The Revolt of the Pendulum (46 page)

Our knowledge of ourselves is that we are alone, and our dream of ourselves is that we are alone because we are unique. Sludge writers who can tap into that dream are off to a flying start, and
the first sludge I knew in my life was flying sludge. It is still airborne in my mind’s eye: our house in Kogarah, my little room, and the narrow bed holding up the square squadron formation
of my Biggles books, all laid out face up and edge to edge so that I could kneel and worship them as if they were household gods. It wasn’t a case of judging books by their covers, because
when it came to these particular books I loved their contents, whole chunks of which I could recite by heart, especially when not asked. But my adoration for what was in them had made icons of
their outward appearance.

My favourites were the covers with the green background against which, framed by his leather helmet and the heavy collar of his Sidcot flying suit, the features of Biggles loomed with a hieratic
numinance which, I was to realise much later, exactly echoed the Nazi sculptures of Arno Breker, much admired by Hitler and his terrible friends as the ideal of Aryan manhood. All the green-covered
books had the word ‘Biggles’ in the title except
Spitfire Parade
, which somehow I treasured even more than the others, perhaps because you had to know it was about Biggles
– it was, as I explained to my mother on several occasions, secret information. The narrative paintings on the covers of the later books were a disappointment, as indeed were the books
themselves: the post-World War II Biggles adventures had lost focus, not because their hero had aged – miraculously, he never did – but because his author, Captain W. E. Johns, still
alive and writing, must have been older than Dr. W. G. Grace would have been if he had been still alive and batting. There was also the possibility that I myself, the ideal reader, was feeling the
effects of the passing years, which were soon to propel me into long pants and the necessity to shave.

Bulldog Drummond arrived in my life like a descending testicle, a fair analogy for the size of his brain. By comparison, Sanders of the River was an intellectual. It never occurred to me –
though it probably occurred to the author, Edgar Wallace – that Sanders, in demonstrating his mental superiority to all those benighted fuzzy-wuzzies, was the incarnation of the imperial
principle. I just liked the way Sanders, having figured everything out in a flash, adjusted his pace so that lesser breeds could catch up. Bulldog had no such resources. But his capacity for
ratiocination was never the attraction: it was his Caesarian speed of movement as he went into battle against the all-purpose international heavy Carl Petersen. (Surely it was no coincidence, as
the academics say, that John le Carre chose the name Karla for the similarly globe-girdling
eminence rouge
who was later to haunt the squinting imagination of George Smiley.) Acutely
potentiated by the hormonal stirrings of pubescence, my feelings for the even more evil Irma Petersen were a giddy cocktail of fear and desire – as, I now suspect, were those of Drummond. The
bone-headed crusader would run, swim, drive or fly vast distances at incredible speeds specifically to place himself at her mercy. He always survived her perverted attentions, perhaps because (the
thought scarcely entered my adolescent mind, for want, as it were, of a point of entry) she had a thing for him.

The relationship of Irma and Bulldog was duplicated three quarters of a century later in the classically awful British television SF series
Blakes Seven
: no apostrophe in the title, no
sense in the plot. The depraved space queen Servelan, played by the slinky Jacqueline Pearce, could never quite bring herself to volatilise the dimly heroic Blake even when she had him square in
the sights of her plasmatic spasm guns. The secret of Blake’s appeal, or Blakes appeal, for the otherwise infallibly fatale Servelan remained a mystery, like the actual wattage of light bulb
on which the design of Blake’s space-ship, or Blakes space-ship, was plainly based. Drummond’s appeal for Irma was no secret at all. He was born to jack-boots as she was born to high
heels. But the relationship was identical in its balance of forces. In sludge fiction there are only so many situations. It’s part of the charm, and part of the importance: these adventure
stories by and for childish adults emanate from Jungian archetypes boiling deep below the brain, somewhere in the medulla oblongata. Their thematic templates are practically genetic.

But I didn’t know that yet. The Bulldog Drummond books belonged to the parents of my friend Graham Gilbert, down the street. His parents must have inherited them from their parents,
because his parents never read anything, with the gratifying consequence that the books were in pristine condition, all lined up with yellow wrappers intact – the author’s sobriquet
‘Sapper’ stood out boldly on their spines – in a rosewood cabinet topped off with ferociously polished ornaments of brass and glass. One at a time, I borrowed every volume,
immersing myself in their steaming bouillabaisse of dimwit derring-do and xenophobic snobbery. In retrospect, the jut-jawed, meat-headed Bulldog stands flagrantly revealed as a brawling anti-Semite
to whom Julius Streicher would have been glad to extend a sweating paw, but at the time such considerations did not impinge. What counted was the hero’s Pavlovian readiness (
Bulldog
Drummond Attacks
) to pit himself single-handed against a conspiratorial world. He did the same routines in every book – got tied up loosely by Irma, cut his way free, shot it out with
Carl – but still I read them all. Sameness was part of the satisfaction.

