Letters – July–August 2007

What’s your point? Dear Editor, John Carmody, in the June issue, writes a letter loaded with tendentious and pejorative language to accuse me of thundering and provocation in my review of Richard J. Lane’s Fifty Key Literary Theorists (March 2007). Carmody portrays me as self-satisfied in the same breath as he refers to his own wryness. He advises me to use words more ‘clearly and carefully’, and then composes a sentence in which ‘eliding’ creates a ‘mélange’. He charges me with portentousness in a letter that consists almost entirely of windy rhetorical questions. I have only one question: what is his point? I think my argument was reasonably clear. While I agree that I used several general terms, I do not agree that they are problematic in the sentence that Carmody cites. I used the term ‘culture’ in its inclusive sense because the point I was making was broad: it has become a journalistic cliché to depict ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture as antagonists; I suggest that this polarisation is artificial and unhelpful. I mentioned cinema and the various musical styles that are often referred to for convenience as ‘popular music’, most of which have their roots in folk and blues traditions, as specific examples of cultural phenomena that are not usually considered part of ‘high’ culture, but which have rich histories and have produced significant artworks. I do not believe it is provocative, or even unusual, to place a film or a piece of music in the wider category of ‘art’. Carmody seems to disagree with these views; what his letter fails to do is offer any argument against them. James Ley, Preston, Vic. Fetishes, faggots, flirting and all Dear Editor, In his review of the ‘Love, Sex and Desire’ issue of Meanjin, Geordie Williamson managed to ignore all of the pieces that dealt with homosexuality (June 2007). All, that is, except my interview with American author Edmund White, an interview that Williamson called ‘queasy’ and thus apparently ‘one to skip’. Given the short quotation printed in ABR, it is hard to tell why it was that Williamson blanched. Was it because White flirted with me? Was it because we frankly discussed sex and sexuality? Or was it because Meanjin dared to print the uncensored result: fetishes, faggots, flirting and all? Given the recurrent sexual arc traced in White’s recent autobiography and in his pioneering queer fiction, not to mention the seductive Meanjin theme, a bit of homoerotic slap and literary tickle was not out of place in an interview with the author of inter alia The Joy of Gay Sex. Who would have thought a man who admits (on the ABR website) to being ‘fascinated by rare breed pigs’ would prove to have such a dainty constitution? John Heard, Prahran, Vic. Geordie Williamson replies: John Heard wonders why I felt ‘queasy’ reading his interview with Edmund White in the latest Meanjin. He automatically assumes that I must be a prig or a homophobe to be thrown by a bit of ‘homoerotic slap and tickle’. What he does not consider is that my queasiness was inspired by the tenor of his questions, not by the sexuality of his subject. I was excited to see the interview listed in the contents page of Meanjin, and eager to read it. My admiration for White as a writer and public figure is enormous. His essay collection The Burning Library is a model for author interviews which balance questions of sexual identity with the literary means used to shape that identity on the page. So imagine my disappointment when, having been granted two hours with one of the most significant figures in contemporary letters, gay or straight, the first thing Heard thought to ask was whether White had ever seen a collection of dried human shit. Heard is right to consider White’s homosexuality as the central fact of his life. I would have welcomed a frank and unabashed discussion of how his experience has informed his work. But to ask White if he ‘would ever make a porno’ tells us little about the author or his books. It only flags the interviewer’s intimacy with his subject – an intimacy which excludes that third party, the reader, for whom the Q&A was undertaken in the first place. Dymphna Lodewyckx and calendars Dear Editor, Brian Matthews’s fascinating article on Manning Clark and Kristallnacht (May 2007) is likely to engage even a casual reader in its absorbing details. To begin with a seemingly trivial numerical point: in 1933, February 4, March 11 and May 13 were all Saturdays. Thus the Lodewyckx parents’ contributions to the Argus were to weekend editions, which, as with weekend editions of Australian newspapers today, carried more by way of discursive commentary than the weekday editions. But this might also mean that the reference to (Monday) May 13 by Mrs Lodewyckx in the last of these pieces bore no greater significance than that this was the first working day after the previous item from Professor Lodewyckx, reassuring faithful readers that they had not missed an instalment in April. Brian Matthews notes that Dymphna Lodewyckx turned seventeen that year and thus could not but have been aware of these articles and the family discussions around them, adding that she had already been at school in Germany. But here, too, computation intervenes, for Dymphna, born in 1916, had been a December baby. So, if she matriculated at fifteen from Presbyterian Ladies’ College, given the Australian school year, that would have been in late 1932. If it were 1931, the year of her fifteenth birthday, that would not simply have made her an even more amazing child prodigy but would have given her two full years to fill before entering the