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On David Malouf: Writers on Writers by Nam Le

by
May 2019, no. 411

On David Malouf: Writers on Writers by Nam Le

Black Inc., $17.99 hb, 108 pp, 9781760640392

On David Malouf: Writers on Writers by Nam Le

by
May 2019, no. 411

For more than a decade the world has waited, patiently or disbelievingly, for a second book from Nam Le, author of The Boat (2008), a collection of seven tales that won the young Australian author acclaim throughout the world. Finally, it has arrived. A book-length essay running to about 15,000 words, it may not be what the ravenous world had in mind, but it is seriously interesting – interestingly interesting one might almost say. The volume appears in Black Inc.’s neat little Writers on Writers series, with its owlish photographs of authors and subjects: author on top, subject below. Until now, there have been four in the series, including Christos Tsiolkas on Patrick White, and Ceridwen Dovey on J.M. Coetzee. (Michelle de Kretser on Shirley Hazzard, due later this year, promises to be a notable pairing.) 

The authors, it’s apparent, are encouraged (perhaps even contractually required) to be intensely ‘personal’. Here, Nam Le – in his meditation on the subtleties and self-presentation of David Malouf – does not disappoint. His response, deeply autobiographical, feels swiftly written and passionately conceived; the responsive reader will consume it in a trice and then go back to savour its anxious nuances and discriminations. Truly essayistic, it is ‘a thinking out loud, a setting down of thinking’. Like his short stories – which generate considerable tension, marking them out in an often bloodless genre – Nam Le’s essay bristles with paradoxes and contradictions.

The book is curtly and alliteratively sectioned: Prime, Pigeon, Patria, Peril. The first opens with an evocative reminiscence of schooldays: not Malouf’s, but the author’s – Melbourne Grammar School (1991–96): ‘bluestone shadow, navy blue and paler bluer, faces floating against rain and a sort of drowned light’. The author, brought here as an infant on a boat from Vietnam, intones some of the names from the MGS roll-call: Hooper, Frye, Downing – ‘fathers names, patriarchs’ names’. (Will they recognise themselves? Do they read Nam Le? There must be a short story in this.) For this was high school: ‘Mood dream, time tolled through the body.’ Bookish, Palgrave and Norton his ‘boon companions’, Nam was drawn to the Johnno-like Ché, a brawny, charismatic country boy with a triple scholarship. The two outsiders’ friendship galvanised them and alienated the other boys. In Year Twelve, they encountered Remembering Babylon (1993). Malouf’s luminous novel ‘shook their snobberies’: here was ‘a very-much-alive half-Lebanese writer … producing English-language writing of the very first order’. The two young aesthetes admired the poetic prose ‘that seemed to flex its way serenely through any niggles of cringe’.

David Malouf (photograph by Conrad Del Villar)David Malouf (photograph by Conrad Del Villar)

Twenty years later, Nam Le (in one of his few limp phrases) has read ‘pretty much all of Malouf’s other output’. Aware that Malouf and his books have been ‘praised and puffed and premiated’ (the language is self-consciously ornate), he is ‘not really interested … in writing encomia’. He notes that Malouf is ‘adept at slyly steering his eponymous studies’. Curiously, almost resistantly, he has never met the man or seen him in person. Brilliantly, he admits that he is trying to the write the book as though Malouf were dead. (One thinks of Frank O’Hara’s poem ‘The Critics’: ‘the assassin of my orchards’).

Nam Le, sympathetic to ‘the unapologetic nature of Malouf’s learning’, is conscious of his immersion in Western classicism. ‘[Malouf] owns his occidentalism, in all its contradictions and culpabilities’. Frustrated by the public ‘snideries’ occasionally aimed at Malouf, Nam Le inveighs against the purists and the censors who (often from positions of great privilege and entrenchment) ‘have ripped from the world countless works, actual and potential, that dared associate with the wrong sex, race, creed, caste, class, colony – you name it’. This laudable passage warrants lengthy quotation:

We are not so rich in art to deplore what we have merely because it is not what we might have had … On the worst part of the right, ‘culture warriors’ worship ‘Western culture’ only as far as they can weaponise it. The worst of the left, in response – pursuing its pet strategy of self-righteous self-loathing – relinquishes ‘Western culture’ to the right … When done from tribe, it can also feel oxytocin good. Even easier is to abhor writers and their works … when you haven’t read them … It is the craven logic of bullying. The agora, where speech is meant to be most free, has always attracted mobs.

