly damaged by a credit squeeze that nearly cost the Coalition government at the 1961 election. By 1966, however, when Menzies retired, Holt’s position was supreme. He became prime minister “without stepping over any dead bodies.”

As prime minister, though, Holt saw many. Three months after he took office, an Australian conscript, Errol Noack, died in Vietnam; Australia’s military involvement escalated precipitously. The man who had been acclaimed as the “godfather of a million children” after introducing the child endowment scheme in 1940 was now responsible for sending more than 7000 of them to a conflict in which 521 would die. The 1966 election was largely defined by the Vietnam war, but with popular opposition still nascent and an aged Arthur Calwell leading Labor for the final time, Holt and his government romped home with a record majority.

Holt had become prime minister amid some questions about his ability. Had he been deputy too long? Would he be able to lead? The successes of 1966 might have quieted those questions, but the mounting problems in 1967 saw them raised again.

Over the course of that year Holt contended with a treasurer and deputy prime minister at war with one another; with a backbench agitating for a new inquiry into the collision between two naval warships, the Voyager and the Melbourne; with demands for transparency after government VIP flights were shown to have been misused; with a new Labor leader, Gough Whitlam, signalling generational change in the opposition; with a rising death toll and other difficulties in Vietnam; and with two by-elections and a half-Senate election at which increasing discontent with Holt’s performance was registered, quantified and used by his enemies.

There is little to suggest that Holt would regain the initiative and much to suggest that he was flagging, both physically and mentally. By the end of 1967 he was taking morphine tablets for a stiff and painful shoulder, and sometimes lost all feeling in the fingers of his right hand. He was exasperated by some of his colleagues and by the government’s difficulties. “Man wasn’t meant to live like this,” he complained to one public servant; to another, he observed, “Nobody can live forever.”

Walker builds this picture, attentive to the resonant and the telling. He spots in Holt’s infamous “All the way with LBJ” speech a phrase from the Wesley College leaving song. The loneliness Holt had experienced in 1926 was the same loneliness he imagined, as prime minister, all national leaders feeling. Hence his remarks to president Lyndon Johnson — LBJ — on the White House lawns:

And so, sir, in the lonelier and more disheartening moments which come to any national leader, I hope there will be a corner in your heart which takes cheer from the fact that you have an admiring friend, a staunch friend, that will be all the way with LBJ.

Walker also relates Holt’s conversation with Reg “Spot” Turnbull, the fellow Wesleyan who was appointed school captain to Holt’s deputy in 1926, but was now, forty years later, an independent senator and spiky critic of the government’s involvement in Vietnam. “You were captain of the school. I was only acting captain,” Holt complained. “But you’re the prime minister, Harold,” a surely bewildered Turnbull replied. “And I’m not.”

Walker accompanies illuminating moments with sharp phrases and pointed similes. Holt’s position as Menzies’s heir apparent is that of “an incoming batsman waiting for a teammate to declare his long innings closed.” Newly prime minister in 1966, smiling in a wetsuit and surrounded by his bikini-clad daughters-in-law, Holt has the look of a “genial seal” and, after winning re-election at a canter, that of a man “who has survived some unpleasant surgery.”

But war in Vietnam — “shaped like a snake, slithering southwards” — leaves political wounds and takes a physical toll. Lyndon Johnson’s face becomes a “ploughed field, the furrows deepening year by year with the daily harvest of worry, arm-twisting, and conflict.” And Holt’s temple of a body — fit enough to be a jet pilot, he thought at one point — is by 1967 a museum of “accumulated scars, scratches, and infirmities.”

What emerges most strongly in Walker’s book is just how many times Holt had been able to avoid more scars. When laid out, his life seems a succession of near misses, lucky breaks and last-minute aversions from disaster. He was almost struck by a passing car in 1941; he was in a car accident that killed his driver in 1955; as prime minister, he found a bullet hole in his window at Parliament House and would have drowned in May 1967 but for a friend who saw him entangled in kelp and gurgling salt water.

Politically, he had a close shave in the 1961 credit squeeze and was rescued from political disaster during the VIP affair by the cool thinking of John Gorton, his eventual successor. In his personal life, he had a second chance with Zara that allowed some absolution for his earlier disregard, yet he also had affairs, most notably with his Portsea neighbour Marjorie Gillespie.

Never was a man more aptly nicknamed — in his case as “Cat” — by his schoolfriends. Invoking these incidents and many more, Walker spies below Holt’s modesty and charm a recklessness engendered by the tragedies of his youth and sustained, as an adult, by their failure to recur. “Holt had often been in the presence of death,” he writes, “and had always survived.”

Holt’s family and close friends were aware of this effect. In her memoirs, Zara recalled once warning her husband of crocodiles in a river; she was brushed off. When she pointed to a nearby shark on another occasion, Holt dismissed her with a brusque, “You’re disturbing the fish.” One friend felt compelled to be blunt: “Listen, cock, stop being so bloody brave. Must you insist on making yourself natural assassin bait?” Holt’s own brother, dying of cancer, also told him to be more careful: “Your health becomes of vital importance to yourself and the party, so do us all a good favour by watching it.” And yet Holt would not watch it, would not stop himself from going one step further.

