Mouths and heads, and what comes out of them in the way of words or song, have been a preoccupation of Conrad’s work throughout his career: in his books and articles on the pronouncements of other writers down the centuries, and on opera and the vocal athletes who perform it; in the collation of interviews he conducted with celebrities of stage, screen and other media, with its carnivorous-sounding title, Feasting with Panthers (1994); and in his one novel to date, a bleak, nihilistic fantasy called Underworld (1992), where the first image to confront us, and a recurrent motif thereafter, is of a detached human head. A mouth features not just on the jacket of his latest book; the text itself pauses at moments to anatomise the great variety on offer from Hitchcock-predatory mouths, hungry mouths, gaping mouths, profanity-uttering mouths, even a mouth under dental ‘excavation’, as well as other screaming mouths. The concluding chapter of the book, which catalogues the ways in which Hitchcock uncannily taps into our – or at least Conrad’s – everyday fears and obsessions, is given the title ‘A Haunted Head’.

Conrad’s own mouthings in the past have never been exclusively text-bound. While no singer, as far as we know, he has earned his basic bread and butter as a talking head, lecturing in universities and speaking on radio and television about a vast range of cultural issues. The Hitchcock book itself grew partly out of some classes he conducted with students at his main academic base, Oxford University, and from a centenary tribute to the filmmaker which he wrote and narrated for BBC Radio 3 in 1999.

Way back in early childhood, long before he learned to hone any of his verbal or rhetorical talents, he proved himself, by his own account, a prodigious screamer. The account appears in Down Home: Revisiting Tasmania (1988), the book where he fully comes out as an Australian. (His previous eight books gave away little or nothing of his origins.) In the opening pages of Down Home, he recalls being taken by his father and mother to a gymkhana in suburban Hobart when he was about four or five years old. This would have been in the early 1950s, the decade of surpassing drabness in the eyes of most Australian intellectuals. His parents soon had to take him home again, as he suddenly let out a piercing and unappeasable cry in the middle of the showground. If we can credit his retrospective interpretation of this outburst, it represented an impassioned protest against the accident of birth which had cruelly consigned him to such a cultural backwater:

My silly fit of misery … repeated that first cry of the displaced infant … This was not the life I wanted; somehow I’d been given the wrong one … What continued to terrify me was the rawness, the shivering vulnerability of the place. 

While this was no scream of fear – more a kind of anti-’barbaric yawp’ – there’s a distinctly Hitchcockian frisson to Conrad’s recounting of it. That last sentence in the passage just quoted might seem just as applicable to Janet Leigh’s phobia about taking showers after her appearance in Psycho as to Conrad’s lingering childhood apprehensions of his birthplace. It makes the more puzzling, however, a remark in his latest book that in seeing Psycho in Hobart at the age of thirteen, ‘I had been handed a psychological agenda for maturity, supplied with a life-time’s worth of bad dreams’. There’s something of a non sequitur in this remark anyway (what have recurrent ‘bad dreams’ to do with maturity?), but the remark is also a contradiction of what he reveals about Hitchcock elsewhere in this book, and, moreover, of what is revealed of his own life and work both in this book and its predecessors. The very talents of Conrad and Hitchcock in their different fields of endeavour, the exhilarations that each is capable of producing in their respective audiences, what can madden you about them, too, or suggest their limitations: all of these things are related to the means and processes by which they have not matured, according to conventional standards, but contrived to remain disturbed or disturbing children.

Conrad discourses more or less explicitly on the resolutely non-maturing Hitchcock, on the director as eternal child, at various points of the book. ‘I do not believe,’ he announces in the preface, ‘that his concerns or his tactics changed significantly in the course of a career that lasted half a century.’ We’re told subsequently: Hitchcock looks like a harmless, overgrown baby, a perpetual infant, still held hostage by childish greeds’, and, a little later on the same page, that ‘a baby has absolute power … Its life, like a Hitchcock film, is about instantly gratified wishes, fantasies that grown-ups hastily put into action.’ Elsewhere, Conrad reminds us that Orson Welles ‘likened a movie studio to a train set’ and that ‘Hitchcock shared this infantile enjoyment of an art that was still in its infancy’, though he has made clear in the preface that not all the great artists in this medium are like this: ‘There are, I know, directors who are greater, with nobler and more humane motives’ (and he names a few – Ozu, Antonioni, Ford – without expanding on them). Other references to Hitchcock’s ‘games’ with his film audiences, to his practical jokes on his young daughter or on other little girls, to his ‘wicked playfulness’ both as a director and a father, are sprinkled throughout Conrad’s text. Occasionally, he might venture a slight reservation about such pranks (‘a strange way to express affection’, he concedes at one point), his general tone in these instances, as in much of rest of his commentary, is awed or admiring, complaisant or complicit. The book, he kiddishly pleads at the outset, ‘is my grateful fan letter to the bogey-man’.

