Poets From Australia

"First-rate science fiction was, and remains, more interesting than second-rate art."

"Nothing Like the Sun and the Enderby books prove that Burgess is as clever as he seems. His utopian satires, of which 1985 is yet another, mainly just seem clever. At a generous estimate there are half a dozen ideas in each of them."

"Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead. There is no author's name on the title page, merely a modest line of italic type advising us that Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev's 'short biography' has been composed 'by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee.' This is the one statement in the entire opus which is undeniably true. Only an Institute could write like this."

"One of the many services performed by Professor Smith's book is to show that Nuremberg was not a kangaroo court. Even the Russian and the French judges were able to act with some independence from their governments. It is true that some of the defendants were arbitrarily chosen, true that the indictment was questionably framed, and true again that some of the verdicts were anomalous. But by and large justice was done. The idea that at Nuremberg the victors tried the vanquished is a false one. The vanquished were the millions of guiltless men, women, and children already obliterated."

"[Mrs Thatcher] started quoting St Francis within minutes of becoming elected, and scarcely an hour had gone by before she was sounding like the book of Revelations read out over a railway station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers."

"Disco dancing is really dancing for people who hate dancing, since the beat is so monotonous that only the champions can find interesting ways of reacting to it. There is no syncopation, just the steady thump of a giant moron knocking in an endless nail."

"Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say."

"The Italian Marxist composer Luigi Nono (BBC2) proclaims the necessity for contemporary music to 'intervene' in something called 'the sonic reality of our time.' Apparently it should do this by being as tuneless as possible."

"Perry [Como] gave his usual impersonation of a man who has simultaneously been told to say 'Cheese' and shot in the back with a poisoned arrow."

"The most solid documentary of the week was White Rhodesia (BBC1), presented by Hugh Burnett. He was on screen only two or three times and even when he was there you would have sworn he wasn't."

"Everybody caught one another's eye with a 'Spot the loon' look when [Tony] Benn was talking. The show was probably true to life, since each minister had a vested interest in briefing the journalist chosen to play him. It's a sweet technique for getting at the truth, so I imagine someone will put a stop to it soon enough."

"I can remember being young enough, long ago, to believe that in Tennessee Williams the giant themes of Greek tragedy had returned, all hung about with Magnolias. Ignorance of Greek tragedy helped in this view."

"On Miss World (BBC 1) Patrick Lichfield and Sacha Distel helped herd the beef. Even further down-market, The Royal Variety Performance (BBC 1) was hosted by Max Bygraves, who tried the time-honoured gimmick of singing the finale at the start. 'And if you doan like our finish / You doan have to stay for the show.' Thanks. Click."

"But you will never catch Sir Oswald [Mosley] admitting to anti-Semitism. All he does is embody it. He talked of 'the use of Jewish money power to promote a world war.' Taxed on this point, he disclaimed anti-Semitism, by saying that he meant 'not all Jews, but some Jews.' That's as far as he will ever reduce his estimate. The truth, of course, is that the real number of Jews responsible for World War II was zero."

"[In Marcel Ophuls' film The Memory of Justice] Mad old Nazis were to be heard deploring modern decadence. 'The difference is, we weren't obsessed with smut,' said one comfortable, retired SS man, all unaware of being up to his neck in blood and pus."

"Probably it is only in free countries, however, that a humorous regard for corruption is possible. In the totalitarian countries, corrupt from top to bottom, nobody is laughing because nothing is laughable. There is no difference between what things are and what things ought to be, since what things ought to be no longer exists even as a standard."

"[Larkin] himself is well aware that there are happier ways of viewing life. It's just that he is incapable of sharing them, except for fleeting moments - and the fleeting moments do not accumulate, whereas the times in between them do."

"Strong language in Larkin is put in not to shock the reader but to define the narrator's personality. When Larkin's narrator in 'A Study of Reading Habits' (in The Whitsun Weddings) said 'Books are a load of crap' there were critics - some of them, incredibly, among his more appreciative - who allowed themselves to believe that Larkin was expressing his own opinion. (Kingsley Amis had the same kind of trouble, perhaps from the same kind of people, when he let Jim Dixon cast aspersions on Mozart.) It should be obvious at long last, however, that the diction describes the speaker."