In this light, the questions about Holt’s decision to go into the surf in December 1967 seem profoundly misplaced. “Surely you’re not going in,” Marjorie Gillespie said when Holt appeared on Cheviot Beach in his sandshoes and bathers. But Holt, as the reader now fully understands, was never going to eschew a swim because it was dangerous. He went in precisely because it was. And so, Walker writes, the prime minister answered Gillespie “by striding towards the water.”

Harold Holt: Always One Step Further
By Ross Walker | La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc. | $34.99 | 328 pages

The post Surely he wasn’t going in? appeared first on Inside Story.

Considerable press coverage followed, partly the result of the merciless phrasing of Ryan’s criticisms but more substantially because the essay represented a significant about-face for its author. As director of Melbourne University Press, or MUP, from 1962 to 1989, Ryan had overseen publication of nearly the entire gargantuan endeavour that he now saw fit to cut down to size. Of all the things in his life that he looked back on with shame, Ryan wrote, the greatest was having been publisher of Clark’s History and having extended to Clark the support and encouragement that any author expects of their publisher.

Coming two years after Clark’s death, Ryan’s essay struck some readers as appropriate and well targeted, if also belated. For others, though, it was hypocritical, inappropriate and unnecessarily personal. The fracas raged for more than a year, with Ryan returning twice more to Quadrant to continue his poppy-felling and, seemingly, to salt the earth around it.

In this effort Ryan was joined by others, generally on the right of politics, who used Clark’s name in what would soon be termed “the history wars.” Prime minister Paul Keating had reignited those wars in 1992 when he accused the Coalition parties of being stuck in a golden age where the cultural cringe reigned and pride in Australian culture was non-existent. For Keating, Clark was a kindred spirit whose ideas echoed his own; when it came in 1993, Ryan’s attack was a “bitchy,” wretched betrayal.

For John Howard, then on the opposition benches, Clark’s vision in the History was gloomily ambivalent about the “heroic achievements” that also needed to be listed on Australia’s “balance sheet.” Over the decade that followed his becoming prime minister in 1996, he would try to dispel Clark’s vision and give more attention to those achievements, trumpeting (for example) the importance of Gallipoli.

In the years since then, Clark has attracted hatchets and haloes in near-equal measure. The subject of three lauded biographies and numerous critical studies, he has also been the target of scurrilous attack, perhaps most notably in 1996 in the Brisbane Courier-Mail, which falsely alleged that he was awarded the Order of Lenin by the Soviet Union for working as an “agent of influence.”

As the historian Stuart Macintyre wrote in 2003, Clark had endured “greater public obloquy than any other Australian historian.” Ryan’s Quadrant essay didn’t mark the start of that process, nor even its lowest point, but it made a deep notch in the public memory that is still evident three decades later.

Coming across Ryan’s initial attack six years after its publication, New Zealand historian Doug Munro became interested in the questions the controversy raised. Later, seeing Ryan fail to account for any of the contradictions in his case in the years before his death in 2015, Munro decided to embark on what he calls a “forensic re-evaluation” of the whole affair. In the background was his admiration for Ryan’s highly regarded second world war memoir, Fear Drive My Feet, which he has described as “the incomparable personal account of the New Guinea campaign.”

Munro fossicked through the archives and clippings, and spoke to all those still alive with something to say; and now, in History Wars: The Peter Ryan–Manning Clark Controversy, he tracks the origins of the affair, the circumstances that prompted it, the accuracy and significance of the claims that were made, and the broader context that they reflect. Drawing on a wide array of material that he musters with clarity and discusses with shrewd judgement, Munro might be said to revel a little too much in the detail.

But it is also where he finds the devil. In many respects, the opening line of Ryan’s essay might also have been uttered by Munro: his History Wars is an overdue axe laid to the dried-out stalk of a poppy, Ryan, who has been left to stand for much too long and in whose shadow too many untruths have been allowed to flourish.

When the Ryan–Clark controversy first broke out in 1993, Don Watson called Ryan’s essay an act of “double cannibalism”: “You live off him in life and when he’s dead you live off him again.” Ryan certainly returned to chew on Clark for years afterwards, but Munro shows that from the beginning Ryan was selective with his facts, concealing those that were inconvenient and distorting others. The distortion was so extensive that Munro has to be blunt: “Much of what Ryan says is inaccurate. He is not a trustworthy source of information.”

In distancing himself from Clark’s History, Ryan claimed that he had inherited — and thus been bound by — an open-ended commitment to publish the whole six volumes as Clark completed them. In fact, as Munro shows, it was Ryan who presented Clark with a written contract for the series, supplanting the informal offer made by Ryan’s predecessor before the first volume was published. It was Ryan who specified the number of volumes the series would include and when each manuscript would be delivered. It was also Ryan who made no provision for peer review, the process by which academic publishers usually ensure the accuracy of a manuscript.

Moreover, over the subsequent two decades in which he oversaw publication of the History, it was Ryan who allowed the terms of the contract to be varied, who encouraged Clark to continue writing when he talked of giving it up, and who repeatedly headed off any prospect of the series going to a different publisher. Far from being bound by the History, Ryan clung to it like a drowning man to a lifeline.

