The Revolt of the Pendulum (31 page)

What grates on my nerves in this area is that he probably didn’t even have tabs on himself as a Lothario. Of all the young men I knew, he spent the least time glancing into mirrors. He
must have just thought it was natural that all these unfeasibly lovely creatures fell into his arms. A certain unawareness of what life is like for ordinary mortals might have been detectable even
then by someone suitably attuned, and is fully detectable now, like those pins of his going through the metal detector as he checks in at the airport for his latest flight to glory. The tendency on
the part of the clever to imagine that less gifted people are being wilfully obtuse can have important political consequences, which in the case of Hughes we might keep in mind.

If Hughes nowadays sometimes behaves as if his own country has failed him, we should give him a break and not put it down to snobbery. Sooner or later a man as smart as that will end up
believing that the whole world has failed him, unless he is made to realise that a superior intellect, if its owner is bent on assessing the life of human beings in the mass, is more likely to be a
handicap than an advantage. There are signs that Hughes has been brought nearer to this realisation by the impact of a car coming in the other direction fast enough to break almost every bone in
his body, but the job is not yet complete, perhaps because that wonderful brain of his came through in one piece.

Hughes is in no position to say how wonderful the brain was and is, even if he knows, which I suspect he doesn’t, quite. But the Australian expatriate writer Alan Moorehead spotted
Hughes’s capacities not long after the art-hungry prodigy, no longer an artist but already causing long-distance ripples as a writer about art, went into self-imposed exile abroad. I should
say at this point that the much publicised Australian Expatriate Movement gets far too much attention in Australia and is likely to be misunderstood elsewhere, because it’s one of those neat
media stories that travel too well, like cheap wine.

In recent years, by media operators and academic drones in Britain and Australia, the story has mainly been written around the adventures, real and supposed, of the so-called Famous Four, a
globetrotting group of celebrities comprising Hughes, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer, and finally, shambling along far in the rear like Sancho Panza, myself. Nowadays the Famous Four get a good
deal of approbation in their homeland, partly because of the questionable assumption that they have done something to raise their country’s previously supine international profile, and
thereby helped to create the climate in which Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts can be appreciated in their full splendour, as fit female counterparts for the race of supermen
represented by Heath Ledger and Hugh Jackman, not to mention Russell Crowe, who in Australia is written up as if he were a dinkum (i.e. genuine) Aussie unless he has recently thrown a telephone at
someone, whereupon it is suddenly remembered that he was born in New Zealand. One way and another the expatriates are now, as the Australians say, quids in.

I can remember when it was different, and we were all regularly reviled for having turned our backs on our homeland. (Hughes still comes in for some of this treatment, for reasons we will get
to.) But the point to grasp is that this whole thing about a specific expatriate generation is an illusion, because Australia has been producing expatriates since Dame Nellie Melba. It’s
something that all liberal democracies do, especially in the first flush of their prosperity, when the amount of marketable talent is beyond the capacity of local metropolitan outlets. They start
colonising the earth, and Australia has long been sufficiently in flower to spread its pollen on the wind. There were always the theatrical people and the painters, and then, during and after Word
War II, came the writers, headed by the war correspondents, of whom the most prominent was Alan Moorehead. Quite apart from his famous books about the Nile, Moorehead wrote a shelf of considerable
volumes that it would take a long paragraph simply to enumerate, but sufficient to say that he was ahead of his time in realising that Italy was a perfectly reasonable place for an Australian
writer to set up shop, because Australia, which like America had been the product of many of the world’s cultures, would inevitably produce cultural figures who were at home anywhere.

Back in Australia, there were still a couple of generations of intellectuals on the way who would be reluctant to agree with that proposition, because they thought that Australia –
eternally stricken, poor mite, by its subservient connection to Britain – needed a national identity, which would be sabotaged if talented people opted out. Moorehead, who had just spent
several years in a ringside seat as several different national identities tried their best to annihilate each other, knew all that was moonshine, and that Australia’s national identity
depended on nothing but the quality of its culture, which was more likely to be enhanced than inhibited if some of its young exponents were to spend time abroad. Correctly assessing that Hughes was
short of financial resources but was carrying the prose equivalent of what the Australian children’s radio programme called the Golden Boomerang, Moorehead invited the loping vagabond to stop
by.

