Here Riemer discusses his long academic career, almost entirely spent at Sydney University. He highlights the theatricality of academia, though often it is a theatre of war. I remember Andrew Riemer during my time as a doctoral student at Sydney. I never spoke to him, even though I was writing about Australian autobiography and he had just written one. It was that kind of place, or I was that kind of student. In the context of this book, this seems suitably Riemeresque, given his own experiences of academia’s reticences and codes. Despite my diffidence, I sensed that his lugubrious style was a product of a developed sense of humour, as much as a masking of it.

In Sandstone Gothic Riemer chooses English as an undergraduate, more for style than substance, after failing medicine three times. Riemer argues that in his self-fashioning, setting aside his Hungarian years, he was ineluctably drawn to English because of Australian cultural conditions in the early ‘60s. Riemer’s nostalgic sensibility was compounded by Australia’s nostalgia for Britain; his sense of exile compounded by his living in a country defined by exile. His ‘sentimental education’ was received at an institution whose motto, loosely translated, reads ‘the same mind under different skies’. The nostalgia inevitably leads Riemer to postgraduate work in England. Instead of Oxbridge, he heads for the University of London, partly through a fear of being found out as a parodist, and partly through a desire to live in a metropolis, a European city, rather than a provincial one. London, not the University, gives him the required education.

It may be a commonplace criticism these days, but nevertheless I feel that this work is under-edited. In the earlier books, Riemer seamlessly joined the autobiographical and essayistic spirits. Here there are, for me, a few moments when tension is lost, and repetition stands in for exposition. Once in London, though, Sandstone Gothic really takes off, perhaps because Riemer’s gift is for recovering long-gone moods through the evocation of earlier times and places. (In this case in that netherworld that was then the British Museum’s Reading Room). He also has an eye for absurdities of English life then. In addition, Riemer seems unconstrained in his representation of people, such as his supervisor, whose ‘seminars’ where held in the Dickensian local, and who only showed interest in Riemer’s thesis when it involved ‘real’ research, such as within the ‘underwater gloom’ of the Public Records Office.

The set piece of Sandstone Gothic, however, is Samuel Goldberg’s attempt, as Challis Professor, to make the English Department at Sydney University in his own, Leavisite, image. In the last twenty years, Leavisites have been so discredited that it is hard to imagine how Australia could have been so dramatically affected by them. Despite being more even handed than John Docker’s account (in In a Critical Condition) of these early theory wars, there are moments when old bitternesses seem to show like weathered, but still visible, wounds on a tree.

Though Riemer may spend too long on this issue for his general audience, there are some wickedly funny moments. The department’s fracture into two is described intimately, but the episode has no scène à faire. G.A. Wilkes, then the holder of the new chair in Australian Literature, finesses a situation whereby he can devise English courses. The Berlin Wall that eventuates is unsustainable, and Goldberg and his supporters leave, mostly returning to Melbourne University (about which Riemer has little to say). Perhaps, this anti-climax is intentional. ‘It is ever thus’, Riemer seems to be saying. In this section, my own few memories of Wilkes are surprisingly borne out, especially with regard to his presence in departmental meetings. Tall, taciturn and impassive, Wilkes’ striking white plumage was never ruffled by the more strident calls of the cockatoos and lyrebirds around him.

The real climax of Sandstone Gothic comes when a similarly evangelical brand of literary studies makes its way into the University in the ‘80s (known, risibly, to the press as ‘Theory’). This eventually leads Riemer to take early retirement and engage more fully in writing and reviewing.

Sandstone Gothic is framed by encounters with three figures of Riemer’s student days: Jill Ker Conway, Germaine Greer, and Robert Hughes (no Clive), described with varying degrees of effectiveness. Their roles become apparent towards the end, as they reappear like figures in a Morality play. Riemer can’t quite decide whether their success is enviable.

Certainly, he concludes, such success could only occur through expatriation. This is emblematic of Riemer’s situation. Having been expatriated once he seems unable to make a further exile, and to engage further in parody once in the metropolis. Indeed, in this work he seems less sanguine than in Inside Outside or The Habsburg Café about the apparently

postmodern condition of his narrative, with its emphasis on parody and surfaces. The insider on the outside, or the outsider on the inside, is not a position gained without costs. While mimicry is a way of controlling the object of attention (English culture in an antipodean context, or a remembrance of Middle Europe), it also, Riemer seems to say, has real effects upon the psyche.

Northrop Frye once wrote of comic resolution as ‘an individual release which is also a social reconciliation’. Memory, then, the act of narration, is like the green world that Frye associates with Elizabethan comedy, though the degree of release and reconciliation is less clear here than in the discourse of drama.

In a way Sandstone Gothic is both a lament for and celebration of the Australianness of Riemer’s sensibility and the effects that it had on his career: the modesty and nostalgia, the looking towards the metropolis. Perhaps it is this, rather than the ivory tower, that most academics wish to inhabit.