A Rake's Progress

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, March 3-4, 2012

Doing the biography of a living writer can’t be easy. Writers like to have control over things – especially over the contents of books. When Martin Amis “co-operated” with his new biographer, Richard Bradford, he didn’t do so unconditionally. He granted Bradford a series of interviews, and gave him the green light to approach certain other approved parties. But he stipulated that some people – including his mother and his ex-wife – would not be involved.  

Considering these restrictions, Bradford hasn’t done an entirely bad job. His book is lopsided, but it’s meaty. It contains a better class of information than it would have if he’d tried to proceed without Amis’s approval. It isn’t a first-rate biography by any means, but it has one crucial thing going for it. Martin Amis has lived a life you don’t want to stop reading about. 

His personal history seems implausibly heightened, like the plot of one of his novels. His father, Kingsley, was one of the liveliest writers of his generation. His mother was a free spirit who routinely let the kids ride around on the roof-rack of her car. He published his first novel at 24; became a rakish celebrity; worked his way through a roster of stunning and well-connected girlfriends. In his mid-twenties he inadvertently fathered a daughter whom he didn’t meet till he was in his mid-forties. His cousin, Lucy Partington, vanished during the 1970s; twenty years later it emerged that she had been abducted and murdered by the serial killer Frederick West. 

The story has been told before – most artfully by Amis himself, in the memoir Experience (2000). Bradford hasn’t retold it very elegantly, but he has augmented it with generous chunks of previously unavailable information. While his interviews with Amis himself have yielded nothing startling, some of Amis’s most articulate friends – including Clive James and the late Christopher Hitchens – have disclosed things they never would have if the project had lacked Amis’s blessing. 

Bradford deserves credit for getting their testimony down, but he has no knack for digesting his source material and converting it into a fluent narrative. He tends to bung down the quotes of his interviewees in verbatim slabs, some of which go on for nearly a page. At times the project veers close to oral biography.  

By letting his sources speak at such length, Bradford keeps reminding you how few of them there are, and how tightly clustered together they are on the Amis sympathy axis. Hitchens goes on the record, lavishly, about the disintegration of Amis’s friendship with Julian Barnes. He divulges the contents of a hostile private letter that Barnes wrote to Amis. This is juicy stuff, all right. But it is, palpably, just one side of the story. Whether Barnes was offered the chance to give his side I don’t know. If he wasn’t, he’s got a right to feel angry all over again. 

It isn’t that one longs to hear Amis get bad-mouthed. It’s that Bradford’s information comes from too few angles to give you a properly rounded account of the man. The pages dealing with the break-up of Martin’s first marriage, to the philosopher Antonia Phillips, are especially threadbare. Forget about getting both sides of that story: Bradford is hard-pressed getting just one.   

But those were the rules, and Bradford can’t be blamed for obeying them. What he can be blamed for, quite loudly, is the slapdash way he handles his material. Bradford has written three previous biographies, including one of Amis’s father. But there are times when you’d be willing to bet he’d never read a literary biography before, let alone written one. He has a weird way of dispensing essential information. 

On page 48, for example, Amis makes an unheralded reference to somebody named Rob. Bradford, not very helpfully, appends the word “Henderson” in square brackets. Four pages later we’re told what we should have been told straight away: that Rob Henderson was, for some time, Amis’s best friend. Rob sticks around in the narrative for several years. Then on page 102 Bradford casually, and without elaboration, announces that Rob, these days, is “dead.” He doesn’t feel the need to expand on that until page 363, where he discloses the cause of death: cancer, in 2001.     

Bradford seems temperamentally averse to saying the right things in the right order, or indeed at all. A biography of Amis, you might think, would be the right place for a clear account of the famous dental procedures he underwent during the nineties. But Bradford doesn’t seem all that interested in clearing the matter up. He quotes a newspaper report suggesting that Amis spent $20,000 having his molars replaced, but doesn’t say whether or not this is accurate. A while later he takes another brief pass at the question, and leaves you with the impression that Amis’s oral issues amounted to nothing worse than a pair of infected wisdom teeth. But Amis’s own memoir recounted, in excruciating detail, the surgical removal and replacement of nearly every tooth in his head. 

On the subject of Amis’s novels, Bradford can be illuminating. When he analyses portions of The Information (1995) in the light of Martin’s concurrent marriage breakdown, he is performing useful criticism, even if he does misremember a couple of plot details. (The hack novelist Gwyn Barry scores his first raging success with Amelior, not with Summertown.) 