Mostly, despite its literary dressing, this is a book of cultural affinities and oppositions. Nam Le, recalling a residency at the University of Wyoming, still regrets being enlisted as a spokesman for refugee settlement simply because of his ethnicity. ‘I allowed myself to be used. I became a mouthpiece.’ Most impressive to him is Malouf’s composure, his ‘personal, artistic sovereignty’, his ‘disregard for fashion or recency’. He admires Malouf for eschewing the notion of being ‘representative’ in any way. ‘If literature has a nemesis,’ Nam Le writes, ‘it is instrumentalism.’ Again, he balks at the idea of surrendering to an orthodoxy or an expectation. (‘Identity is not nothing, but it’s not everything.’) Occasionally sententious, he writes: ‘Writers shouldn’t be joiners, shouldn’t be boosters or censors or mouthpieces – representatives – of anything but their own truths.’

Nam Le is, of course, familiar with labels. They stick to him because of his background. After all these years he remains a ‘Vietnamese-Australian’ writer. Yet Malouf would never be dubbed ‘Lebanese-Australian’, and J.M. Coetzee – born elsewhere, long settled in Adelaide, proudly naturalised, writing about Rundle Mall even – would never be described as ‘South African-Australian’. The hyphen niggles at Nam Le; it won’t go away, ‘a hum of model-minority conditionality’. ‘Why should I be the one stuck with the hyphen?’

Name Le (photograph by David Tacon)Nam Le (photograph by Dave Tacon)

It is in ‘Patria’ that Nam Le and David Malouf ‘most meaningfully part ways’. Nam Le writes about his detestation of the ‘black hole of nationality’. Australianness, for him, is just one of the many lines of affinity and identity that shape a writer. He marvels at the ease with which Malouf – ‘ethnically half-Lebanese’ – has ‘elided these aspects of identity to little note and no fuss’. Nam Le’s Malouf is ‘a writer in the business of identity. Only not, it seems, one half of his own.’

Nam Le contests the Lawrentian notion of Australia as tabula rasa – ‘a new leaf. And on the new leaf, nothing.’ Mindful of Malouf’s ‘tendency towards wholeness’, how he ‘tincts his work with neo-colonial motive’ and pursues his own ‘sedulous, stupendous project of nation-writing’, he resists the notion of reconciliation or ‘full possession’ of the continent through a ‘collective spiritual consciousness’, to borrow Malouf’s phrase. Finally, he rejects an idea of reconciliation that ‘exhorts further “possession” of an already expropriated place. That isn’t palimpsest – it’s overwriting.’

Towards the end of this rather fierce little book, Nam Le wonders why he can’t ‘get interested in Malouf’s campaign of cultural nationalism’. The answer is clear: ‘“Australianness” is alien to me because I’m still alien to Australia.’ He can’t share the apprehension of the fabled bush as ‘the dark unmanageable’. ‘A lifetime here, and I’m still outside this primal sense of being outside.’

And that’s when, as he says, it hits him. ‘For non-Anglos, non-Europeans, non-whites – whiteness is our “bush”. Whiteness is our surrounding, seething reality … the perpetual engine of our anxiety.’  Tinted by his face, cruciated by his hyphen (as he puts it), he knows he will never ‘pass’. ‘And I realise too that this is the land’s real gift to me. It’s okay. I no longer have to try.’

Peter Rose reviews 'On David Malouf: Writers on Writers' by Nam Le

On David Malouf: Writers on Writers

by Nam Le

Black Inc., $17.99 hb, 108 pp, 9781760640392

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Comments (2)

  • This "rather fierce little book" (and I couldn't agree more with this comment of your reviewer) hit me really hard, when I read the essay over the last few days. And for old white Australians like myself, I think it is meant to. And although I once foolishly volunteered and wore the uniform of the Australian Army and served in Vietnam (Nam Le's country of birth) for a year in 1967/68, I feel more and more alienated from the country in which I was born and which I somewhat reluctantly now have to call home. Because I always fondly believed, incorrectly as it has turned out, that Australia was a welcoming country for those from other lands seeking its help and refuge, and that after a few years living here, such people would feel, as presumably David Malouf does, but Nam Le does not, that they had become truly Australian; that they no longer felt "other".
    Nam Le's essay is challenging, instructive and deeply thought provoking. Some have suggested that it is more about Nam Le than it is about David Malouf, and that he has not done his subject justice. I profoundly disagree. His work in this essay has sent me back to rereading David Malouf's writing, much of which I had half forgotten. That to me is proof enough that the essay is a success. And it has not only made me reread 'The Boat', but long for more writing from Nam Le's pen. I hope he won't disappoint us by another long interval before he publishes again.
    Posted by David Bradford
    27 November 2019
  • I was very surprised by the statement here that J.M. Coetzee would never be described as ‘South African-Australian’. Like most readers, I am guessing, I associate him primarily with South Africa, where most of his finest work is set. Also, given that he only moved to Australia in his early 60s, I would have thought that describing him in that way would simply be an act of courtesy.
    A quick look on google also brought up - in a short space of time - - "Irish- Australian crime author", "Irish-Australian cellist", "a German-Australian author" etc. etc.
    Posted by Andrew Shields
    12 May 2019

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