Munro also shows that Ryan refused to release his grip even as a beleaguered and heavily indebted MUP, in danger of going under when Ryan took over, recovered. Publication of the first volume of Clark’s work in 1962 was certainly well timed, providing the publisher with vital revenue and credibility. “It gave reassurance,” Ryan wrote in his memoirs, “to both booksellers and the public that ‘MUP is still definitely in business.’” By 1971, though, MUP had recovered its position, aided most of all by the sale of its printery and the building it occupied. By volume three, then, the lifeline that Clark’s work afforded was no longer necessary. In his original attack on Clark, and for years afterward, Ryan shuffled the pieces to hide this, but it does not escape Munro. As he puts it, acerbically, “Ryan, by his own account, sold his soul and continued to publish the History.”

Questions of integrity are rife in this book. As is well known, Clark poured his own, tortured feelings into his subjects, creating vivid portraits (perhaps even self-portraits) in the process, but at a cost to the credibility of his history. In old age, increasingly identified with the Labor Party, he put a sage’s hat atop his historian’s and made gnomic utterances purportedly drawn from his unique insight into the country’s soul. Did this make him a mountebank, as Ryan argued? Perhaps. But perhaps Ryan saw fraud because he was seeing it in himself.

Ryan had fought bravely during the second world war, had written that fine memoir of his experiences, was praised for his steady hand while director at MUP, and had been a well-regarded, if contrarian, columnist with a range of newspapers and magazines. But by the time he began drafting his essay on Clark in 1993, he had left MUP and lost his column in the Age, and was in Munro’s terms “a preacher without a pulpit.” Seeking a new pulpit — perhaps via a column in Quadrant — did he deceive himself into thinking that he had been shackled to Clark, that MUP had to publish the History? Did he realise that he was spinning his own fairy floss?

Writing thirteen months after his original essay on Clark was published, Ryan aimed another axe at the critics who had cried foul, and reiterated his criticisms of Clark and the History. In his original essay Ryan helpfully told the author of a single-volume abridgement then under way that he should simply stab the “thin verbal soup” of Clark’s work with a pin to allow the “gaseous verbal excess to hiss its way out,” leaving behind only what was important. Again, this phrase might also be used by Munro as a description of his efforts. His incisive study of Ryan’s criticism, and of the context in which the Ryan–Clark controversy played out, punctures the myths that have surrounded it and shows us what is important and what is left over: the wreckage of the history wars. •

History Wars: The Peter Ryan–Manning Clark Controversy
By Doug Munro | ANU Press | $55 (print), free online | 194 pages

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Tall-poppy lopping appeared first on Inside Story.

As the playwright Luigi Pirandello once wrote, it is a cruel injustice to pin any life perpetually to one moment and judge it there. That sentiment is no doubt shared by those who have spilled ink over Evatt: the authors of four full-length biographies, an insider portrait and a host of books in which Evatt is a key figure.

One reason for these repeated attempts to portray Evatt is his complexity and contradictions; another is the extraordinary breadth of his life and career. He had a shining period at the NSW bar and a stint in NSW state politics, and was appointed to the High Court at a precociously young age. There, amid some 400 judgements, he wrote books about the reserve powers, the Rum Rebellion, and William Holman. Then he entered federal politics, made himself a significant player at the United Nations, and rose to the leadership of the Labor Party after the death of Ben Chifley. And finally, after losing three elections, he accepted an ignominious appointment to the NSW Supreme Court.

Most writers have understandably focused their attention on the later parts of Evatt’s career, with the result that his decade at the High Court has been left largely untraversed. In The Brilliant Boy, Gideon Haigh leads us through these uplands, and makes a persuasive and elegant case for the significance of one particular moment in Evatt’s career — the judgement he delivered in Chester v Waverley Council.

Evatt is one of two titular “brilliant” boys of this entwined biography and legal history: immensely intelligent, determined, and ambitious in every sphere. Haigh attributes these traits to the influence of his mother Jeanie, who instilled in her son a belief that he could do better than anyone else. What followed certainly suggests that he could: he won a swag of prizes at school and university, took first-class honours in English, philosophy and mathematics, and then veered into law, where he “cut a swathe” through the Sydney bar and crossed paths with Robert Menzies, then at the Melbourne bar. In chapters that teem with colour and are flecked with a light wit, Haigh recounts Evatt’s rise through the 1920s: how he became a High Court habitué then went into state politics, where close experience of the domineering premier, Jack Lang, left him disenchanted and made him refocus on his legal career.

Almost immediately after his return to the law, aged thirty-six, Evatt was appointed to the High Court, where his resolve, liberalism and omnivorous mind would rankle his crustier colleagues. Haigh’s discussion of the machinations of the court and the interplay of its characters is wonderfully sharp, setting them in the context of wider clashes between capital and labour, the Commonwealth and the states, and non-Labor governments and left-wing radicals.

Against this background Haigh sketches Evatt the intellectual: the man who read voraciously, hung around artists’ studios and galleries, bought a Modigliani for his wall, “slipped from Bench to desk” to write histories, and was bursting with opinions he couldn’t keep to himself. While on a visit to the United States in 1938, he wrote to president Franklin D. Roosevelt to offer advice on filling a Supreme Court vacancy.

