The Meaning of Recognition (45 page)

Being Australian helped. Offended locals often remarked of the post-war Australian expatriates that they were treating the world as their oyster. Actually the first wave of Australian invaders
into Britain were music-and-theatre people stretching from Melba through to Robert Helpmann. The second wave were the war correspondents: Chester Wilmot, and the commanding figure of Alan
Moorehead, later to be the acknowledged mentor of Robert Hughes. Porter, Barry Humphries and Michael Blakemore were in the third wave, and the bunch to which I belonged were only the fourth. When
my lot hit the beach, it was still not realized that these occasional incursions were adding up to a determined assault. No doubt I was unusually clueless, about that as about everything, but as I
dug my foxhole below the dunes it took me some time to realize that Porter had already gone in miles ahead by parachute. As Baudelaire pointed out, writers who use military metaphors are laying
claim to a belligerence whose physical consequences they would prefer to avoid. So I hasten to point out that there never was a battle, because there was never any real opposition. Except perhaps
in Haslemere, Britain welcomed us with an open house. No criticism from the natives ever equalled the opprobrium from home, where for a long time the expatriates were thought of as having sold
Australia short. But in fact they exemplified Australia’s greatest strength, and carried it with them as a flag. They were confident that the whole heritage of the arts, learning and history
was theirs to be possessed by right. If anything about the Australians appalled the resident intellectual, it wasn’t their accents or their table manners, it was their world-eating propensity
to loot the museum of history. Unplaceable by class, the Australians had no inhibiting expectations that they would be stopped at the door. The native assumptions of accreditation by background did
not apply to them. They did not believe that they needed a double-barrelled surname to walk at large in Europe.

In the literary field, Porter was an early example of this freedom. Now nobody is astonished to find Germaine Greer helping herself to a naked young male body by Praxiteles, although she hopes
that they will be astonished by what she says about it. The old Empire has turned upside down; Australia is a productive demonstration that the colonial investment didn’t all end up in the
debit column; and Australian voices help to project the English language, with a nasal shading to the vowels perhaps, but with all its resources fully and boldly deployed. Peter Porter is a big
part of that Australian expatriate story, which even in Australia is now seen to be part of the total Australian story of an emergent, rapidly proliferating culture growing on the well-grounded
trellis of political stability. Australian literature has become a thing of glamour. Inevitably, Australian poetry, as a highlight of the literary picture, is becoming a thing of glamour too.
Already there is talk about which one is
the
Australian poet, Peter Porter or Les Murray. Actually both know that there are many other Australian poets who count. Murray writes about the
late Philip Hodgins, and Porter about the late John Forbes. Both died too young; neither ever really left home for long; and they would have been enough to establish a national literature by
themselves.

But really there is no such thing as a national literature. There is only literature, and a nation can participate in it only by ceasing to be nationalistic. Nor is there any competition between
stars, although the illusion that there can be is the inevitable consequence of literature being granted journalistic attention. It could be said that Murray is to Porter as Heisenberg is to
Einstein: Murray dealing with the subatomic world, and Porter with everything from the atomic to the celestial. It could be said that Porter is to Murray as Haydn is to Mozart, with the proviso
that nobody can understand Mozart who does not love Haydn. These hyperbolic things could be said, and probably will be: but they should be said only as part of the inexorable buzz of commentary
that swarms around a successful literature – a buzz it craves, so why protest? It’s a Condé Nast world. But it’s also a more serious world than that, and Porter has helped
to make it so. In doing so, he exults, even as the last things gather to overwhelm him. One of his later collections is called
Fast Forward
. Perhaps I am especially fond of it because it
is dedicated to me: one of the biggest honours I have ever been paid; an honour so big that I have never known how to thank him. The poems in
Fast Forward
are, as always, mainly
flashbacks, but they do point to a future: a permanent future, built on the hope that is left when all disappointments have been faced. You can’t say that of those who have suffered unjustly,
and Porter is always careful not to say it. But he does say it about himself, even in the poem called ‘Dejection, an Ode’. If this is dejection, listen to the vaulting music of its
opening paragraph. I said earlier that in his first poems you could hear a sonority both colloquial and erudite. Well, here, in 1984, you still could, and even today you still can.