Conrad’s feelings of empathy with the naughty child in Hitchcock Conrad’s go back to that time when he himself was still an ‘adolescent boy’ in Hobart, and managed to slip into Psycho one weekday afternoon, evading both his school commitments and the constraints of the censor. Passing for ‘MATURE’ (the censor’s category for admission) in fact involved him in some classic brat behaviour: ‘playing truant’, dumping his ‘school cap and blazer’, and ‘investigating how much it was possible to get away with’. In the same year, we learn from Down Home, a Tasmanian company was making a film of Nan Chauncy’s children’s classic, They Found a Cave, and Conrad presented himself for a screen test. As he recalls, ‘thanks to my proficiency at screaming in mortal terror and laughing hysterically on camera … I got one of the parts.’ It enabled him to wag school, officially, for three months.

The initiation into maturity with which he associates Psycho in one breath he recognises elsewhere as a pubescent fixation that has never left him. ‘I assumed,’ he says in the opening chapter of The Hitchcock Murders, ‘that I would eventually recover from the obsession, just as I outgrew my adolescent rashes. Now, accepting that I never will, I want to understand why.’ His closing chapter vividly confirms just how fixed, as well as fixated, he has been by Hitchcock’s images and self-images down the years – unable to escape, or even to want an escape, from their infectious juvenility. The landings and stairwell of Conrad’s house in London, we learn, are swathed in posters of Hitchcock: movies from all around the world. There are Japanese, Danish, Mexican, French, German, and Italian versions as well as some of the original Hollywood classics. ‘Neuroses now advance across my walls like a global epidemic,’ he unashamedly observes. ‘From the bottom to the top, it is a long climb’, but Hitchcock, he notes gratefully, ‘keeps me company. So do my younger selves, dating back to the truant who slunk in to see Psycho.’

Aspects of his younger selves have proved to be a persistent force in Conrad’s climb to literary and intellectual eminence in England and America, and there is no denying that one in particular has been a superbly enabling force. He was ‘good at exams’, as he modestly puts it on the opening page of Down Home. His record suggests he was brilliant at them. This preternatural talent was probably what reassured his teachers at school that he could afford three months off to go filming. It was eventually to pay his passage to England and secure his livelihood there. Such precocity, of course, is no guarantee of maturity, whatever that may be.

In 1968, after only three years at the University of Tasmania, Conrad was awarded a Rhodes scholarship; most recipients of this award in Australia at the time would have had to wait until they completed a four-year honours degree, involving a thesis as well as exams. Two years later, he completed his second undergraduate degree at Oxford to great acclaim; rumours floated about the place that his exam papers had been declared publishable as they stood. Greater glory awaited him when he decided to sit for the Prize Fellowship examinations at All Souls College, Oxford’s most exalted academic institution, removed from the general student body. Only two of these fellowships are awarded each year, and the process involves a series of exams in areas well beyond any undergraduate specialty, as well as a gruelling interview and an even more gruelling dinner with the dons, where (as legend has it) a candidate’s manners are on trial as much as his mind. Conrad won, triumphing in all the tests and surviving all the ordeals like some intellectual Tamino or Calaf. His lustre assured by his All Souls success, he was to quit this formidable enclave a few years later for a teaching post at another Oxford college, Christ Church, and to take up the first of a series of visiting fellowships and lectureships at American universities.

He had already begun to be sought after as a regular reviewer of books, and later of opera and other cultural events, in the most august British weeklies, including the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, Spectator, and Observer. (Just the list of his reviews in the TLS index fills columns.) He can still be found contributing to such publications every now and then, and he has also in recent years managed to break into the charmed circle of contributors to the New Yorker. His first book, a study of interconnections between nineteenth-century fiction, painting and architecture entitled The Victorian Treasure-House, was published in 1973 when he was twenty-five – relatively late for a wunderkind, though he has more than made up for it since with his daunting tally of tomes (some fifteen in number, including The Hitchcock Murders) on all manner of cultural subjects, from the most mandarin to the down-homiest, and ranging across at least three millennia and three continents. Two of these books (his Everyman History of English Literature, published in 1985, and Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the Twentieth Century, 1998) contain around 750 pages each. None of the more famous cultural refugees from this country that I wrote about in my book Once an Australian – all of them at least ten years older than Conrad – has matched this volume of productivity, nor perhaps his intellectual versatility.