“Who did Evatt think he was?” asks Haigh rhetorically. In the words of one of Evatt’s near contemporaries, the literary critic Nettie Palmer, he was a man certain that he could do what he wanted.

But this was not wholly true. “Evatt’s life would be marked every bit as deeply by what he could not do,” writes Haigh, pointing to the first world war, when Evatt was rejected for service because of his astigmatism only to see two of his younger brothers enlist and never return. On Haigh’s reckoning, this loss, and the immense toll it took on his mother, was a trauma Evatt could never forget.

Then there is another “brilliant boy.” In September 1937, workers for Waverley Council excavated a deep trench in the middle of a thoroughfare and, downing tools for the weekend, left it barricaded only by a few planks, an upturned wheelbarrow and a pile of sand. Overnight rain filled the trench with water and the next day children in the neighbourhood began challenging one other to jump over it. Max Chester, a seven-year-old child of Polish-Jewish immigrants only two years settled in Australia, fell into the trench and drowned. His body was discovered six hours later in the presence of his mother, Golda.

Such an incident was not atypical. One of the most startling parts of The Brilliant Boy is its evocation of a world far more brutal and callous than our own. Haigh notes a litany of deaths on unsafe building sites and points out that Sydney trains at this time travelled with their doors open, regularly leading to horrific accidents in which people were hurled out by the jolt of a carriage on a warped track. There seemed little impetus for change, even if it would have been simple and cheap to effect. Even Max Chester’s death was blithely accepted by the Waverley Council: work continued on the trench without a single change in work practices — even after another boy fell into the trench a week later.

These dangerous practices reflected a profound lack of sympathy and humanity within the legal system. Judges would attribute recklessness to the victims, downplay their injuries, and worry instead that the “floodgates” might be opened if cases like Chester v Waverley Council were to succeed. As Haigh puts it, the overriding view on the bench was that the world “was a harsh place in which unfortunate events happened for which it was frivolous to seek redress.” Thus Golda Chester’s frustrations when, with the aid of solicitor and state politician Abe Landa, she sought compensation.

With an eye for the salient point and the humanising detail, Haigh teases out the links between cases heard in local and overseas courts to detail how this state of affairs had been reached and how, in the years immediately before Chester v Waverley Council reached the High Court, the law had begun to evolve. He shows how a smattering of rulings became hurdles for Golda Chester: how judges insisted that mental injury be accompanied by physical injury; and how Privy Council rulings bound Australian courts but not British ones. Then he shows the shifting ground: how, in the wake of the first world war, the notion of traumatic injury became more accepted; how a case centred on a snail in a bottle of ginger beer established the law of negligence; and how a case over woollen underwear established in Australia a liability standard for negligence.

But those shifts were not enough. By the time Chester v Waverley Council came before the High Court, the matter had been winnowed down, stripped of the very real human tragedy — namely, Max’s death — and recentred on whether the council had a duty of care to his bereaved mother. A witness who had seen Max Chester fall into the trench was not called. The judges worked from appeal books. The verdict was decided almost immediately.

On grounds that it was not common for the death of a child to produce “any consequence of more than a temporary nature,” Chief Justice Latham ruled against Chester. On grounds that “the shock to the appellant [Chester] is not within the ordinary range of human experience,” Justice Starke ruled against Chester. On grounds that “the law must fix a point where its remedies stop short of complete reparation for the world at large,” Justice Rich ruled against Chester.

Evatt disagreed. In what becomes the raison d’être for this entwining of life and case, Haigh writes that Evatt performed an act of radical empathy: “He, an honoured Australian judge, tries to enter into the mind of Golda Chester, a penniless Polish-Jewish woman, to understand the ‘nervous shock’ occasioned by her agitated search and horrifying discovery.” Evatt’s communing with Chester was prompted by his knowledge of her predicament. “Twice Jeanie Evatt watched sons disappear into danger; twice she endured the long wait for dreadful news that was always a possible outcome. Golda’s wait had been shorter and sharper but no less helpless.” Thus Evatt’s terse refutation of the verdict of the NSW Supreme Court chief justice Sir Frederick Jordan: “She was not ‘looking for the body of a child,’” writes Evatt. “She was looking for her child.” (As Haigh notes, “These are devastating lines.”)

Moreover, Evatt argued for the kind of imaginative understanding that he had just deployed: that the council should have foreseen that the trench, inadequately guarded and filled with water, would be an attractive but dangerous place for children, and that any parent who came there and discovered his or her child had died would incur great shock and distress. “If the present defendant had ‘directed his mind’ at all to the possible consequences of his primary default, would he not have foreseen the likelihood of injury being suffered, not perhaps in the precise way in which it was suffered, but in some such way? If so, he owed a duty to the person who suffered.”

Evatt stepped down from the High Court to go into federal politics soon after Chester v Waverley Council. Great highs and lows awaited him there. But he remained aware of the significance of his dissent, and for years afterward nursed the hope and belief that it would be vindicated, to the point that he approached a young Murray Gleeson to write an article doing so.

