The Revolt of the Pendulum (37 page)

Actually this memory is inaccurate: it was always worthwhile to keep a file of
Meanjin
, for example, and when James McAuley started
Quadrant
he raised the stakes for everyone. But
when I sailed for England in the early 1960s, that was the way the Australian picture looked to me. From here on, my brief account gets personal. Peter Porter, I suspect, has a more informative
story about what it meant to become an expatriate Australian poet. He had more reason to think about what was involved, because poetry was his whole endeavour, and the problem of maintaining a
spiritual presence in the homeland he had physically left would be a matter of life and death to him. I could never claim that kind of thoughtfulness. Working more by instinct than by strategy, and
always more by luck than judgment, I had a big enough task establishing and maintaining a poetic reputation in Britain, where my other reputation as a professional entertainer seemed determined to
get in the way. Get caught on screen with your arms around Margarita Pracatan and see what it does to your status as a lyric poet.

But precisely because Britain was in possession of a fully developed literary world, it had room for someone who broke its rules of dignity. In Britain, everyone is aware, even if they hate the
idea, that the poet who doesn’t fit the picture might be part of the picture. One could be given the cold shoulder – any number of cold shoulders – yet not be frozen out. Even my
poems about Australia found space in the literary pages of London. Eventually I found myself writing more and more such poems, and Australian editors – who were still keeping their eye, as
always, on the British and American magazines – began asking to reprint them. I was glad to comply, although I hasten to insist that I had no plans for making a
reconquista
. It had
long been apparent to me that the expatriate, should he wish for a return, was up against the same difficulties as a space traveller making a re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere: unless he
got the angle exactly right, he would burn up, with the implacable Australian press waiting on the ground to interview the fragments. But really my poetry was proof that I had never been away.

It had already proved that to me. Any decent poem begins in feelings so deep that we might as well call them instinctive, and what I had been discovering was the nature of my instinct, which had
been formed in Australia and never forgotten it, whatever my conscious mind might have thought. With a whole heart, I can thank the Australian magazine editors for having spotted this almost before
I did. At the head of these editors was Peter Rose, who generously made space available in the
ABR
for poems I had published in Britain and America but which might also appeal to Australian
readers who had no easy access to the periodicals they first appeared in. Later on there were other editors, and there were poems which had their first publication in Australia, but the
ABR
continued to provide me with my most welcoming landing strip for things I was sending in, or bringing back, from abroad: it was my Edwards Air Force Base. The
ABR
even ran the full text of
the address I gave when I received, in Mildura, the Philip Hodgins memorial medal, which remains my sole big literary prize, and the only one I will ever need.

When I published that address as a chapter in a book, I gave the book the same title as the chapter,
The Meaning of Recognition
. Self-dramatising is what I do for a living –
everything I write, in whatever form, is an unreliable memoir – but the drama, I would like to think, is not always entirely about me. In writing about the magnificent but cruelly abbreviated
achievement of Philip Hodgins, I was an expatriate trying to fulfil what I think of as part of the expatriate’s duty: to help give Australia to the world, and to bring a world view to the
task of clarifying Australia’s position to itself. Laid out as an argument, the full story of how I view that duty would take a book all on its own, but I would be surprised if my work had
not been telling the story by implication for these many years. The
ABR
has played a crucial part in helping me to tell it, so I have a personal reason for being grateful for the
magazine’s existence, and I am sure there has been many a contributor, over the course of its three hundred issues, who could say the same. Finally it comes down to the importance of having a
forum in which the concept of intellectual freedom trumps all other political standpoints: a forum in which, wrapped in our separate togas, we can speak our minds to each other without being knifed
on the way home. No literary magazine is worthy of its title if it doesn’t provide that. The
ABR
does.

THE VOICE OF JOHN ANDERSON

There is a tone of voice that you can hear in the way a sentence is balanced, even if you are not equipped to understand its content. ‘What the idealist has, in fact, to
show is that there is no real distinction, and the answer is that in that case there can be no real relation.’ Thus wrote John Anderson, in
Studies in Empirical Philosophy
, and as soon
as I read that sentence I was home. Actually I was leaving home. I read it on the ship to England. At Sydney University I had managed to avoid his lectures, as I had avoided the lectures of
everyone else, but his spirit was all around the place. Everyone you met was either an Andersonian or a non-Andersonian. Now, as the Indian Ocean ran slowly past, I was an Andersonian too. Or
perhaps a non-Andersonian. Either way, his name was in there somewhere. His name was all over Australia’s intellectual world. For good or ill, he was the national philosopher.

If Nietzsche had lived long enough, he would have been horrified at the consequences of becoming the national philosopher of Germany. But to be regarded as a national philosopher is not
necessarily a bad thing. For two hundred years, Britain’s national philosopher was Hume, and to a great extent he still holds the job, because in the twentieth century none of the attempts to
replace him quite worked out. Closely identified with Bloomsbury, G. E. Moore was thought too comfortable by those who were reluctant to accept Bloomsbury as the epitome of civilized Britain.
Bertrand Russell was thought incorrigibly silly by anyone who found him less the embodiment of human reason than he did. A. J. Ayer was never thought silly, but he did seem to be having too good a
time. For a while, among those serious about literature, Dr Leavis was drafted into the role, but the appointment looked less judicious when he showed signs that he believed it. Uniting all the
candidates was a debt to Hume’s empiricism, which was still there when all their separate visions frayed. The first embodiment of the national way of thinking remained the best. In Italy,
Benedetto Croce achieved the same position. He started much later, but then so did a united Italy. It seems to be one of the characteristics of any nation united by more than power that it will
boast one man universally agreed upon as exemplifying its tone of thought. In Britain, the tone of voice is exemplified by Shakespeare and all the poets, but the tone of thought is exemplified by
Hume the Scot. If my own country, Australia, has such a thing as a tone of thought –and I think it has – then the man who brought it into being was another Scot: John Anderson.