He is well justified in suggesting, as he does in Down Home, that it was his youthful talent for exams that ‘earned me my second chance. Home was where you started from, not where you stayed.’ But what did that chance entail? Its yield has been an ambiguous one, to say the least. Musing on his break from home in the following paragraph, he remarks: ‘the thing I had lost was childhood, youth: the two decades before you control your own life, when you are tussled and twisted into the being which you helplessly remain.’ There’s an illuminating paradox here, if it’s not another non sequitur. How could he have both ‘lost’ those earlier stages of life and continued to be their captive?

The paradox is partly resolved, or explained, by his bold assertion in his second volume of autobiographical writing, Where I Fell to Earth (1991):

I can remember the exact moment of my birth. It happened on Waterloo Bridge, on a morning in August 1968; I was twenty years old at the time.

Those previous twenty years were, however, cancelled at that moment ... I had spent them in Tasmania, reading about what my life would be like when I was reborn in the northern hemisphere. I was inclined to see this term of years as one of those penitential, ignominious lives you have to toil through in order to atone for crimes in some other incarnation – except that I was doing my penance in advance, and once I’d got it over I could expect release, perhaps, into a new existence.

That ‘perhaps’ is a wise reservation. You might detect an echo here of another talented émigré, albeit from the pages of fiction, who relished the prospects of a ‘clean slate’ facilitated by his removal from the pinched and provincial world of his upbringing: ‘This was the real annihilation of his past and of himself, Tom Ripley, who was made up of that past, and his rebirth as a completely new person’ (The Talented Mr Ripley, 1955). Conrad is certainly familiar with Ripley’s creator, Patricia Highsmith, if only from the earlier novel of hers which Hitchcock famously adapted, Strangers on a Train. But there are significant differences, and one is that Conrad doesn’t change his name as Ripley does, so that the ‘new existence’ he looks forward to forging is already somewhat restricted by a hangover from a past identity that he can never bring himself to efface. Conrad’s migration to the Old World of his childhood imaginings does not bring about ‘rebirth as a completely new person’.

Being ‘reborn’, in however different a world from your original birthplace, also implies going through the phases of childhood and youth again, not skipping them or fast-tracking to maturity. In a sense, Conrad at twenty can be said to have chosen to sustain or renew the state of childhood and to have resolutely eschewed the only alternative available to him at the time. Given the nature of the alternative, he was lucky to have had an option, and few would hold it against him for making the choice he did at the time. The year in which he was granted the Rhodes Scholarship to England was also the year in which he received his call-up papers for military service. If he had not gone to Oxford, he would have had to join the Australian armed forces almost immediately. This, too, would eventually have taken him away from home, as those forces were then committed to fighting in the war in Vietnam; but whatever prospects of ‘rebirth’ might have been associated with such a locale – not as distant as Oxford, but far more exotic – would have been tinged, to say the least, by the countervailing prospects of violent death. Conventional thinking, anyway, has tended to identify military service of all kinds not as a means of rebirth so much as an instrument by which youths are made men: as an agent of ‘manliness’, if not maturity. There may be good grounds for questioning this line of thinking, but Conrad himself, in his Hitchcock book, seems to fall in with it. Speaking there of two of the main characters in Rope, which was filmed not long after World War II, he tartly observes: ‘The dandies presumably avoided the call-up.’

The Oxford experience for Conrad involved the perpetuation of his bookish childhood by other means – or, indeed, by the same means. That ‘second chance’ he earned by being ‘good at exams’ was in large part a chance to go on showing how good he was at this pursuit. It’s true that many Rhodes scholars of his day were encouraged to do a second undergraduate degree; it gave you the stamp of a ‘true’ Oxford product more than any doctorate could. But there was an element of choice again in Conrad’s submission to the process; and the phrase he uses to sum it up, ‘fancy-dress exams’, an allusion to the peculiar dress etiquette Oxford imposes on its candidates down to this day, says something of the back-to-childhood mood he recognised in the whole ritual.