An embarrassed Gleeson declined, but time would eventually prove Evatt right. In this compelling and incisive account Gideon Haigh delivers what Evatt sought; moreover, he does Evatt a more important service by shifting our attention from that calamitous moment in 1955 to a time when, at the height of his powers, he sought to bend the law towards justice. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Disclosures made in the biography — of even more affairs, of Roth’s having made a pass at a friend of his one-time stepdaughter, of Roth’s comments about the God-sanctified perfection of a twenty-year age gap between romantic partners — only fuelled the speculation, to the point that Peter Carey, for one, was moved to declare that being “an arsehole” was of no consequence for Roth’s position in the literary firmament.

Roth himself was appalled by the thought that his life might be understood only as a litany of licentious affairs: “It wasn’t just fucked this one, fucked that one, fucked this one,” he said. Responding to #MeToo, he wrote that he had “nothing but sympathy” for the pain felt by women insulted and injured by male sexual desire. “But I am also made anxious,” he told a friend, “by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges.” He was “made anxious as a civil libertarian,” he went on, “because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is publicised accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment.”

What Roth would have made of the response to allegations of rape and sexual harassment levelled at Blake Bailey, his chosen biographer and the author of Philip Roth: The Biography, is probably clear. Bailey, who has denied all, has certainly received punishment: his literary agent dropped him; his publisher, W.W. Norton (which faces questions over its handling of the allegations), pulled the book from sale and cut ties with him; and the tide of very positive publicity has decisively turned.

The allegations against Bailey and the controversy around Roth are certainly serious, but they shouldn’t prevent us from paying critical attention to Bailey’s book. It is, after all, an extended and serious study of a significant literary figure. Had it not been for the latest allegations, it would probably be fixed in the public mind as the definitive word on its subject.

The book is also informed by material that may not be available to any future biographer or Roth scholar. As well as marathon interviews with the now-deceased Roth, Bailey was given his subject’s imprimatur to interview more than a hundred classmates, friends, girlfriends, publishers and family members, all of whom appear to have made a considerable effort to help with a book they believed would be authoritative. (One example is the former neighbour of Roth’s who wrote Bailey a hundred-page “remembrance” of her years-long affair with the writer, and was the model for Drenka Balich in Sabbath’s Theater.)

Bailey also had untrammelled access to Roth’s archives at the Library of Congress, as well as papers not integrated into that collection. Among the latter is the infamous “Notes for My Biographer” manuscript that Roth wrote to rebut his former wife Claire Bloom’s memoir, Leaving a Doll’s House, and “Notes on a Scandal-Monger,” an account of Roth’s dealings with Ross Miller, an English literature professor who was briefly commissioned to write his authorised biography. (As the title suggests, the arrangement didn’t go well.) The fate of these manuscripts is in the hands of the executors of Roth’s estate, Andrew Wylie and Julia Golier, and there is no guarantee that they will be added to the official archives, let alone survive.

This level of access and cooperation lies behind Bailey’s use of the definite article in the title of his biography; for readers and scholars interested in the dimensions of Roth’s work and his life, these sources mean that this is a book to be reckoned with. No less a figure than Roth himself — who invested considerable time and energy in the process, and who anticipated the book would be substantive, corrective and comprehensive — would have insisted on such a reckoning.

By 2012, Philip Roth had retired from the writing career that had otherwise occupied him full-time since the early 1960s. His journey from prodigal Jewish son to lionised favoured son was complete: he had his own holiday (Philip Roth Day, 23 October) and was acclaimed as one of America’s greatest writers. His books had won nearly every prize it was possible to win and had been anthologised in the Library of America; some of them — Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997) and The Human Stain (2000) in particular — had become classics. His attention was now focused on his biography.

Bailey applied to write the book after the collapse of Roth’s arrangement with Miller. To Roth’s question about why a gentile from Oklahoma should presume to write about him, a Newark Jew, Bailey replied that he was not bisexual, an alcoholic, or possessed of a Puritan family heritage, but he had managed just fine with his well-regarded biographies of writers Richard Yates (2003) and John Cheever (2009). This might well have allayed Roth’s concerns, but what sealed the deal — and wasn’t mentioned in the eventual biography — was Bailey’s unabashed admiration of actress Ali MacGraw, who had starred in the film adaptation of Roth’s first book, Goodbye, Columbus and whose attractions Bailey and Roth cooed over. “Just as important a literary qualification for a biographer as knowing where he fits into the literary continuum with Malamud and Bellow and so forth,” said Bailey later, “is not taking too prim or judgemental a view of a man who had this florid love life.”

Bailey certainly isn’t prim or judgemental. He narrates Roth’s life from promising young author and enfant terrible to titan of American letters in detail and with clarity. Few areas of Roth’s life seem off-limits. “Let the repellent in,” Roth was fond of saying, and Bailey follows that maxim by providing countless examples of Roth’s behaving poorly. Roth nursed grudges, cut people off or used them in his fiction with nary a sign of regret, and was both unconcerned and unrepentant when confronted by their outrage. He was cavalier with girlfriends, seemed impervious to the damage that his chronic infidelity might cause — “God, I’m fond of adultery,” Bailey quotes him saying — and, if anything, was a believer in its benefits: “Adultery makes numerous bad marriages bearable.”

Amid this, as portrayed by Bailey, he was generous and could also be caring. He lent money to friends for medical emergencies and tried to rehabilitate those of them with alcohol problems, he advocated for the provision of libraries, and he championed free expression, no ifs or buts about it.

