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National Observer Home > No. 51 - Summer 2002 >Book Reviews

Hughes

By Andrew Riemer

Sydney, 2001: Duffy and Snellgrove, pp. 180.

Andrew Riemer, formerly of Sydney University’s English Department, is best known today as a distinguished memoirist and Sydney Morning Herald book reviewer. In this monograph on Robert Hughes’ life and art criticism, Riemer’s deepest, most instructive insight is his awareness of Hughes as possessing a Counter-Reformation mind: one honed on his Jesuit schoolmasters’ overt internationalism, and profoundly Mediterranean in outlook. (Hence, incidentally, the unfailing disastrousness of the cosmopolitan Hughes’ periodic associations with the incurably provincial Thomas Keneally, whose much-vaunted “Catholicism” is merely crypto-Calvinism, preaching eternal damnation to all except Irish republicans.) When Hughes discusses non-Catholic countries’ artists — the great seventeenth-century Dutchmen, for instance — he produces pastiche: brilliant pastiche, but pastiche nonetheless. When Hughes discusses Velásquez, Zurbarán or Goya, he changes from skilled defence-counsel to passionate pilgrim. Vermeer might edify Hughes’ intellect; the Latins move his soul, especially when (as with Gaudí, De Chirico or Matisse) they can be conscripted into the modernist canon without too much outright special pleading.

Still, in some circumstances a Counter-Reformation mind is a curse; and never more so, surely, than in navel-gazing villages like New York, whose intelligentsia not only spent almost the entire twentieth century thrashing about in the miasma of Marx and Freud, but in extreme cases — Susan Sontag’s being the most notorious — required the most drastic brain-surgery to induce awareness of any Gentile heterosexual’s achievement whatsoever. In this environment Hughes “went native”, with no more benefit to himself than Gulliver would have gained by becoming a paid-up Lilliputian. Every shopworn Madison Avenue fraud, to which most locals were largely or wholly immune, possessed for Hughes the attractions of forbidden fruit. The Big Apple lavished on him, as it repeatedly lavishes on foreign-born writers, innumerable lucrative venues for non-writing and non-thought. Talk-show punditry; book-launches every evening of the week; P.E.N. Club crusades against Verwoerd or Franco or Pinochet: suchlike enemies of authorial promise now abound from Salzburg to São Paulo, but in Hughes’ youth they were distinctively Manhattanite. A less intelligent man than Hughes would have responded with keener self-preservation. He was neither the first nor the last powerful thinker to have found, after a youth of high cultural attainment, irresistible purgative attractions in sheer vulgar stupidity.

Spending a lifetime in Australia would have left Hughes acutely and justly miserable, but the question arises: did New York bring out his best, or his worst? Might not London, Paris or Rome have forced on him the habit of uncongenial research chores, the blessings of comparative anonymity, a culture générale that would have saved him from his worst blunders on non-artistic issues, and the intellectual hygiene dependent on a firm refusal to greet any foe (however irksome) with screams of “Racism!” or “Fascism!”? Such speculation is tempting but vain. Incontrovertible is the simple fact that almost every manifestation of New York cultural evil — images of the urine-stained Christ, of the dung-covered Virgin Mary — has from Hughes elicited either tolerance or active praise. Whether such blaspheming eupepsia can survive the 11 September chastisement (and the eschatological consciousness which this chastisement has presumably now engendered, not just among America’s certified morons, but perhaps within America’s arts nomenklatura also) remains obscure.

Riemer’s own descriptions of Hughes’ mental processes fail to clarify the matter. He feels compelled to snipe at Spanish Catholicism’s “bigotry”: for no more obvious reason than that this creed had better things to do in 1936 than roll over and die at Marxist gangsters’ hands. Elsewhere Riemer’s current notion of intellectual property rights seems cavalier in the extreme. He loftily refers to Hughes’ bare-faced plagiarisms (which their perpetrator has neither denied nor attempted to deny) as “hoary tales of misdemeanours, some stretching back as far as the 1960s”: the word “tales” thereby implying, without actually specifying, falsehood. It is uncertain, moreover, why Riemer should cite these thefts’ sheer antiquity in Hughes’ defence. Possibly Riemer imagines that some statute of limitations exists, or should exist, on artistic larceny: and that after a few years, filching automatically turns into some species of Great Postmodernist Collage. Or possibly, and still more frighteningly, Riemer considers plagiarism itself harmless. In that case, we who have looked with pride upon having attended his classes must wonder how he held down prestigious academic posts with a clear conscience.

Those who concluded years ago that literary criticism is one long holiday for its practitioners might well be wrong, but Riemer’s performance here is unlikely to change their minds. Hughes’ worst, least subtle, and most slatternly recent didactic endeavours elicit from Riemer a veneration that would seem excessive even if applied to a Ranke or a Croce. Through whatever misguided goodness of heart, Riemer devotes page after page to discussing The Fatal Shore as the profound work of sober scholarship which he imagines it to be, rather than as the demagogic rant which it actually is. The dignified autopsies which Geoffrey Blainey and Geoffrey Partington separately performed on The Fatal Shore’s pretensions have failed to make any apparent dent upon Riemer’s consciousness.

At least the earlier, and in every way better, Hughes dredged up (to quote T. S. Eliot) fragments against his ruins. The Shock of the New remains as vivid, and at times as downright funny, these days as when it emerged two decades ago. At least three dozen of his Time articles would be worth collecting in a hardback anthology, which extracts from The Culture of Complaint and maybe American Visions could also adorn, along with several 1980s New York Review of Books contributions well deserving a fresh audience.

Hughes possessed the innate talent to belong with our language’s finest essayists, from Bacon and Dryden to Chesterton and Orwell. He also possessed what those men lacked, the capacity for historiographic scholarship of a monumental sort. The contrast between what Hughes had the potential to be, and what he actually has been, imparts to his Western Australian downfall a tragic sense that would have overpowered even Hogarth.

Scott Fitzgerald, when observing the death-wish so widespread among the United States’ writers (and who, pray, possessed greater expertise on that particular theme than Fitzgerald himself?), once remarked: “There are no second acts in American lives.” Hughes’ deterioration raises afresh the problem of why Australian writers’ creative faculties, far from making it to a second act, usually collapse in a drunken or drugged heap well before the end of the first.

A serious study of Hughes, as opposed to the offering under discussion, would explore this topic in detail. Although it need comprise no more pages than Riemer’s pamphlet, it would assess its protagonist with some attempt at impartial enquiry: rather than in the spirit of a social worker who, confronted with both comprehensive and indisputable evidence of her client’s recidivism, deems it an adequate response merely to parrot her own eternal belief in his niceness. Regrettably, the present effort will simply convince most publishers that all possible demand for a Hughes biography has now been met.

R. J. Stove

 

National Observer No. 51 - Summer 2002