Certainly, Conrad needn’t have submitted himself to the extra ordeal of the All Souls exams; the quality of his undergraduate papers was more than sufficient to earn him entry to a research degree programme anywhere in the world, let alone careers outside the playground of the university. But attempting those daunting exams and winning the Fellowship allowed him complete freedom to work as he wished, without the boring accountability, the punctilious disciplines, the professional cautions and proprieties involved in doing a doctorate. The main burden at All Souls, as he describes it in Where I Fell to Earth, was the dress code, which was no kids’ stuff but more country gentleman’s. It was a great relief in the end to get back to a mainly undergraduate college, where for all of its own aristocratic swank in days past, it was now possible for him to get away with his teenage civvies most of the day: ‘my lightweight Australian suits and peglegged pants.’

Another slight problem with All Souls (though he doesn’t say so) is that once he had done the exams there, and succeeded in them so brilliantly, there were really none left worth bothering about. But then there was that precious opportunity he had now been granted to write what and how he wished, so what was to prevent his carrying on in much the same manner as before? Dipping in to most of Conrad’s writing, from The Victorian Treasure House (begun while he was still at All Souls) to The Hitchcock Murders nearly three decades later, you get the impression that he’s still writing brilliant exam answers, and that there’s been no more sign of development in ‘his concerns or his tactics’ than he attributes to the childlike subject of his latest book. That it proves so easy just to dip and dabble in all his writings down the years bears out the continuing aptness of Joseph Kerman’s verdict on Conrad in a critique of his second book, Romantic Opera and Literary Form, in the New York Review of Books: ‘His work proceeds by repetition, by the multiplication of epigrams in a process of evolving variation, rather than by the logical development of argument’ (9 February 1978).

There’s not much opportunity or requirement in an exam for sustained logical development; and you can certainly risk the odd non sequitur, if it’s wrapped up in a sufficiently dazzling epigram. There’s no room either for the painstaking assemblage of evidence, with supporting documentation, to be found in a work of scholarship. The good candidate depends on making an impact through the quick grab of a few paragraphs each in answer to a fairly discrete set of questions. One or two breathtaking cadenzas will be enough to lend plausibility to your stated opinion on the questions concerned. A pause to qualify your opinions, even in the· shape of a mere ‘perhaps’, is something of a luxury. Protracted reflection would only delay you in proceeding to the next question or to your next exam. Reductiveness – the more startling the better – is the name of the game. Of course, you have to be superbly prepared to play the game well, with all that has to be reduced stored somewhere in your head. You trust to your extraordinary capacity for absorbing new facts and languages that might come in handy and, in deploying these, to your memory, rigorously trained through doing previous exams. The labour of elaborate notetaking, systematic filing, exhaustive checking and rechecking, all that goes under the name ‘research’, may therefore be dispensed with, and your examiners as well as you will probably find this less taxing, more fun. If they’re susceptible to some lively entertainment amidst the dross that is routinely served up to them, you’ll gain top marks as you always did as a kid.

The Hitchcock Murders shows little deviation from this winning formula. There’s a succession of provocatively reductive utterances, such as ‘what is a camera but a spy-glass?’, or ‘what are orgasms … but enjoyable deaths?’, or ‘music, like imprisonment, is a matter of keeping or doing time, an enforced apprenticeship to duration’. (Sometimes these can sound as much like exam questions as answers.) There are some impressive signs of specialist learning. Conrad has clearly taken the trouble to learn the language of the medium he’s writing about, approaching film on its own distinctive terms, not those of earlier cultural and artistic modes. But he has no time for documenting his learning or providing his readers with a ready means of checking it. There have been no footnotes or endnotes to his work ever since his third book, Shandyism (1978). Those can be useful self-checking devices, too, but with his extraordinary memory, why should he bother with them?

Just occasionally, this heedlessness can diminish the fun. In recounting the preparatory scenes of that great train thriller The Lady Vanishes (1938), memory fails him for once, and he rather spoils the story of those two cricket-addicted passengers, Caldicott and Charters, by attributing the latter’s fears for his native England to the worsening international situation rather than to its fortunes in a test match. In his account of the opening scene of Rope, on the other hand, he might be forgiven any inexactness or flight of fancy. His re-creation of its verbal and choreographic strategies is a masterpiece of descriptive prose: taut, elegantly creepy, every bit as enthralling as the original scene in the film. Such qualities mightn’t qualify Conrad’s criticism for publication in some of today’s more heavyweight journals of film analysis and theory. But if that’s how maturity is measured, you could well understand his feeling that it’s a virtue – as Hitch himself might have put it – strictly for the birds.