Bailey constructs his book chronologically and marshals his material effectively. Telling quotes pepper the text, and Bailey willingly allows for conflicting perceptions. One fine example is his citation of Claire Bloom’s thought that Roth’s voice was “suffused with pain” when he “reluctantly” declared his love for her. The reader who has learned of the wounds Roth sustained and inflicted during his first marriage might see the basis of that pain and be more tolerant of Roth’s decision, in the same paragraph, to go ahead with a scheduled trip to the Caribbean, sans Bloom; but the same reader might also understand how Bloom could be disconcerted by the nature of this love and how it is expressed.

Later, Bailey juxtaposes the costs of Roth’s infidelity with the poignancy of his ageing body and his need to charm. While continuing to bed young women, the septuagenarian felt that he had to prepare them for the lurid scars on his body before disrobing. “When lovely Venus lies beside/ Her lord and master Mars/ They mutually profit/ By their scars,” he would sing. Later, he would laugh: “Isn’t it charming? And it gets them. It gets them.”

One of the most notable aspects of the life described by Bailey is the salutary influence Norman Mailer, William Styron and other writers had on Roth and his generation of writers. Having seen the effects of booze and fame, writers like Roth, John Updike and Don DeLillo cultivated a steadiness and discipline that allowed them to be far more productive. Roth was particularly avid on this point. Hurrying to his desk at nine o’clock each morning, he was prone to reprimand himself that the novelist Bernard Malamud would already have been at it for two hours.

Roth was also fond of quoting Flaubert’s maxim that a writer should be orderly and regular in life, like a bourgeois, in order to be wild and original in his or her work. Those habits helped produce twenty-six novels, one novella and a short story collection, a work of narrative non-fiction, an autobiography-cum-novel, and two collections of interviews and essays: a bookshelf and then some.

Bailey also makes the valuable point that Roth and his fellow “abstemious children” began their careers at a time when literature occupied a “sovereign place” in American culture. Today, it is impossible to imagine that a contemporary novel could generate the publicity, notoriety and sheer sales (4.1 million copies and counting) that Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) did — let alone have an immediate social effect, as Portnoy did in Australia. Today’s impecunious scriveners, meanwhile, will gasp to learn that Roth earned US$827,000 from his writing in 1968 alone (and they might faint when Bailey notes that this is equivalent to more than US$6 million today). And those who know the outlines of Roth’s career might well be stricken when they realise that those earnings preceded publication of Roth’s most famous and commercially successful book, Portnoy’s Complaint.

But such detail belies a profound and critical weakness in Philip Roth: The Biography. What should ostensibly draw readers — the work — receives comparatively little attention. Bailey is excellent on Roth’s early career: his faltering short stories, the forays into playwriting, the ignominious and forgotten film criticism, the networks Roth built among emerging critics and contemporary writers. He gives considerable time to the publication process, Roth’s hand in preparing copy (“The masterpiece of an American master,” he ghostwrote of American Pastoral), and the reviews he received (long-time New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani’s reviews are mentioned twenty-one times). But he is often disengaged when it comes to the books.

Unlike the pages of lively and thoughtful analysis that Hermione Lee offers on Tom Stoppard’s plays in her recent biography, Bailey shies away from the works. He is even less concerned about their drafting — a particularly peculiar decision given Roth’s monk-like devotion to writing, revising, and extensive rewriting in response to feedback from a select group of readers. New Yorker editor Veronica Geng became one of those trusted readers and Roth’s favourite editor after talking with him about The Ghost Writer (1979), but Bailey says little about her advice. Ross Miller was presented with a draft of The Counterlife (1986) and told Roth that there was “a good book in here somewhere”: they spent thirteen hours talking about where it might be found. But Bailey betrays no interest in uncovering the effect of this conversation on the published book. Instead, time and time again, he turns back to Roth’s personal life.

This is the point at which Bailey’s refusal to be “too prim or judgemental” counts against him. The sympathy he feels for his subject, necessary for a biographer, is almost certainly too tender, and turns him into an uncritical barracker.

An example of Bailey’s too-close alignment with Roth lies in the book’s treatment of the 1962 symposium at Yeshiva University at which Roth spoke on “the conflict of loyalties in minority writers of fiction.” In The Facts, his autobiography-cum-novel, Roth claims to have been pilloried for his depiction of flawed Jewish characters not only by the largely Jewish student audience but also by the moderator, who asked if he would write the same stories if he were living in Nazi Germany. Bailey cites contemporaneous correspondence largely echoing Roth’s account: by the end, in Bailey’s telling, Roth is “battered,” “dazed,” “overwhelmed” and “wan.” But more recent reportage, using recordings of the symposium, suggests the audience was largely on Roth’s side.

That event was almost certainly important to Roth’s development and career: it even prompted a short-lived declaration that he would never write about Jews again. But to what extent did Roth build it up in his correspondence and then mythologise it in The Facts? This is the question Bailey should have been asking.

More notable, given the controversy over Roth’s “florid love life” and the alleged misogyny of his fiction, is Bailey’s treatment of the women in Roth’s life. As though to prove that he can understand Jewish culture, Bailey dashes his book with Yiddish expressions — most notably shiksa, an often-pejorative term for a non-Jewish woman — and frequently introduces women via their looks before anything else.