Bradford forgets, though, that a biographical approach to Amis’s work can only get you so far. Amis is principally a satirist. He is interested – fearlessly – in the outside world. No doubt the novels contain wisps of his personal history, but that is not what they are about. A critic who plunges into the books in pursuit of Martin’s shadow risks seeing less in them than the average reader will, not more.    

Bradford, a couple of times, can be observed doing exactly that. Pursuing his notion that The Information is “a story about Martin Amis,” he cites the biographical fact that the father of one of Martin’s aristocratic girlfriends was fascinated by Martin’s velvet trousers. He then quotes a long scene from the novel in which an ageing aristocrat contemplates the trousers of Richard Tull, the book’s luckless anti-hero, and demands that he remove them. 

But the joke, in the novel, is that the trousers aren’t Richard’s; they’ve been lent to him by the old man’s daughter, and the old man has abruptly recognized them as his own. Instead of quoting the parts of the passage that make this clear, Bradford replaces them with ellipses. This is a bit naughty of him. It makes the passage sound more straightforwardly autobiographical than it really is.   

Bradford does some similar textual pruning when psychoanalysing Kingsley’s Girl, 20 (1971). He feels that one of the protagonist’s children resembles Kingsley’s rebellious older son, Philip, who by this time was well into his twenties. The character, says Bradford, “frequently tells members of the family and visitors to ‘fuck off’, refuses to go to school and urinates regularly on the bathroom floor.” So he does, but it’s a trifle misleading of Bradford not to mention that he is six years old. 

First-rate biographers do the simple things well. Zachary Leader’s Life of Kingsley Amis (2006) was a model of the genre: lucid, panoramic, reader-friendly. Leader, admittedly, had the luxury of writing about a figure who was no longer around to help or hinder him. But he also had the right temperament for the job. If he had any personal quirks, he kept them out of his book. Bradford puts his in. His book is okay as an interim biography. But when the job of definitive biographer is being filled, I have a feeling that Bradford will, as the early Amis might have phrased it, get aimed.

Less Fun than it Looks

Originally published in The Weekend Australian, March 24-25, 2012 

Is there a job in the world that isn’t much less fun than it looks? From a distance, being a Wiggle would appear to be a pretty cushy gig. Roll out of bed at around ten, slip on the coloured shirt for a mid-day show, mingle backstage with some celebrity milfs, then spend the remainder of the day reclining in a hot-tub full of cash. 

Anthony Field, the Blue Wiggle, has written a book that unveils the less glamorous reality: the bad hotels; the terrible food; the backstage arguments, one of them culminating in the throwing of a toy drum kit; the grim logistics of coping with irritable bowel syndrome on the road. Field isn’t complaining, mind you: he keeps stressing that the joy of the live shows makes it all worthwhile. But he leaves you feeling that he and his fellow Wiggles have thoroughly earned their success. 

Field earned his while suffering from a diabolical array of health problems that threatened, at one stage, to curtail his wiggling for good. He pulled himself back from the brink, thanks to an exercise and dietary regime he details in the book’s second half. But it’s the first half, describing how he got to the brink in the first place, that makes for more compelling reading. 

Field played in the Sydney band The Cockroaches as a youngster. An uncomfortable fit as a rock and roller, he eventually quit to finish a degree in early childhood education. This would prove one of the shrewdest career moves made by an entertainer since Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. During his final year at university, Field formed a children’s group with two other teaching students – Murray Cook and Greg Page – and the ex-Cockroach Jeff Fatt. The Wiggles were born. (A fifth Wiggle, Phillip Wilcher, played on their first album but left soon afterwards.) 

The group’s early struggles were not all that different from an emerging rock band’s: there were meetings with boneheaded executives, efforts to crack the American market, gruelling tour schedules. Sometimes they played three 90-minute shows a day. Could Keith Richards manage that? 

Probably not, if he had to spend two hours in the backstage toilet every time he ingested something mildly toxic. Field, during his darkest years, was so unhealthy that he made Keith look like Michael Phelps. His problems, according to his own incomplete list, included “hernias, back ailments, broken bones, food sensitivities, colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, potentially fatal infections, circulation issues, and exhaustion.” 

Let's pause now to get a few things straight about the Wiggles’ collective health issues. Field is not the Wiggle who left the group to deal with a mysterious fainting illness. That was the Yellow Wiggle, Greg Page, who quit back in 2006, and was reinstated earlier this year, causing his replacement to be controversially stripped of the yellow shirt. (Field’s book, alas, was completed too early to tackle the Wigglegate imbroglio.) 