"As far as talent goes, Marilyn Monroe was so minimally gifted as to be almost unemployable, and anyone who holds to the opinion that she was a great natural comic identifies himself immediately as a dunce...As a natural silent comedian Marilyn might possibly have qualified, with the proviso that she was not to be depended on to invent anything. But as a natural comedian in sound she had the conclusive disadvantage of not being able to speak. She was limited ineluctably to characters who rented language but could not possess it, and all her best roles fell into that category. She was good at being inarticulately abstracted for the same reason that midgets are good at being short."

"In a piece written circa 1960 called 'The Twelve Caesars' he said that world events were the work of individuals and that the motives of those individuals were often frivolous, even casual. There is something of Suetonius and Plutarch in Vidal's unblushing readiness to view contemporary history in terms of character."

"Solzhenitsyn can imagine what pain is like when it happens to strangers. Even more remarkably, he is not disabled by imagining what pain is like when it happens to a million strangers - he can think about individuals even when the subject is the obliteration of the masses, which makes his the exact reverse of the ideological mentality, which can think only about masses even when the subject is the obliteration of individuals."

"There is abundant evidence in Stoppard’s plays to show that he is as capable of emotion as anybody. In Enter A Free Man Linda is a finely tuned moral invention whose equivalents we might well miss in the later plays, if we really thought they should be there. The mainspring of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is the perception—surely a compassionate one—that the fact of their deaths mattering so little to Hamlet was something which ought to have mattered to Shakespeare."

"For the educated man, there is a moment of his early acquaintanceship with Dante when he realizes that all he has slowly taught himself to enjoy in poetry is everything that Dante has grown out of."

"It's yet another mark of Auden's superiority that whereas his contemporaries could be didactic about what they had merely thought or read, Auden could be tentative about what he felt in his bones."

"Every week I watch Stuart Hall on It's A Knock-Out and realise with renewed despair that the most foolish thing I ever did was to turn in my double-0 licence and hand back that Walther PPK with the short silencer."

"[H]e could never have played the hero, because for him it was creativity itself that had the heroic status, beyond politics, beyond patriotism, beyond even personal happiness. It’s the reason why his work is like that. His poetry, so wonderful when it is really flying, isn’t trying to tell you how much he knows. It’s giving thanks for how much there is to be known."

"Hughes spends a lot of time in this book saying what his country never had, and still hasn't got. Actually it's got it, because it's got Hughes. He should give his country a little more credit, if only because it still gives so much credit to him."

"Sandburg is unreadable today only because of the way he wrote. His prose was bad poetry, like his poetry."

"[B]y now some of the editors and subeditors [on Fleet Street] are themselves products of the anti-educational orthodoxy by which expressiveness counts above precision. It would, if the two terms were separable. But they aren't. Beyond a certain point - and that point is reached early - precision is what expressiveness depends on."

"Only the misapprehension that [Paglia] can be wise like lightning could explain her brief appearance, in Inside Deep Throat, to tell us that the cultural artefact in question was 'an epochal moment in the history of modern sexuality.' On the contrary, it was a moronic moment in the history of exploitation movies made by people so untalented that they can't even be convincing when they masturbate."

"I quite like talking myself, but when Peter was in the room there wasn't much point, you just had to listen. He was unimaginably, overwhelmingly gifted. You had to imagine a cross between Dr. Johnson, Isaiah Berlin, Peter Sellers and don't forget Charlie Chaplin — because Peter was a great mime too. … He was inexhaustible. It was like talking to Europe, talking to history."

"The mad idea that the Jews have no right to exist is a potent intensifier of the almost equally mad idea that the State of Israel can somehow be eliminated. I say 'almost' because a friend of mine in Australia recently presented me with a plausible case that the Middle East would probably be a more peaceful area if the State of Israel had never been founded. Like her argument that the Aborigines would have been a lot happier if the Europeans had never shown up, this contention was hard to rebut, except by rudely pointing out that we were both sitting in an Italian restaurant in Melbourne, history having happened."

"He wasn't just a genius, he had the genius's impatience with the whole idea of doing something again. He reinvented an art form, exhausted its possibilities, and just left it. There is always something frightening about that degree of inventiveness... He didn't lose his powers. He just lost interest in proving that he possessed them."