Thus, Maggie Martinson — Roth’s first wife, with whom he had a tempestuous, damaging relationship — is both a shiksa and “a short, attractive blonde.” A divorced mother of two children who waited tables to get by, and who may have been molested by her father, Martinson is immediately set up as the opposite of Roth’s “golden child,” and not a page goes by without some aside about her flaws. A request from Martinson that Roth pick up half a pound of parmesan cheese is recalled by Roth and presented by Bailey as a deliberate attempt to distract the writer from his work rather than an everyday errand. Martinson’s threat to kill Roth if he ever slept with her daughter is presented as if it were half-deranged, even though mention has already been made of the clear affection Martinson’s daughter held for him: “Kiss me, Philip,” she once said, “the way you kiss Mother.” The division of the Roths’ assets during their divorce proceedings is presented as evidence of Martinson’s grasping nature, not merely the reality of a divorce.

When Bailey seeks confirmation from Roth for his portrayal of Martinson as forever overreacting, desperate and in some ways physically disfigured, Roth invokes the Brothers Grimm: “This was like some mythological nemesis.” So does this depiction of Martinson amount to a myth, as Roth seems to suggest? Bailey’s answer is no, but Roth would likely suggest otherwise. In The Facts he has his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, describe this portrayal as unrealistic: “I suspect Josie [Martinson] was both worse and better as a human being than what you’ve portrayed here.” Given his abrupt dismissal of Martinson’s diary — “a pretty insipid piece of writing” — Bailey appears to have had no such suspicions.

In focusing on Roth’s relations with women, Bailey’s sympathy with Roth becomes acute. He joins the fray as an uncritical advocate for his subject. Thus, his portrayal of Roth’s relationship with Claire Bloom works in neither man’s favour. Roth made a pass at a friend of Bloom’s daughter and was rebuffed; he admits to having called her desire to avoid him “pure sexual hysteria.” In response to her claim that he had deliberately goaded and insulted her — “What’s the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don’t fuck her?” — Bailey makes limp excuses: “His impulse to mock a certain kind of bourgeois piety was among his pronounced traits, both as a writer and a man.” And he seems to make nothing of Roth’s fear, as the #MeToo movement erupted, that this young woman might have more to say about the incident.

What, then, remains of Roth? Notwithstanding its conspicuous weaknesses, what emerges from Philip Roth: The Biography is a striking figure: a man who felt himself compelled to be a writer, who pursued that vocation with unrelenting vigour and abstemiousness — to the point of buying a farmhouse in which he could devote all his waking hours to the page — and who was so diligent in his efforts that he amassed more than 200 boxes of archival material in the course of producing more than thirty books. If he is in need of rehabilitation, those books are likely to be where Roth is rehabilitated. It will not come from a biography. It will certainly not come from this one by Blake Bailey. •

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That assessment, like that first quip to an overly credulous TV interviewer, is sure to raise eyebrows. But Williams takes it seriously. He believes that historians have typically taken a “myopic” view of the man who occupied the Lodge from 1968 to 1971. They have described his leadership skills as poor, ranked him as a below-average prime minister, and apportioned him overwhelming blame for the results of the 1969 election, at which the Coalition government, though winning another term, suffered a 7 per cent swing and the loss of sixteen seats.

In this biographical study — one of a series commissioned to rectify a lack of knowledge of leading figures from Australian history — Williams tries to correct the record while explaining why he still concurs that Gorton was a below-average prime minister.

There’s a paradox here that echoes the biographical subject (“the most paradoxical individual to hold Australia’s highest public office”) and this series (“scholarly rather than academic”). What emerges, however, and is valiantly argued, is that Gorton was not simply a placeholder between Menzies and Whitlam, as so many imagine, but rather an active and potentially transformative prime minister — a man who could have been great but who fell far short largely because of his own indulgence and amusement.

Born in Melbourne, or perhaps Wellington, in 1911, Gorton was the illegitimate son of a bigamist orchardist and a Catholic barmaid whose surname was Sinn. His upbringing was materially comfortable but emotionally deprived. When his mother died of tuberculosis, he was sent into the care of his father’s first wife, who also cared for Gorton’s elder sister. The nine-year-old had not known of the existence of either, yet recalled barely shrugging at the news.

An establishment education at Sydney Grammar and then Geelong Grammar was followed by a stint at Oxford, where he gained a pilot’s licence, a blue in rowing, and a wife, in the person of Bettina Brown. Vague hopes of becoming a journalist dissipated when his father died and Gorton inherited his citrus orchard at Kangaroo Lake in northern Victoria.

Like many of his generation, Gorton came of age during the second world war. As an RAAF pilot, he crashed his plane four times over four years, the second time most seriously, transforming his smooth good looks into a crumpled visage. Explaining his later tendency to speak with his head down, Gorton said that he didn’t think anyone else wore as much of their backside on their face. A career in local government after the war was cut short by election to the Senate in 1949.

Like many of the “forty-niners,” Gorton went into politics believing that it was possible to build a postwar world “in which meanness and poverty, terrorism and hate, will have no part.” He was convinced of his ability to build that world. Asked what he thought of his colleagues, he remarked, “Not much. I’m the best of them.” Notwithstanding that belief, he spent nine years on the backbench, eventually holding his first ministry — the navy, typically a training ground for new ministers — from 1958 to 1963. He later claimed that he had “built the modern navy” in that time.

