Cairns as cultural curiosity

Dear Editor,

Gideon Haigh begins his review (ABR, June/July 2002) of my book, Keeper of the Faith: A Biography of Jim Cairns, with a childhood reminiscence about a letter he received from Cairns in 1975. Understandably, at the age of nine, what impressed Haigh about the letter was its style rather than its content. Yet, if his review is anything to go by, Haigh has never outgrown this preference for style over substance. Self-indulgent and plain silly, he not only does the book an injustice, but undertakes an even greater disservice to Cairns.

Two examples of Haigh’s silliness will suffice. He contends that the book consists of ‘endless slabs of quotes from press reports’, apparently blind to its extensive range of sources, including archival records and interviews (some thirty interviews with Cairns alone). Indeed, breadth of research was one reason the Australian Historical Association and the National Centenary of Federation judged the manuscript worthy of support. Then there is Haigh’s suggestion that an ‘alert narrator’ would have seized upon Cairns’s presentation in childhood with a copy of William Morris’s News from Nowhere to digress into a discussion about the Utopian tradition. What makes this suggestion so gratuitous is that, as any ‘alert’ reviewer would know, the narrative regularly pauses for detailed reflections upon the books that most profoundly influenced Cairns’s intellectual development.

The most negligent thing about Haigh’s review, however, is that it displays no curiosity in, let alone comprehension of, my book’s themes. This is especially incongruous given his complaint that the biography is a doctoral thesis and not a book. If that were the case, how is it that Haigh remains utterly clueless as to what that ‘thesis’ is? He offers no opinion, for example, of my argument about Cairns’s importance as a voice of dissent against the established order, or of the book’s challenge to the mythology surrounding his great ideological and political rivalry with Gough Whitlam. Likewise, he seems totally uninterested in my analysis of what Cairns’s eventual marginalisation suggests about both the ideological trajectory of the Labor Party and the impoverishment of contemporary political discourse.

How to explain that so little registered with Haigh? He would probably insist he was rendered comatose by the ‘wooden prose’ that is the trademark of ‘réchauffé Ph.Ds’ written in ‘the clunking, creaking, monotonous vernacular of modern Humanities departments’. Yet other reviewers (in the mainstream media, not academic journals) have consistently remarked on how readable the book is, despite its serious intent, and how moving is its account of Cairns’s life. Nor can I resist observing that it’s difficult to treat seriously a reviewer who, in accusing scholarly presses of feeding ‘academic vanity’, declares: ‘I’d like to share here a personal partis pris … Why are university publishing houses churning out books with audiences of approximately three at best, including the author’s mum? There. I’ve said it.’ Does Haigh have any idea how pompous he sounds here, or how simplistic is his diagnosis of the problems facing scholarly presses?

I concur with Haigh that, ultimately, what is at issue here is ‘a matter of vision’. He seems to have no head for a serious, sustained and unashamedly political narrative. He prefers historical writing that is dilettante in style and non-challenging in content. His belief that I should have approached a study of Cairns in this way underlines that he has no understanding of Cairns, or what made him special. While Haigh found my book’s many references to social change tedious, the truth is that Cairns’s commitment to ideas and social change defined him above all else. What’s more, it was the sheer relentlessness of that commitment that made him so radical, disturbing and different in the Australian political landscape. Haigh, it seems, would have me rob him of this. No longer defiantly political, Cairns might thus be reduced to a kind of cute cultural curiosity.

I’ll finish by quoting from another Cairns letter, one he distributed at the launch of Keeper of the Faith. Despite attending the launch, Haigh appears not to have noticed it. In the letter, Cairns declares that the biography has ‘allowed me to understand my own work’ and ‘the reasons for [my] success and failure’. That Cairns acknowledges this, even though the book’s assessment of him is not always complimentary, speaks volumes for his open and inquiring mind. I hope readers of ABR will judge the book with the same spirit.

Paul Strangio, Clayton, Vic.

A military misnomer

Dear Editor,

In the June/July 2002 issue of ABR, you published a review by Peter Ryan of War Letters of General Monash, edited by Tony Macdougall. Mr Ryan believes this book not merely to be a ‘shortened version’ of the 1934 edition. I suggest that that is substantially what it is.

As John Monash’s granddaughter, I am familiar with most of the literature about his life and career, and am fortunate to own an original copy of the War Letters of General Monash, published in 1934 by Angus & Robertson, edited with an Introduction by F.M. Cutlack. Over the years, many people have told me that they hoped that the War Letters of General Monash would be reprinted, so I was pleased to learn that a new edition had appeared in the bookshops. However, on reading it, I am deeply disappointed.

Firstly, the title is misleading. Since it is not a reprint of the 1934 edition, this book ought not to carry the same title. In all honesty, it should be clearly marked as ‘abridged’ or ‘selected’. Mr Macdougall admits that ‘this edition ... contains approximately half the text of the original edition’. The grounds for inclusion or exclusion of letters are given as the omission of ‘repetitious passages’ and ‘family matters’. That is scarcely adequate. A comparison of the two books confirms that Macdougall has merely lifted half the letters, excised the others, and provided a new Introduction and linking passages.

Mr Macdougall’s Introduction covers the whole of Monash’s life, or attempts to do so, in ten or so pages.(Cutlack’s was purely a military Introduction, and an excellent one.) There is no shortage of accurate material on Monash’s life, and Mr Macdougall rightly praises Geoffrey Serle’s fine biography (1982). Had he consulted that work more closely, he would have avoided the many mistakes and misinterpretations in his Introduction, and in his bridging passages between the letters. The latter are intended, presumably, to fill up the gaps left by cutting out half the letters, a simply hopeless task.