But the strength of those lines depends on a poet who knows that he can’t get everything right since Plato: he can only desire to, and be as true as he can to the desire. Everything is
indeed connected to everything else, but suffering is still suffering; injustice is still injustice; and the four horsemen will always ride. Our consolation is that even our metaphors of
destruction are human creations. The same horses once drew the sun out of the sea. They are there again above the portico of St Mark’s in Venice, and one of them shakes its mane in
Bernini’s fountain in the Piazza Navona. Art, thought, the humanities, creativity itself: it really is a unity. Until it ends, it can’t be started again; it can only be added to; and
Peter Porter, by helping us to see, hear and think in his way, has added to it abundantly. What was it he said about the fifth horse, Phar Lap? It was his simple excellence to be best.

TLS
, 13 February 2004. This essay was first presented as a keynote lecture for the Peter Porter symposium organized by the Graduate School of English Studies, University
College London, and by the Robert Menzies Centre.

Postscript

At the Melbourne Festival in 2000 Peter Porter and I went on stage to do nothing for an hour except talk together about literature. The unscripted dialogue attracted a
gratifying amount of approbation, much of it centred on the fact that we had done a lot of quoting from memory. To the blushing surprise of us both, to quote from memory was hailed as a rare and
daunting display of skill from the exotic past, like scrimshaw, wampum and the ability to measure distance in miles instead of kilometres. The dialogue between literati was itself regarded as an
unusual form – which, indeed, in the non-English-speaking countries it is, although in Germany and France it is common, and in a country like Argentina it is a staple (Borges and Sabato said
some of their best things while talking to each other). In the age of the interview and the profile, two question-and-answer forms that have been worked to death, Porter and James found themselves
in the delicious position of having started something new. The word of mouth got out from Melbourne and the media moved in. Radio really counts in Australia – the publishers would rather have
their writers on radio than on television – so we had good reason to be pleased when the ABC invited us to try the same dialogue form from a radio studio. The distinguished arts producer Jill
Kitson pressed the buttons in Melbourne when Porter and I went into the ABC’s studio in London for our first series of six dialogues. The programmes went to air in Australia as soon as
post-production had been completed in Melbourne (post-production consisted mainly of toning down my heavy breathing) and they worked well enough on the national network for Jill Kitson to
commission another series, which was duly followed, in the course of time, by a couple more, to a grand total of twenty-four programmes, with, we hope, more to come. In the pub after each recording
session we try to make it a rule not to talk away the material for the next one, but the rule is hard to keep. Most writers, when they talk to each other at all, talk about sex, money, physical
ailments, and the unending perfidy of their literary enemies. Porter and I talk about those things too, but we have always enjoyed talking about the arts, and the chance to do so on the air has
been very welcome. With an uncharacteristic stroke of acumen, I retained the webcasting rights, and all the dialogues can be heard in the audio section of www.clivejames.com, together with, in the video section, a television dialogue we recorded in my living room. (Viewers are free to decide whether faces add
anything to voices: I think, in this case, on the whole, not.)

Like many of the best things in life, this broadcasting partnership happened by accident, and was followed up more through self-indulgence than through altruism. But every writer cherishes the
dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were inspired by what we said to rush off and
read the books we were talking about, we can congratulate ourselves for all those guilty hours when, the last two left after a long lunch, we went on arguing about everything we knew. He knows more
than I do, but if I live long enough I might catch up; and that’s the way some of the young Australian writers feel about both of us, or so they say. Not that you can trust them 2.54
centimetres. We’re agreed on that.