Completism was part of the hunger: with print as with food, I was the kind of consumer who leaves nothing on his plate. When I graduated to Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner – the
local lending library came in handy at this point, because there were so many titles by each author that I could never have afforded to own a tenth of them – I read everything by both, even
though each repeated himself shamelessly and often verbatim. (Actually Ellery Queen was two people at the very least, but for inventiveness they barely added up to one: whereas Erle Stanley Gardner
also wrote copiously under the name of A. A. Fair, thus engendering another few dozen titles to get through.) Nothing, however, could beat actually owning the stuff. Personally doing a lot for the
royalties of Leslie Charteris, I bought every Saint book in print, usually in the big yellow Hodder and Stoughton trade paperbacks, although the Pan pocketbooks were more desirable, having the
better cover paintings. (On the Pan covers, Simon Templar posed in black tie and pistol plus adoringly draped soigne´e women: surely the prototype for James Bond’s graphic image in
later years.) There was no room to arrange all my Saint books on my bed, so I lined them up in rows on the lounge-room floor, in front of the Kosi stove:
Enter the Saint
,
The Saint Steps
In
,
The Saint Closes the Case
and (wait for it: the title of the century)
The Last Hero
. Bliss! And boy, couldn’t Leslie Charteris
write
, I asked my mother
rhetorically, quoting the evidence by the page while she dusted the wax fruit in the brass dish. For the first time in my career as a reader, here were sentences which, when you read them again,
got better instead of worse.

Even more than Bulldog Drummond, the Saint was a model for James Bond: years later, I could tell from the first pages of Ian Fleming that he, too, had once thrilled to Simon Templar’s
savoir faire, his Lobb shoes, his upmarket mistress and his mighty, hurtling Hirondel – a car that would have seen off Bond’s Bentley in nothing flat. Unlike Drummond, the Saint, though
he packed a narcotic uppercut and could shoot the pips out of the six of diamonds after flicking it through the air, existed on the level of mentality: he was clever, he had wit. He didn’t
just charge and shoot, he figured things out, like Sanders of the River but without the solar pith helmet. For someone like me – someone who was bringing exactly no sporting trophies home
from school, and for whom a reasonable result in English was his sole academic distinction – the idea that brains could be adventurous was heady wine. It was a short step to the most
adventurous brain of the lot. Ranging backwards in time but forwards in receptive scope, I submitted to the awe-inspiring intellect of Sherlock Holmes.

In the Sherlock Holmes novels, and even more so in the short stories, almost all the action was in the mind. Though the Saint could outwit his enemies and leave them chastened by his epigrams
while they tied each other up and surrendered to the police, he was seldom relieved of the necessity to plug a few of them as well. For Sherlock to carry a pistol was a rare event. In every tenth
story, he might discourage an attacking footpad by taking a swipe with his walking stick, but that was about it. Admittedly, and often without informing Watson in advance, Sherlock moved about a
lot. Though his favourite posture was one of silent meditation, he was given to sudden disappearances. (This motif was later borrowed by John le Carre´: ‘Then Smiley disappeared for
three days.’) After Watson had duly added acute apprehension to his customary unflagging astonishment, Sherlock would just as suddenly turn up in other cities, other countries. But his
manoeuvrings were seldom in order to position himself for an attack. They were in order for him to announce in the appropriate circumstances that he had the whole mystery figured out. From this and
that he had deduced such and such. Watson, with the same access as Holmes to this and that – the facts in the case – had deduced exactly nothing.