In his lectures at Sydney University from the late Thirties onwards – he was still there when I was a student in the late Fifties – Anderson carried the torch for realism. The
pluralism that he claimed for himself was underpinned by the realism that he claimed for all the philosophers who ever mattered. He influenced whole generations of students, who in turn, because of
Sydney University’s central place in the tertiary education system, influenced the teachers’ colleges, the schools, the broadcasting networks, the emergent media elite, and eventually
the entire culture. Plenty of people were against Anderson, especially if they were religious. Catholic archbishops pronounced anathema upon him. My own Presbyterian minister, when he saw that I
was going to the Devil, blamed the influence of ‘that man Anderson’. In the absence of a ship back to Scotland, his enemies recommended a slow boat to China. Nor were all his enemies on
the clerical right. There were plenty on the atheistic left who thought his realistic stance a reactionary denial of the legitimate aspirations of suffering mankind. He was always being attacked
from one wing or the other, often on the supposition that he had glossed over a difficulty in his line of reasoning.

He seldom had, but he was easy to misrepresent. Until his last years, he was practically in samizdat. His lectures were his main writings, and they circulated exclusively in note form until he
collected them in the only book to bear his name while he still breathed:
Studies in Empirical Philosophy
. Typically I failed to enrol myself in the philosophy school while he was still
active: it might have been too useful, too engrossing, too apt to distract me from the essential fields of student journalism, amateur drama, and bad poetry written late at night. But I was
surrounded by Andersonians and picked up enough of their acerbic parlance to conceive a thirst for the whole picture. When I went to England the book was part of my luggage. Everything else in my
bags might have been ill chosen (as I related in
Falling Towards England
, I was the only Australian ever to arrive in an English winter without a sweater), but I had brought the right book.
Looking back on it, I can see my belated immersion in Anderson’s lectures as the first step in a long process of coming to terms with the country I had left behind: meaning, of course, that I
hadn’t left it behind at all, but had embarked on a roundabout way of discovering it for the first time. Anderson would probably not have approved. Although he knew how to let his hair down
in old age – I personally knew a famous beauty who had to take to the stairs to outrun him at a party thrown by the Downtown Push – he was no bohemian. He expected his students to
buckle down, pass their regular tests in logic, and keep abreast of the background reading. My future wife won the Philosophy Prize for two successive years but she took endless pages of detailed
notes while doing so: his powers of compression were a match even for her powers of application. Anderson wasn’t for dabblers. He would not have been pleased by the idea of someone reading
his work unsystematically as literature. But for those of us condemned by our nature to read him in no other way, there is a lot to go on. Scattered among his dense pages of symbols are plain
statements fit to resonate for a lifetime.

For Anderson, realism was the bedrock and idealism the aberration. But since so many kinds of idealism had been so prevalent for so long, the first task of the realist was to combat idealism in
all its forms, starting with the pious notion that idealism could annul contention between social forces. This perpetual struggle squared well with his convictions about the necessity of conflict.
Later on, when I read Croce, I recognized, in the principles that Croce had inherited and developed from Vico and Hegel, the same emphasis that Anderson had been handing down from his lectern like
a renegade Presbyterian minister preaching the inevitability of an unjust world. ‘We can’t make the world safe for goodness,’ said Anderson, ‘it exists and develops in
struggle with evil.’ For Anderson there could be no ‘higher’ reality: there was only reality, in which the facts were good enough. Realism ‘presupposes as the formal
solution of any problem the interaction of complex things.’ The complex things would not simplify themselves in obedience to a wish, least of all if the wish were a plan.

Anderson’s withering contempt for social planning had far-reaching consequences for his political vision. It was not just that he had, like Pareto, a well-developed instinct for the law of
unintended consequences. He didn’t even much like the intended consequences. The welfare mentality he thought essentially servile. (His view of the welfare state as a control mechanism was
his point of contact with the Sydney Libertarians, from whom he otherwise differed in most respects, beginning with his capacity to own a watch, pay his bills, turn up for work on time and fulfil
his duties.) Planning, he thought, applied only to commerce, and therefore never to culture, of which he had an entirely non-utilitarian view. If learning wasn’t pursued for its own sake then
it could not be learning. ‘It is true, of course, that social equality is merely a mirage, but devotion to it has still done much to contribute to the destruction of culture.’ (The
‘of course’ was a typically back-handed placing of the banderillas.) Finally he made the idea part of his definition of culture. He said culture had to do with the opposition to
levelling.

In retrospect, Anderson might look like part of a war-time politico-philosophical movement that included von Mieses, Hayek, and Karl Popper. In fact, however, he was out on his own, networking
mainly with Plato. Perhaps the necessary reaction to progressive social engineering got into the air along with the idea itself. It was no wonder that Anderson was hated on the far left. The wonder
was that he wasn’t equally despised in the centre, since he held out very little hope even to the mildest ameliorative impulse. Very little became too little when he expressed his contempt
for planning. Planning had, after all, helped to win the war against enemies who, had they prevailed, would certainly have included empirical philosophy on their list of activities to be
proscribed. With victory in sight, Arthur Calwell planned Australia’s post-war immigration policy. Many of the consequences were, naturally enough, strictly incalculable: the law of
unintended consequences did not cease to apply. But the calculable consequences worked out quite well, and not just in the field of commerce. The country was transformed, incomparably for the
better. Had Anderson lived long enough, he would have been required by his innate honesty to deal with the patent fact that his country – to which he himself had come as a migrant – had
planned its future and succeeded in almost all departments, including that of culture. He would have been in the uncomfortable position of a philosopher counting himself lucky that his best pupils
hadn’t listened.