Watching Sydney Harbour Bridge erupt in coloured flames to mark the end of a brilliantly organized Olympics, I wept for London, city of the dud Dome and the invisible River of
Fire. Last week I was in Paris and wept for London again. When I first came to Europe forty years ago, the London Underground and the Paris Metro were much of a muchness, even if the Metro had the
edge in style. Now the comparison draws tears of blood. I still travel on the Tube, but only when there is no appointment waiting for me at the other end, because it might have to wait forever.
Also I am getting to the age when a long staircase starts to matter. The Metro has an unfair advantage there: dug shallow, it needs few escalators. But in all other respects the Metro’s
supremacy is a clear case of intelligent management. At St-Germain in the late afternoon there was still room down in the entrance hall for a Piaf-style singer good enough to pull a shower of
coins. The train came hissing in on rubber tyres: wheels that don’t wear out rails. In my carriage there was a live jazz band playing Hot Club standards. When I got off at Châtelet,
there was a woman on the platform reciting Racine’s
Phèdre
from memory at the top of her voice. Nobody mocked her and many listened in respect as the perfectly cadenced
alexandrines resonated in the station’s tiled vault. She was probably a nut, but might well have been a licensed busker like all the others. Look at the map and you will see that all I had
done was cross the river, but the trip was nearly as rewarding as walking across the Pont Neuf, and anyway it was raining. Remember the last time you rode the Tube when it was raining outside? How
far did you get? We apologize for the inconvenience caused. Or, to quote the new and even odder version: ‘We apologize for the inconvenience caused to your journey.’ Sir Kingsley:
‘Yes, but it isn’t my journey that’s being inconvenienced, is it? It’s me, you posturing sod.’

With John Prescott in charge of the finances, no doubt the London Undergound will soon be fixed. After all, he was the man who saved the Dome. Without him, it might never have happened, and we
would have been deprived of the best long-running entertainment since Nimrod. I have always liked the cut of Prescott’s jib: in this government he stands out like a good man in a bad
advertising agency. But it is often a mistake to suppose that honesty precludes cunning. I bet it was his idea to stage the Dome jewel robbery, which would have been a PR masterstroke except for
one crucial flaw. The fact that it was a
bungled
robbery was right in keeping: the spectacle of the blaggers bouncing their hammers off the armoured glass was pure Dome. But the actors
playing the Sweeney mucked it up. They should have arrested those children for singing hymns without a licence. Instead they arrested the villains, thus transmitting a fatal air of competence. The
essence of Dome culture is that nothing must go right.

A few years of weathering have done nothing for the Centre Pompidou, which still looks like the place where all the world’s sewer pipes come together in conference, but you have only to go
up to the fourth floor to see what it’s got that the Tate Modern hasn’t: paintings, properly arranged. Again, the French have a certain advantage. Most of the painters were either born
in France or else lived there, so the State had ready access to so much good stuff that not even Goering could manage to take it all away. But as with the Metro, those in charge know how to
capitalize on a lucky break. The paintings are grouped so that you can see who’s who, what’s what, and when’s when. (The same applies on the top floor of the Musée
d’Orsay: first the Impressionists, then the Post-Impressionists. Get it?) The present arrangement of the Tate Modern is meant to discount all that, purportedly so as to enlarge our
comprehension, really so as to make the holes in the collection look less gaping. But the conceptual drivel written on the walls is a fearful price to pay, and the Domish impulse behind the whole
effort is neatly symbolized by the glowing plastic cap placed on top of an otherwise impressive building in order to deconstruct its monumentality. Over and above the candy-tipped chimney, or
rather below it and stretched out flagrantly ahead, is that unbeatable testament to architectural arrogance, the bridge that rewrites the rules of suspension with such virtuosity that it
doesn’t work. Paris has one just like it, but I doubt if its creator will get another commission for anything bigger than a funfair ticket booth. In London, the same genius responsible for
our non-crossable bridge is currently erecting a new obovoid office block for the Mayor, who sensibly doesn’t want to move into it. A country in which Ken Livingstone has become the voice of
reason is facing an uphill struggle.