Nor is Field to be confused with the Purple Wiggle, Jeff Fatt, who had a pacemaker installed in 2011. No: Field is the one who has suffered from just about everything else. He is excellent at evoking what it’s like to live with chronic pain. Fellow sufferers will find some of his observations scarily accurate. “Pain,” he says, “becomes a habit that’s hard to break.” 

Field broke it when he met a holistic chiropractor named James Stoxen. In the book’s second half Field lays out, complete with photographs, the exercise routines with which Stoxen helped him morph from an overweight, pain-racked pill-popper into the chiselled, tattooed specimen depicted on the book’s front cover. (Sidebar question: now that even the Wiggles are getting tattoos, can we agree that the tattoo has officially lost its bad-boy connotations? Who’s getting one next? Kevin Rudd?) 

The book, it must be said, does get rather bogged down exploring the Stoxen philosophy. Stoxen views the body as a giant spring. He carries around a bedspring in his bag to demonstrate this principle. He believes that the spring is divided into seven “floors” or levels. He abhors shoes, and advocates walking around barefooted whenever possible. For all I know, he may be right about these things. But his intonations do sound, prima facie, like those of many other self-help gurus who have gone before him. 

Still, there is no doubt that his techniques have worked for Field. Nor can you question the genuineness of Field’s desire to spread the word. He knows he sounds like an evangelist, but feels that the good news must be shared. His fervour is contagious. At one point I seriously considered rustling up a set of witch’s hats (where do you buy a witch’s hat?) and giving his programme a try. I know how his young fans feel. Field has enthusiasm, and that can’t be faked. Somehow he never lost it, no matter how debilitating his problems got.

But not only to look at

500 words on My Favourite Novel for The Weekend Australian

I must have been about eighteen when I first opened my parents’ copy of Lucky Jim. Physically it didn’t promise much. It was a liver-spotted Penguin from the 50s or early 60s. Much as I wanted to be the kind of guy who read orange Penguins, I was grimly aware that getting through one could be hard work. (To this day I maintain that Lady Chatterley’s Lover, sodomy or no sodomy, is a surprisingly uncompelling book.)

But on the second page of Lucky Jim I got collared by this description of two men crossing a lawn: “To look at, but not only to look at, they resembled some kind of variety act …” But not only to look at. What an exhilarating thing to do to a sentence. Literature had never sounded like that before. Amis was right there in the book with you, twisting his sentences like trick balloons.

One member of the variety act is the book’s hero, Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer at a provincial British university. The other is his boss, Professor Welch, one of the great comic antagonists in fiction. Dixon has five weeks to convince Welch to keep him on the faculty. “Until then he must try to make Welch like him, and one way of doing that was, he supposed, to be present and conscious while Welch talked …” [read more]

The Sound of No Hands Clapping

On Richard Flanagan's Fanciful Non-Fiction

Originally published in the Australian Literary Review, October 2011

Nobody would deny that Richard Flanagan is a passionate writer. His new collection of non-fictional prose is full of fire and commitment, all right. But does he have the talent to convert passion into literature? This is the question about his work that won’t go away. Let's consider a typically cantankerous sentence from the present volume. Responding to critics who argue that Australian novelists should “write more about money”, Flanagan says this: “So much offensive idiocy and prescriptive stupidity has not been heard since the days the lecterns of Eastern Europe grew greasy with the nonsense of cultural commissars insisting on how only social realism adequately described socialist reality.” 

Look at what passion does to Flanagan’s prose. His language overheats, but it refuses to get especially inventive or evocative. (By what process might one expect “nonsense” to deposit grease on a lectern?) Flanagan’s unfortunate lack of creative resources (wit, irony, pictorial imagination) means that his strong feelings have nowhere to go, except into the making of a crude overstatement that can only alienate an intelligent reader. To suggest that the plight of the contemporary Australian novelist is in any way comparable to the woes of a Soviet-era writer in Eastern Europe is obscene, as well as absurd. Indeed, the comparison is so inept that Flanagan destroys his own case: he accidentally reminds you that Australian novelists, when you look at their situation historically, don’t really have much to complain about at all. Flanagan has an anti-talent for rhetoric. When he cranks up his prose to convince you of something, he has an uncanny ability to make you sympathise with the opposite view, even if you didn’t before. 