One of the many admirable things about Hughes is that he has always cherished his mentor as much as his mentor cherished him. Moorehead was the Virgil to Hughes’s Dante. The old hand
didn’t just teach the youngster which local wine was which, he taught him the importance of not talking a book away – the most important lesson a writer can learn, and the harder to
learn the better that he talks. The passages about Hughes’s creative sojourn with Moorehead would alone make this book worth the price. ‘I found Alan,’ says Hughes, ‘the
kind of father I had never had.’ After the bungled operation that left Moorehead with a damaged brain, Hughes pushed his master’s wheelchair. Tears of compassion soften the tone, but
the style, as always, stays firm. There is never any question about Hughes’s ability to find the perfect written equivalent for anything in his range of feeling. There is only ever a question
about what he feels.

Whether he feels compassion for his late wife Danne is hard to guess. The safest answer is that he doesn’t know what to say. She was too much for him. I knew her too, back when we were all
starting off in Sydney, and I had already guessed that she might be too much for anybody. She had a problem vis-a`-vis the reality principle that would later be echoed by the second wife of Paul
McCartney, still fifteen years from being born when Danne Emerson’s tower-of-power beauty was in its launch phase. I can remember how Danne came striding with would-be magisterial slowness
through the dining room of Manning House (the cafeteria of the Women’s Union at Sydney University) and Germaine Greer said, ‘Oh, come
on
, Danne,
relax
.’ Germaine was
three tables away from me so you can imagine that the comment was quite audible. Danne wasn’t fazed. She might have been on something even then.

In London she was on everything and Hughes piercingly describes the consequences. By a paradox mercifully quite rare in the play-power, alternative, Sixties lifestyle, Hughes went and married
someone who actually believed in the play-power, alternative, Sixties lifestyle. Why a man who had already had his pick of the world’s sane beauties should have teamed up with an insane
beauty is a question he doesn’t put to himself here, and possibly once again the reason is modesty. Never having grasped the full measure by which he was initially blessed, he doesn’t
see the irony in how he was subsequently cursed. Anyway, the long episode makes grim reading, and is climaxed by Danne’s untimely death and the subsequent suicide of the couple’s son,
occurrences noted with a lack of comment that surely only permanent and irresolvable bewilderment could make possible. It was tragic fate on a Greek scale, and his benumbed registration of these
personal disasters makes it very plausible when he advances the proposition that it takes art to make life bearable.

There is a lot about art here, and politeness demands that we should note the abundance before complaining that there might have been more. Before Hughes left Sydney, he already had an
appreciative eye for the Australian art that he would later rank and classify in his pioneering critical work
The Art of Australia
(1966). One of his enthusiasms was for the reclusive genius
Ian Fairweather. From an exhibition in Sydney, Hughes bought one of Fairweather’s key paintings,
Monsoon
. ‘It cost all of three hundred pounds, and I secured it by queuing all
night, accompanied by Noeline and ahead of eight or ten other impassioned fans, on the steps of the gallery, with a thermos of rum-laced coffee, blankets, and a sleeping bag, in order to get first
pick . . .’ Note the excitement, which, as always with Hughes, is closely accompanied by powers of definition that can evoke even the indefinite. ‘It was a large abstraction,
predominantly black, brown, and grey, traversed by a violent yet exquisitely harmonious net of swiftly daubed, creamy lines. It gave a sense of lightning flashes piercing tropical darkness . .
.’

You will find passages like that all through Hughes’s writings (
The Fatal Shore
is especially rich in verbal landscapes of gallery quality) but the thing to grasp here is that he
not only felt like that when he was young, he could say it like that when he was young. Saying everything as if he still has the young energy of discovery is what he does. The excitement and the
powers of evocation were what Hughes took abroad with him, and his continuing wisdom has been to know that neither works without the other. In this book you can see them working for Duccio,
Cimabue, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Goya, Bonnard, Sidney Nolan, John Olsen, Robert Crumb, Robert Rauschenberg and others. But not enough others. We would have liked the whole catalogue,
because the story of such a brilliant critic’s steadily accumulating and interacting enthusiasms, their ever-intensifying interplay of nuance, is his real autobiography. Those were the most
important Things He Didn’t Know.