Herewith some examples of how the Introduction is often misleading and mistaken:

1.         ‘Written to his wife Victoria and intended only for her eyes and their daughter’s.’ In fact, some of them were widely circulated, and written with that intention, as part of Monash’s campaign that the Australian troops be given due respect for their feats of arms.

2.         Monash was ‘possibly the only true intellectual among the senior commanders of World War I’. (There would have been hundreds of such men of Monash’s rank and above.) Praise is sweet, particularly of one’s grandfather, but this assertion is both unlikely and impossible to prove.

3.         Monash as a boy spent ‘a short period in Jerilderie’. It was actually two and a half years in all, an experience that affected him for the rest of his life.

4.         Monash had a ‘happy childhood’. We don’t know that. He was very close to his mother, but his father was distant and inadequate and the boy was overworked to fulfil the adult demands on the ‘wunderkind’.

5.         ‘He attended his barmitzvah at the age of thirteen.’ A Jewish boy does not ‘attend’ his bar mitzvah; he is or becomes bar mitzvah.

6.         ‘Princes Street Bridge’. No such structure exists.

7.         ‘The city’s few Jews were mostly assimilated.’ Meaning what by ‘assimilated’?

8.         ‘Their daughter Bertha (Bert) was born in 1892.’ The Monash’s only child, my mother, was born in 1893, not 1892.

9.         The depression of the 1890s ‘almost destroyed Monash’s financial security’. At that stage in his life, there was no security to be destroyed.

10.       Monash was a member ‘of the best clubs’. Is the Melbourne Club one of these? Jews were not welcome, and Monash never belonged.

11.       The family trip around the world in 1910: ‘Europe itself seemed to have left him cold.’ Please consult Serle pages 174–75. Monash much enjoyed his only European trip, or, at least, many aspects of it.

I could go on, and on; this is not the half of it. Mr Macdougall reignites the long-held Australian myth surrounding Lloyd-George’s and Liddell-Hart’s remarks of the 1930s about Monash’s possible accession to the highest command in World War I. Serle devoted perhaps his finest chapter to the matter of Monash’s postwar reputation. He demonstrates how unreliable these assertions were and clarifies the political arguments in Britain that caused them to be made.

The Australian public deserves better than these dubious passages and many others for which I have no room here.

Now that this emasculated version of the War Letters has been published, it is unlikely that there will be a reprint of the original edition, which contained twice the number of letters, covering the whole war, as well as maps, photographs and index, all of which are missing from this edition. We are therefore deprived of the possible availability of an important work of Australian history.

Elizabeth Durré, Kew, Vic.

John Monash victorious

Dear Editor,

Peter Ryan, in his review (ABR, June/July 2002) of Tony Macdougall’s War Letters of General Monash, points out that Geoffrey Serle’s biography John Monash has long been unavailable. He quotes Macdougall’s view that it is ‘possibly the finest biography of a public figure and a private man published in Australia’. Ryan laments that the publisher’s efforts to reissue in paperback have come to nought because ‘the university that bears Monash’s name has declined even a paltry financial contribution to the project’.

Melbourne University Press is indeed keen to republish. And, sadly, it is true that our formal approaches to the very highest reaches of Monash University failed dismally. But the scholars of Monash have shown their mettle. We are delighted to report that, thanks to the intervention of Graeme Davison and others, and to generous contributions from the School of Historical Studies and the Centre for the Study of Jewish Civilisation, we will now be able to restore John Monash to the world in a handsome new edition.

Teresa Pitt, MUP, Carlton, Vic.

Reviewing the reviewer

Dear Editor,

Any mention of White always did provoke strong feelings, and it is important not to get caught up with counterproductive views on new readings of canonical works. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to answer Richard Bell’s review (ABR, June/July 2002) of my book Patrick White and Alchemy.

Bell’s review ranges from comparisons with his ‘favourite book’ on Frank Zappa in the opening paragraph, an inflation of commonplace and outdated perceptions of White, to multiple highly problematic reductions of, and generalisations on, White and ‘significant artists’, and how difficult it must be to find new things to say about them.

In addition, Bell compares my work to David Tacey’s neo-Jungian work on White, failing to note that I explicitly distance myself from it in several places in the book. There are indications that Bell has read only the first third of the book and skimmed the rest, as there is no mention of the complexities of the latter two-thirds, where alchemy is analysed as a significant hybridity metaphor in post-colonial fiction.

Bell states that ‘no evidence is proffered in support of the contention’ that White had an interest in alchemy. Given that the reviewer is reading a 332-page monograph on alchemical imagery in the first part of White’s oeuvre, this statement seems bizarre. Any White aficionado would know that, both as a writer and as a man, White was extremely secretive about his private life, guarded his inspirational sources jealously, and systematically destroyed any references to them. After Barthes’s ‘The Death of the Author’, Bell’s argument against my book that there is no biographical evidence of White’s interest in alchemy fades, especially when counter-shaded with the prolific manifestations in White’s entire oeuvre. Towards the end of the review, Bell’s pseudo-knowledge of alchemical scholarship becomes apparent when his ‘quick google search’ leads him to a surprise discovery of Barbara Di Bernard’s standard work Alchemy and Finnegan’s Wake, thereby exposing a striking lack of knowledge of the field he attempts to review.

James Bulman-May, Aarhus, Denmark