This tendency turns out, in the present volume, to be chronic. Flanagan has a habit that is surely a bad one in a non-fiction writer: he keeps failing to check whether what he is saying is true. Here he is kicking off an essay about war entitled “Lest We Forget”: 

Lest we forget, we reverentially intone every Anzac Day and yet we forget all the time. We forget that out of the 102,000 Australians who have died in wars since Federation, only 40,000 died during World War II. We forget that all those other wars in which the majority died were not because we were threatened, but because we were involved with empires elsewhere threatening others. We forget that all those Australians who died … did not die for our country but for other countries. 

Let's try our best to parse this. Flanagan seems to concede that the 40,000 Australians who died during World War II were fighting a just war. He is not radical enough to contest that point. But what exactly does he think he means, when he makes reference to “all those other wars in which the majority died”? Exactly which wars does he have in mind? As Flanagan surely knows, 61,000 of the 62,000 futile deaths he's talking about occurred during World War I. And how can he possibly believe Australians have “forgotten” that World War I was an imperial conflict, fought a long way from these shores, in which far too many Australians pointlessly died? Has he ever been to an Anzac Day service? Has he noticed that Gallipoli gets more than the odd mention in our national conversation? Remarkably, Flanagan gets through this particular essay without referring to Gallipoli at all. This is a strange omission, and it raises a question that's hard to answer with any confidence. When Flanagan leaves such inconvenient details out of his arguments, is he being deceptive on purpose? Or does he get so worked up, when churning out passages like that one, that he develops the capacity to deceive even himself? 

As every sentient Australian knows, the image of the heartless British general sending diggers to a meaningless death is so familiar that it's become something of a national cliché. So how on earth has Flanagan managed to convince himself that this detail of our history has somehow been "forgotten" by everybody except him? And what purpose does this delusional proposition serve? Well, it turns out that Flanagan has raised the subject of Anzac Day because he wants to make a point about our current involvement in Afghanistan. We shouldn't be there, Flanagan passionately believes. And when Flanagan thinks that he’s morally in the right – and he rarely thinks he’s anywhere else – he seems to feel he has a licence to mangle the facts (and the English language) in just about anyway he pleases. 

“We forget we asked the Americans to be in Vietnam,” he writes, “and we don’t even know exactly why we are in Afghanistan.” The first half of the sentence is so badly phrased that Flanagan inadvertently seems to suggest that we asked the Americans if they would go to Vietnam. The remainder of the sentence makes sense grammatically, but it's still crucially vague: does Flanagan mean we don’t know why we’re still in Afghanistan, or we don’t know why we went there to begin with? 

Flanagan's prose is riddled with little imprecisions like this one. Indeed, being imprecise is fundamental to the way Flanagan operates as a thinker. Alleging that “we don’t even know” why we’re in Afghanistan is a lot easier than engaging with the well-known arguments for our presence there. Those arguments aren’t unassailable, of course: you can make a solid case against them, and plenty of writers have taken on that responsibility. But Flanagan's non-fiction is fundamentally irresponsible, because it keeps pretending that the facts are less thorny than they really are. By pretending that we’re in Afghanistan for no reason worth mentioning, he can vaguely imply, without having to argue the point directly, that we could immediately bring our troops home without exposing Afghan civilians to any nasty consequences. This is almost certainly a fantasy. But Flanagan, whose chief and perhaps sole aim as a writer is to advertise his own compassion, prefers not to bog himself down in awkward realities. 

For all his loathing of politicians as a class, Flanagan writes exactly the way politicians talk. His whole intellectual style is founded on a suppression of complexity. He doesn’t use language to assimilate and deal with the world as a whole. He uses it to isolate the portions of reality that upset him, and to obscure or skate over the parts that it doesn’t suit him to talk about. Reducing his opponents’ positions to a caricature, he conveniently lowers the bar for himself. Rational argument becomes unnecessary. Our presence in Afghanistan can be frictionlessly invalidated by a simple reminder that war is an “evil” thing. 

Such faux naivety is typical of Flanagan’s posturing approach to world affairs. His views on Australia’s involvement in Iraq would fit easily on a protester’s placard, with room left over for a large cartoon rendering of John Howard’s Mr-Sheen-like head. For Flanagan, Howard simply took his “riding orders” from Washington. The whole thing was about Australia’s “servitude to a new imperium.” Many an anti-war protester believed that too, of course. But that doesn't entitle a serious writer to pretend that things were exactly that simple. As with our involvement in Afghanistan, serious arguments can be made against Australia’s participation in the invasion of Iraq. Nobody is stopping Flanagan from making them. But to make them, you need to move beyond the idea that the whole thing was a puppet show, with George Bush pulling John Howard's strings. You need to acknowledge that the other side had arguments too. 