"Referring to "the historian David Irving" is like referring to the metallurgist Uri Geller."

"Year Zero (ATV) featured John Pilger in Cambodia. Most of what he had to show was hard to look at. Already it has become apparent that Pol Pot's crimes, like Hitler's and Stalin's, are too hideous to take in, even when you are faced with the evidence. Nevertheless Pilger might have found a few unkind things to say about the North Vietnamese who, I seem to remember, have recently taken to offering their internal enemies the opportunity of going on long yachting expeditions with insufficient regard to safety precautions. Pilger loudly accused the international relief organisations of playing politics, but forgot to mention the possibility that the North Vietnamese might be playing politics themselves. The way he was telling it, they were philanthropists. He was there and we were here, but it was hard to quell the suspicion that one of the reasons he was there was that North Vietnam likes the way he presents such a neat, easily understandable picture."

"All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish."

"Santayana was probably wrong when he said that those who forget the past are condemned to relive it. Those who remember are condemned to relive it too."

"Himmler was certainly banal, but he was also baroque, steaming around in a special train and diverting large amounts of the Third Reich's increasingly thin resources to such 'tasks' as proving scholastically that the Japanese were Aryans. How could you show all that and be believed? The whole Nazi reality was a caricature. The more precisely you evoke it, the less probable it looks."

"[T]he sure sign of a shlock media product is that it is drawn not from life but from previous media products."

"John Carey, who had once buried The Metropolitan Critic, hailed Unreliable Memoirs as the written equivalent of sliced bread. Instantly I revised my opinion of his critical prowess upwards."

"Martin, rather than step into the spotlight, would prefer to die in an unarmed attack on the power station supplying its electric current. His genuine modesty is the main reason for the fateful discrepancy between him and the journalistic literary sexton beetles who make copy out of him: they would like to receive the degree of attention that he would like to avoid, and the clearer it becomes that he would like to avoid it, the more they resent him for failing to appreciate their generosity."

"If the assembled company rags you for a failing, you can usually play up to it for comic effect: it's the failing they don't mention that you have to watch out for."

"I should say in haste that his early poetry gave him the right to think of himself as a giant. But he was also a nutter, one of the manic-depressive type who, when in a downhill phase, accuse themselves loudly of being Hitler. (They never accuse themselves of being the seventh anonymous stormtrooper from the right at a dedication ceremony for the new blood banner in a provincial town twenty miles from Dortmund: they always accuse themselves of being Hitler, just as the people who had previous lives in ancient Egypt always turn out to have been pharaohs or chief priests, and never night-shift workers on the crew that put up the third tallest obelisk in one of the satellite temples at Karnak)."

"I never got away from the enigma of Coren's personality. For me he remains the most enigmatic man of his generation, because the sprawling palace of his attainments has so many rooms he has scarcely bothered to look into. He can fly planes, drive fast cars, dance accomplished jive, speak perfect German. But who is he? His writing never tells you, because its humour is a shield."

"If it feels like a mistake before you go in, don't go in."

"Actually, like the vast majority of Australians, I had been born and raised in a city, but in the British imagination at that time the whole of Australia was still the outback, which was somehow equipped with a beach. Later on, this outback beach acquired an Opera House and a row of brick bungalows, one of them occupied by Kylie Minogue."

"He had a conspicuous individual talent, but it was interpretive, not directly creative. He could never have emulated Chaplin, Keaton or Jacques Tati and set up a whole project by himself, controlling its every detail even if the task took years. But there is no point carping. He had such a protean capacity that it would have been a miracle if he had been in full command of it."

"The sure sign of a weak man who ascends to glory is that he can't tolerate having strong men around him."

"I was wrong, however, to suppose that Sellers thought the world revolved around him. He thought the cosmos did too, and history, and the fates... Like every egomaniac, he behaved as if everybody else spent their day being as interested in him as he was."

"It just never occurred to me that the real distance I would have to cross would be in my own mind. In that respect, I had flown half a million miles before I moved an inch, and these three volumes are just the rattling the side of my cot made when I climbed over, on the first stage of that long, momentous journey across the carpet, towards the light of the open door."