Essayists From Australia

"The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf."

"Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue."

"In those uneasy two days, between the declaration of peace and its accomplishment, one of the prisoners, a jeweler named Licht, had been making a present for Oskar, something more expressive than the metal stud box he'd been given on his birthday. Licht was working with a rare quantity of gold. … Licht melted the gold down and by noon on May 8 was engraving an inscription on the inner circle in Hebrew. It was a Talmudic verse which Stern had quoted to Oskar in the front office of Buchheister's in October 1939. "He who saves a single life saves the world entire.""

"Peter Thompson: Was one of the things that really attracted you to the story, the obvious moral ambiguity of Schindler? Tom Keneally: Absolutely, it was the fact that you couldn't say where opportunism ended and altruism began. And I like the subversive fact that the spirit breatheth where it will. That is that good will emerged from the most unlikely places."

"In times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly Father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He'd hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a packet of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man, saves the entire world."

"Remembering how I planned to break the journey, to drive My own car one day, to have choice in my hands and my foot upon power, To see through the trumpet throat of vertiginous perspective My urgent Now explode continually into flower, To be the Eater of Time, a poet and not that sly Anus of mind the historian. It was so simple and plain To live by the sole, insatiable influx of the eye. But something went wrong with the plan: I am still on the train."

"Quaking muscles in the act of birth, Between her legs a pigmy face appear, And the first murderer lay upon the earth."

"No hunter of the Age of Fable Had need to buckle in his belt; More game than he was ever able To take ran wild upon the veldt; Each night with roast he stocked his table, Then procreated on the pelt. And that is how, of course, there came At last to be more men than game."

"Her bulk of beauty, her stupendous grace Challenged the lion heart in his puny dust. Proudly his Moment looked him in the face: He rose to meet it as a hero must; Climbed the white mountain of unravished snow, Planted his tiny flag upon the peak. The smooth drifts, scarcely breathing, lay below. She did not take the trouble to smile or speak. And afterwards, it may have been in play, The enormous girl rolled over and squashed him flat; And as she could not send him home that way, Used him thereafter as a bedside mat."

"And her five cities, like teeming sores, Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state Where second-hand Europeans pullulate Timidly on the edge of alien shores. Yet there are some like me turn gladly home From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find The Arabian desert of the human mind, Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come, Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes Which is called civilization over there."

"Adam had learned the jolly deed of kind: He took her in his arms and there and then Like the clean beasts, embracing from behind, Began in joy to found the breed of men."

"Darwin's daughters have no tails, Yet a reminiscent motion Agitates the lovely frails At the seat of amputation. Charles called Eve and Adam lies And denied the garden state, Yet the gait of Paradise Could not wholly liquidate."

"I still haven’t forgiven C. S. Lewis for going on all those long walks with J. R. R. Tolkien and failing to strangle him, thus to save us from hundreds of pages dripping with the wizardly wisdom of Gandalf and from the kind of movie in which Orlando Bloom defiantly flexes his delicate jaw at thousands of computer-generated orcs. In fact it would have been ever better if C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien could have strangled each other, so that we could also have been saved from the Chronicles of Narnia."

"[E]ven if you do know about art, you can’t talk about it socially ... Damien Hirst's shark was a common talking point for a time, and so will the diamond skull be: for a little more time, perhaps, but not forever. The Botticelli paintings are forever because they aren’t talking points."

"Spielberg had done his best with Schindler's List, but his best left some of us wondering just how useful a contribution it was, to make a movie about how some of the Jews had survived, when the real story was about all the Jews who hadn't."

"I think the control I had over my work was less than adequate. There was nothing wrong with the good bits in my poems, it’s just that they were packed around with lots and lots of bad bits, and I think that the only way I’ve improved in the last several decades [. . .] is that I’ve learned to leave out the bad bits. I’m not sure you do improve beyond that."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"In Australia during WWII, a couple of established poets invented the supposedly nonsensical works of a fictitious poet called Ern Malley and used them to discredit the modernist pretensions of the young editor who printed them. It never occurred to them that as writers of talent they were not in a position to suppose that they could deliberately write something perfectly meaningless."

"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."

"I see the pain on your face when you say the word intellectual, because it has so many syllables in it."

"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."

"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."

"After thirteen hours we arrived at Bangkok airport and I raced for the smoking room. Smoking room was a big name for a small Perspex cubicle that was opaque from the outside because of the grey pressure of the fumes within. I opened the door, saw all the other smokers sitting there face to face in two tight rows, and I realised that I would have to smoke in the standing position. Then I realised I didn’t have to light up. All I had to do was breathe in. It was the moment of truth."

"From 'What Happened to Auden'"

"After being murdered at Stalin's orders, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism."

"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."

"There is a consoling mythology, constantly being added to, which would have us believe that genius operates beyond donkey work. Thus we are told reassuringly that Einstein was no better at arithmetic than we are; that Mozart gaily broke the rules of composition while jotting down a stream of black dots without even looking; and that Shakespeare didn't care about grammar. Superficially, there are facts to lend substance to these illusions. But illusions they remain. There is always some autistic child in India who can speak in prime numbers, but that doesn't mean Einstein couldn't add up; Mozart would not have been able to break the rules in an interesting way unless he was able to keep them if required; and Shakespeare, far from being careless about grammar, could depart from it in any direction only because he had first mastered it as a structure."

"[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."

"[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."

"In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas."

"The controls fell easily to hand, and from there onto the floor."

"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."

"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."

"If you can't have a revolution without Jacobinism, then it becomes a matter of how to have reform without revolution. Anyone who "accepts the necessity of Jacobinism" wants to try his hand at it. When François Furet hinted at this conclusion in his truly revolutionary book on the French Revolution, he found himself immediately tagged by the left as a diehard spokesman of the reactionary right. It was assumed that if he was against the Terror, he was against the people. His contention that the Terror had been against the people was not accepted."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro."

"Everything the British Empire built here will be history. Most of it already is, but it’s a history that has left its mark. In the War Cemetery at Sai Wan Bay you can see it clearly: understated but indelible. The armed forces of Imperial Japan tried to enslave the whole of the East, including Japan itself. Caught up in the terrible war that raged in Asia and the Pacific, a lot of our people who came out here to fight never came home. They died in a good cause. But if the people in this graveyard were somehow to learn that yet another tyranny was on the way, they would find it hard to rest in peace. One of them is my father, who has lain here now for fifty years. He lived and died under our old empire without ever thinking that it was wonderful beyond question. But he thought that it created more than it destroyed, and he was right. The best hope of our last colony is that when the men from the mainland finally take over they will not try to rewrite history by pretending we were never here. Some of us will always be here."

"From 'The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered'"

"Few artists were ever fully well, so it is no great trick to prove them ill. There are commentators who can't get interested in Caravaggio until they find out he killed someone. They are only one step from believing that every killer is Caravaggio."

"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."

"A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say."

"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."

"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."

"Attempting to define the sensationalism of the press, Malcolm Muggeridge came up with the slogan 'Give us this day our daily story.' A doomed effort, because all it did was remind the reader that the King James Version of the Lord's Prayer was better written than an article by Muggeridge."

"One of [Mann's] many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was."