Flanagan doesn’t think much of John Howard’s political opponents either, by the way. Kim Beazley is a “big puffy boy,” a “lost blimp”, leader of a party of “conceited bastards all born to rule.” This is primitive stuff, offered up by the very same writer who piously complains, in another essay, about the “growing coarsening” of our “public rhetoric.” If Flanagan feels that his own frenzied contributions are part of the solution, rather than part of the problem, he is mistaken. He wants to restore "empathy" to our political scene, but raining noisy contempt on every politician in the country except Bob Brown is a strange way to go about doing that. 

 

As a novelist, Flanagan has always has always had a liking for the bold imaginative stroke. In The Unknown Terrorist, he delivered the news that Jesus Christ was history’s first suicide bomber. In Wanting, he took two real historical figures – the Tasmanian Governor Sir John Franklin and his adopted Aboriginal daughter Mathinna – and invented a scene in which the former raped the latter, thereby epitomising the theme of white invasion. These are big sweeping metaphors, but big sweeping metaphors can be useful in the field of fiction. Novelists are licensed to be a bit reductive, and draw caricatures, and say things that are not literally accurate, because such techniques can sometimes provide a startling short-cut to the truth. 

Whether Flanagan’s fiction is a bit too reductive is a question for another day. The problem, in the current context, is that Flanagan is far too ready to indulge his penchant for fictional overstatement in the non-fiction arena. Writing about reality is a lot more demanding, in some ways, than writing about an invented world. It subjects a writer to stricter rules of evidence, for one thing. The short-cut becomes a less legitimate technique. But Flanagan’s essays are full of sinister and unsubstantiated phrases like this: “In an ever more unfree age, when avenues for the expression of truth are daily closing off all around …” If Flanagan were any other writer, one would brace oneself for a mention of the Internet at this point. After all, you can hardly say something like that without acknowledging the existence of the Web. But Flanagan can. He just moves on. Apparently he just feels we live in an increasingly unfree age. And apparently just feeling that strikes him as sufficient reason for asserting it as a fact. But in non-fiction, it isn’t enough (or shouldn't be enough) just to say what you feel. You need to say what you think, and explain why you think it. 

No doubt newspaper and magazine editors commission pieces from Flanagan precisely because he is a novelist. Perhaps they expect him to cut through to the secret heart of things, and deliver seer-like insights that are beyond the ken of the average journalist. But on the evidence of this book, Flanagan sees less than the average journalist, not more. I don’t think he writes better than the average journalist, either. His grip on language is far from sure: he says “decimate” when he means “annihilate”, and “alumni” instead of “alumnus”, and “doyen” instead of “doyenne”. He also has a habit of scrambling the natural word order of spoken English for pseudo-literary effect. “Gathering were the dark clouds of the Cold War,” he writes, as if a cliché can be jolted back to life by just shifting the verb from one place to another. And try unravelling this sentence, with its bizarre and pompous inversions of the laws of natural speech: “This is no nationalistic argument, for good writing, good art are ever anti-national; rising beyond them, opposing fundamentally the nonsense of national pretensions with the mess of life.” You can see what he means, eventually. But working out what a writer is trying to say shouldn’t be such hard work. With Flanagan, the task is so laborious that you feel entitled to a share of his royalties. 

“I like books that smell of sweat.” The phrase is Flaubert’s, and Flanagan uses it as one of his epigraphs. Alas, my copy of this book ended up smelling more of my sweat than of Flanagan’s. I don’t doubt that Flanagan was incredibly fired up when he wrote it. Nor would I deny that some of the causes that fire him up are good ones. But anyone can get angry. The really hard part of a writer’s job is to transmute emotion into readable, memorable language. Flanagan’s language is forgettable at the best of times, and at the worst of times it's memorable for the wrong reason: because it turns ugly under pressure. “Our two major parties did not so much play the race card, as back it to the hilt with cracked rhetoric …” Is Flanagan saying that the race card had a hilt, or that the cracked rhetoric did? After a while you stop asking yourself such questions. What's the point, given the clear evidence that Flanagan never bothers to ask them himself? The man cares about a lot of things, but language isn’t one of them.