More significant was his appointment to what became the education portfolio at a time when the federal government was increasingly active in the area. But he didn’t make it into cabinet until after Robert Menzies had retired in 1966, and was not a part of the government leadership group until October 1967, when prime minister Harold Holt decided the Senate needed a firmer hand and had Gorton appointed leader of the government in the Senate.

The timing was impeccable, and so was Gorton’s judgement. Perceiving a growing scandal around the misuse of government VIP aircraft, he reacted with a shrewd and casual insouciance by tabling — with a shrug — flight records whose existence the government had hitherto furiously denied. The favourable atmosphere this created allowed him to vault over more experienced colleagues in the leadership ballot that followed Holt’s death in December 1967.

It was a time of considerable political difficulty for the Liberals and their Coalition partner, the Country Party. Labor had an articulate and appealing leader in Gough Whitlam; the Coalition was beset by divisions and animosities; public support for Australia’s military commitment in Vietnam was waning; and a generation of critical journalists had arrived in the Canberra press gallery.

In Williams’s reckoning, Gorton could have risen to meet these challenges, not least because his earthy nationalism, liberalism and rugged appearance struck a chord with the public and suggested a new direction for a two-decades-old government. “We had reached a stage where we were on top of a mountain, and we had to decide whether we stayed up there or go out in various directions,” Gorton later told Williams. As prime minister, these directions were given the catch-all term of “Gortonism,” a highly individual set of preferences including centralism over federalism, prime ministerial autonomy over cabinet government, and greater spending on social welfare.

The problem was that each of these preferences infuriated members of Gorton’s party. Liberal state premiers, conscious of the federal government’s continued growth, protested at Gorton’s moves to extend Commonwealth sovereignty over the continental shelf. Cabinet colleagues were driven to near-madness by Gorton’s unilateralism, evident in his protecting MLC Life Insurance from foreign takeover and in negotiations over oil discoveries in the Bass Strait. “Get this into your head,” Country Party leader John McEwen told Gorton while explaining that consultation was a vital part of the Coalition agreement. And Gorton’s insistence on increased social spending made treasurer Billy McMahon irate to the point that he all but disowned the 1969–70 budget.

One effect of that increase was a 5 per cent cut in defence spending, which raised the hackles of the anti-communist hardliners in the Democratic Labor Party. Given that they had threatened to withhold preferences from the government in 1968, it is hard to know why Gorton was happy to antagonise them again in 1969. But he compounded the offence by signing off on a speech by external affairs minister Gordon Freeth in which Australians were told not to panic if the Soviet Union extended its influence into the Indian Ocean. The DLP made good on its threat and withheld preferences when the election was called for 25 October 1969, forcing Gorton to campaign on an unwieldy program of increased social spending and greater national security.

Gorton indulged himself during that campaign by allowing rumours to proliferate about McMahon’s role in a re-elected government. This distraction, which fed stories of disunity and division that could have been stopped with a single denial, astounded observers. “I have never experienced such a hopeless Liberal–Country composite government campaign,” wrote former Country Party leader Artie Fadden.

Williams tries to defend Gorton from what followed, noting that the government’s support at the 1969 election was equal to its performance in 1967, when the VIP scandal was reaching its apogee and itchy government members were fretting about Holt. This, says Williams, “clearly undermines any claim of Gorton as sole or principal architect of the Coalition’s near-defeat.” The 1969 result certainly lends weight to the argument that the government’s fortunes were in long-term decline, but it also shows just how valuable an opportunity Gorton squandered with his insistence on behaving (in his own words) “precisely as John Grey Gorton bloody well decides he wants to behave.” By the time of the election, this willfulness had earned him the disapproval of censorious opponents. Gorton was unrepentant: “I like a party where I can sing and dance and yarn. Yes, I even like talking to women! How else can I keep in touch with what people are thinking and saying?… Do they want me to live in an ivory tower and meet only diplomats and politicians? Well, damn it, I’m not going to.”

The results of the election put paid to that kind of freedom. The loss of so many seats — including Freeth’s — saw Gorton’s leadership challenged by McMahon and national development minister David Fairbairn. Gorton survived, but in Williams’s account his eventual demise in March 1971 was now almost inevitable. So, too, in Williams’s telling, was the demise of the government, which followed twenty-one months later.

Perceptions that the period between Menzies and Whitlam was a shapeless interregnum have been commonplace for years. One valuable feature of this book is Williams’s effort to show otherwise by setting out the policies and actions that, he argues, make Gorton a “bridge” between the conservatism of the Menzies years and the progressive liberalism of the Whitlam government. Whether it was his nationalism, his enthusiasm for the National Film and Television Training School, or his unapologetic moves to extend the power of the Commonwealth, his record shows an ageing and divided government responding to the hopes and demands of an emerging generation.

While Williams is remiss not to include the McMahon government in that bridge, given its attempts to chart a new way forward, his book draws attention to a vital period in Australia’s history and a significant figure who was vastly more complex than a description of his height and weight, or even his claim to be best prime minister, might suggest. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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