Once again, it might be a case of Hughes not quite knowing how rare his gift is. He is ready to risk opprobrium by calling himself an elitist. ‘For of course I am an elitist, in the
cultural but emphatically not the social sense.’ Elitists, however, even such large-minded and non-snobby ones, are never in short supply. What you hardly find anywhere is someone who can do
for art what Leonard Bernstein did for music: go on television and become a fisher of men, hauling the general viewers in the direction of a new life. Hughes did it with
The Shock of the
New
.

In America the series was successful enough, but from an American viewpoint it is probably hard to estimate the impact that it had in Britain and Australia, where it was shown on the mainstream
channels. Here was the kind of survey that the BBC used to be able to do when it still commanded the services of resident grandees like Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski, but now it was being done
by an Aussie who had based himself in New York. (Hughes went there in response to a telephoned invitation from
Time
magazine. Immured in his London flat, surrounded by the ruins of his
marriage, Hughes was so stoned that he thought the CIA was after him.) He was a new breed: a breed without a readily traceable bloodline. His background invisible in the far distance, he
exemplified the biggest advantage the new wave of Aussie expatriates had: they inhabited the cultural world as if they had been born in it, and nowhere else. Culture was their country.

Hughes could, and should, have done a whole chapter about how he got
The Shock of the New
off the ground. Instead, he gives it a paragraph or two, and wastes a whole line recording
(correctly, alas) that I warned him about how doing television would erode his reputation for seriousness. It ranks high among the least pertinent things I have ever said, because Hughes’s
true seriousness is based on exactly that: his ability to transmit the highest level of aesthetic enjoyment through the popular media, one of which, of course, is the bestseller. This book will
probably do all right anyway, but it might have done even better if a whole generation who were already grateful to him felt inspired to cram a copy into the hands of their children, saying: here,
if you have to go crazy, don’t go crazy about Eminem. Go crazy the way this guy did – go crazy about Cimabue.

Hughes did go crazy about Cimabue, before Florence was flooded in 1966, and he went crazier still after the raging waters had done their work. The great Cimabue crucifix in the Museo
dell’Opere of Santa Croce was stripped of its paint. At the head of his camera crew, Hughes arrived in time to gather up all the floating specks of pigment and put them in a jar, just in case
the resulting mulch might be an aid to restoration. The possibility was never proved, because a workman threw away the jar. The whole episode is as riveting as that: one of the best bits in a book
of best bits. But the bits are a bit like the flecks of paint: they belong on a more coherent structure.

There would have been more room for art if there was less stuff about politics. An even more awkward truth is that the stuff about politics could have been more worthy of that superior brain we
have been talking about, the piece of Hughes that was left intact after he was comprehensively screwed by his own car. At the subsequent inquest, Hughes got into trouble with the Australian press
by suggesting audibly that the proceedings were a circus. Suggesting things audibly is one of Hughes’s most endearing characteristics. When young he never had much idea of adjusting his
discourse to the audience, and he still hasn’t now. But his disinclination to censor himself means that he can easily talk himself into trouble.

What he didn’t seem to realise, when the car-crash case was being heard out there in the sticks of Western Australia, was that the national press was already laying for him. Hughes
favoured (still favours) an Australian republic, and had several times flown the Pacific to speak against those lingering ties with Britain that he holds to be obsolete. The overwhelming majority
of Australia’s intellectuals are Republican like him, but they didn’t necessarily think he was doing their cause a favour. In the referendum of 1999 the Republicans failed to get their
way. Some said it was because of the manner in which the question was framed, but there were others who thought that a glittering few of the more prominent Republican advocates had been
counter-productive in their advocacy, simply because of their ‘silvertail’ (i.e. privileged) background.