Neither, of course, had the reader, who in this instance was myself, reading far into the night as part of my mental preparation for the mathematics examination next day. But Conan Doyle’s
trick – a trick raised to the level of sorcery – was to make the reader identify with Holmes instead of Watson. Watson was the same well-meaning dumb-cluck as you were yourself, but
Sherlock was your dream of yourself. As a powerful aid towards making the reader imagine himself striding across the moors or along fog-bound Limehouse alleyways in Sherlock’s long shoes,
Conan Doyle made the master sleuth a bit of a shambles in every department except deduction. Hence his appeal to generations of adolescent boys who couldn’t keep their rooms tidy and whose
laundry was done by their mothers – a point reinforced, rather than invalidated, by the large number of adult males who even today make a cult out of the Baker Street bohemian. Invariably the
Sherlockologists are permanent adolescents retaining all the trainspotting tendencies of youth. When a youth myself and in pursuit of an obsession, there was no aspect of life I could not neglect
down to and including personal hygiene. My chief obsession was reading, and for a long while there was nobody else I wanted to read about except Sherlock.

I didn’t try to ape his physical mannerisms. A long way from 221B Baker St. London, No. 6 Margaret St. Kogarah was scarcely a suitable dwelling in which to sit around in a dressing gown
smoking a meerschaum while gazing into an open fire. I could gaze into the Kosi stove, and my clandestine smoking – ten Craven ‘A’s a day and sometimes more – was a pretty
fair equivalent for Sherlock’s drug habit, but otherwise there was no mimetic urge. I never stood in front of the mirror with a deerstalker on my head pretending to be Sherlock, whereas,
pretending to be the Saint, I had many times stood in front of the mirror with a sardonic smile, folded arms and a casually tilted Mauser P-38 replica plastic water pistol. For my resident
interlocutor, namely my mother, there was no possibility of faulting my logic as I told her why it was necessary, rather than attending to my homework, to disappear suddenly that very evening in
the direction of the public library so as to replace
The Hound of the Baskervilles
and
The Sign of Four
with
A Study in Scarlet
and
The Speckled Band
.

It was a phase, of course, and I bless it in retrospect, because Conan Doyle was a real writer providing a free immersion course in the fundamentals of evocation. Conan Doyle was my first case
of following a writer along his side-tracks. Previously, not even the authoritative Captain W. E. Johns had been able to do that. Biggles led me to Worrals and Gimlet but not for long, because
Worrals never shot anybody down and Gimlet didn’t even have a plane. With Conan Doyle it was different. Willing to try Professor Challenger because the same author had invented Sherlock
Holmes, I was plunged irretrievably into
The Lost World
, and nowadays I can only pity a generation that gets its dinosaurs from
Jurassic Park
instead of from the magic plateau in
whose steamy jungle the Prof and his friends spent so much time on the run. A Steven Spielberg dino is a stunning special effect. A Conan Doyle dino was a dino: it stank. The grunts, smells and
yells of fear helped to offset the sneaking suspicion that Challenger was just Sherlock in a pith helmet – i.e. yet another lightning intellect condemned to loneliness among ordinary mortals
with slowly churning primitive brains. And anyway, how bad was that?

Like Conan Doyle and Leslie Charteris, C. S. Forester was too good a technician to be classified as a sludge writer
tout court
, but his central character was that same sludge basic:
Horatio Hornblower, the best strategic brain in the Royal Navy, was so brilliant that he could work his way to a just preferment only through penetrating the defences of the envious and mediocre.
Pretty much like school, really. Saying the minimum like Gary Cooper in
High Noon
or Alan Ladd in
Shane
, resigned to being misunderstood like Christopher Tietjens in Ford Madox
Ford’s great tetralogy
Parade’s End
(a sludge masterpiece daringly masquerading as literature), to whom else was Hornblower designed to appeal except an Australian schoolboy
whose class marks were going steadily down the drain?

It was clear to me even at the time that Forester had based Hornblower solidly, not to say shamelessly, on the original of the heroic figure occupying the top of Nelson’s Column. Along
with the leading character, everything in the Hornblower saga had its basis in historical reality. Forester knew the concrete detail of the period inside out. Years later I wrote myself a starring
role in a Footlights sketch as a pirate captain who did nothing but lurch about shouting orders. (‘Belay the thwart bollocks and lash down the foreskin!’ etc.) I was congratulated
afterwards by a yacht owner in the audience who kindly suggested that I must have known the authentic nautical terminology quite well in order to parody it so effectively. Actually my own nautical
career had consisted of one terrified trip across Sydney harbour as the other half of the crew of my friend Graeme McDonald’s VJ, a journey during which the mere thought of the sharks
cruising below froze my hands to the sheets. I got my technical talk from Forester. ‘Bumscuttle the larboard strakes, Mr Bush!’ I got it from him in full confidence that he got it from
reality. But Forester’s painstaking verisimilitude should not be allowed to disguise the fact that Hornblower is a fantasy.