University of Melbourne in 1934, in the same cohort as Manning Clark. In that case, if she had already been in Germany, what was she doing in 1933? So, it seems that we must revise the timeline: Dymphna was there. There on Kristallnacht in 1938, when Manning Clark might have felt he could easily have arrived in time. But there also in Munich in May, 1933, with her mother along as chaperone, when Manning Clark had been nowhere, not that it would have been much consolation to him in retrospect that few of their Australian contemporaries would have been much further. Moreover, in view of the pride the Lodewyckx parents had in their exceptional daughter, it is not inconceivable that their submissions to The Argus were at least in part framed by Dymphna’s presence in Germany that year, reminding those in their circle and Melburnians beyond of that distinction. These points serve Matthews’s thesis in two ways. First of all, it makes more clear how fraught this German question must have been for all parties, for the parents and for Dymphna, as well as for Manning Clark. Just what pressure of expectations had the parents placed on his future wife at that early age? Secondly, although Matthews may not have got the chronology quite right, that only points up how easy it is to run ahead of ourselves, until pulled up by factual constraints, even as mundane as the calendar. As we look back on this incident and try to understand the motives of the various parties, it is perhaps worth remembering that there were many decent, moderate, well-educated, even Jewish, families in Germany in 1933 whose thoughts about Hitler’s accession to power might not have differed from those of Professor and Mrs Lodewyckx. Without that, it is more difficult to comprehend what overtook Germany later, but also to appreciate how Germans have come to terms with their moral compromises in the aftermath of defeat. Fortunately for all concerned, much less hung on the story Manning Clark was to tell about Kristallnacht. D.G. Rogers, c/-Informatics Institute, University of Bergen, Norway Clark’s feet of clay Dear Editor, Mark McKenna and Brian Matthews, in discussing Manning Clark’s claim to have witnessed Kristallnacht in Bonn, have pointed out the ‘liberties’ he took with the truth about his wife Dymphna’s experience in Germany, but have carefully avoided any real condemnation of this liberty. McKenna, in a most informative article in the Monthly (March 2007), suggested that an historian used to exploiting ‘epiphanies’ to guide him on his way is thus excused as one vague not only about dates but in deliberately relating Dymphna’s personal experience as his own. In the May 2007 issue of ABR, Matthews claimed that any ambitious writer can enhance the truth to be more engaging, an assertion with which we can all agree. But Matthews failed to see any irregularity or incongruity in that historian whose distortion of the truth in this case enhanced his own standing as a personage. Obviously, Professor Clark had and has many admirers, but should they not now acknowledge that Clark gilded the lily in later life? Clark should be judged not only as an historian but also as a vain, fallible man who, at the height of his fame, chose to embellish his life. It’s often hard to admit that eminent people can have feet of clay, but McKenna and Matthews seem to find it difficult to admit blemishes in this influential writer, thinker and historian, whose books were persuasive for many of his readers. My sympathy goes to Dymphna, who chose to remain silent in order to protect her husband’s self-image and reputation. Beryl Doble, Bendigo, Vic. Testing the boundaries Dear Editor, Having read a draft of Amanda Johnson’s Eugene’s Falls, I write in response to Owen Richardson’s review (May 2007). Johnson’s Bildungsroman apparently fails to meet all the criteria Richardson considers necessary to constitute a ‘novel’. For me, the book is an innovative testing of the boundaries of the novel form, one that clearly and deliberately nudges into the territories of biography, art history and the nature of the painter’s eye and the painter’s craft. Like its protagonist, Eugene von Guérard, it ventures into unfamiliar and complex surrounds. Yet, within the wooden confines of Richardson’s implicit preference for a stay-at-home narrative structure, Johnson’s imaginative telling was always doomed to fall short as a novel. One might conclude from Richardson’s review that Johnson’s novel is a dogged explication of her sources, weighed down by a layer of postmodern self-consciousness. But the historical research is, for me, wedded convincingly with psychological insight and wry observation. And far from being ‘inconsequential’, the climax of the book is a superbly understated rendering of what will, implicitly, be brutally changing experiences for both von Guérard and the indigenous people he has encountered. It seems ironic that, while contemporary art criticism generally welcomes experimentation, a novel about an artist that tests the boundaries of genre is reviewed with such negativity. The structure and narrative style of Eugene’s Falls, should not be dismissed for failing to masquerade as something it was never trying to be. Jane Woollard, Montmorency, Vic.

From the New Issue

Selected Stories by Franz Kafka, translated and edited by Mark Harman

‘Defeat Device’, a new poem by Lachlan Brown

Crimes of the Cross: The Anglican paedophile network of Newcastle, its protectors and the man who fought for justice by Anne Manne

‘Information and transformation: The continuing expansion of AustLit’ by Maggie Nolan

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