Between the Covers

Now that John O’Sullivan has assumed the editorship of Quadrant for the next couple of years it may help to look at what he has had to say on a number of public issues.

O’Sullivan’s First Law: “Any institution that is not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”

On Catholic atheists: “Recent years have seen the rise of ‘Catholic atheists’ or ‘Christian atheists’. Oriana Fallaci was one of these. Kenneth Minogue has distinguished them from Christophobic secularists who increasingly seek to uproot what remains of Christian tradition from national law and custom. In resisting their attacks we should seek out allies among ‘Christian atheists’. If they are as clever, brave and principled as Oriana Fallaci and Ken Minogue, we will have recruited powerful intellectual auxiliaries.”

On immigration: “Getting patriotic assimilation right is as vital as—perhaps more vital than—getting border security right.”

On the new anti-Semitism: “No one who grew up in the thirty years after the Second World War could ever have imagined then that anti-Semitism might recover from its links with Nazism and the Holocaust. Nations are cultural communities and the sense of common fellowship and destiny they promote enables different ethnic and religious groups to live together in relative harmony. If those commonalities evaporate or are frivolously destroyed, a war of all against all will erupt and spread by degrees. Europe’s current ‘war on the Jews’ is the first flickering sign of that Armageddon.”

On working for Mrs Thatcher: “Almost everyone who worked on her staff loved her. The ladies who served tea, the doormen, her beloved detectives, could do no wrong; her ministers and senior civil servants must have sometimes felt they could do no right. When a waitress at Chequers stumbled and poured soup into the lap of the Foreign Secretary, Mrs Thatcher jumped up and comforted the waitress!”

Before he joined Mrs Thatcher’s staff, O’Sullivan was a frequent contributor to Quadrant. Some excerpts may also be a useful guide.

On Britain before Thatcher: “Mrs Thatcher’s government was elected last month amid scenes of modest and restrained celebration. Can she really curb trade union power, we whispered? Will tax cuts revive Britain’s static industrial production? Is firm control over the money supply enough to restrain the rate of inflation? If the British disease is incurable, then our reluctance to celebrate was right. Mrs Thatcher deserved not congratulations but sympathy.” (October 1979)

After three years of Thatcherism: “Since coming into office in 1979 Mrs Thatcher has presided over a deep recession, rising unemployment and high inflation. Voters may have judged the government incompetent; they have not assessed it as unfit to govern. What will be the eventual impact on British politics of the Falklands War, the most momentous political happening since Suez? Mrs Thatcher has been transformed from a partisan politician to a great national leader.” (August 1982)

On reforming businessmen: “There are few more necessary tasks than preaching capitalism to capitalists. A lifetime spent selling soap—and indeed in eating, living, breathing and thinking soap—will leave the sharpest businessman vague and baffled when it comes to the general principles that justify his way of life. He may be able to convince a packed hall of the superior virtues of Kleen-in-a-Minute but still be floored when told by a university student that the principal effect of Kleen-in-a-Minute is Alienation. He is usually defeated not by facts (the facts are overwhelmingly on his side) but by words …” (April 1983)

On leaving UNESCO: “The assistant director-general of UNESCO, Richard Hoggart, recalled a British diplomat who, asked his opinion of the campaign by Arab nations to expel Israel from UNESCO, replied, ‘My instructions are to sit on the fence.’” (January-February 1985)

THE DECISION of the publisher Connor Court to bring out a new edition of my Memoirs of a Slow Learner prompted me to look again at the wide-ranging criticisms of the first edition. It was a bracing exercise and ended up as my Introduction to the new edition. This is what turned up.

When Memoirs of a Slow Learner was first published twenty years ago, a number of reviewers complained that I was far too reticent. It was plain to all that I was no confessional poet compelled to advise readers of my sexual peculiarities and mental aberrations. But the complaint went beyond that. I was too uptight. I seemed afraid to let myself go, said Dick Hughes, the jazz pianist and himself an autobiographer. Why is there so little about my inner life, asked John McLaren, then editor of the leftist literary-political Overland? Father Edmund Campion, another autobiographer, found it a “shy”, “taciturn” and “dreamy” book. “No thrusting ego here, no raucous self-justification, no settling of old scores.” Geoffrey Dutton, poet and critic, found stray references to childhood unhappiness and loneliness which I “pass over at high speed but which must have gone deep”. “Not a trace of self-pity,” said the writer and composer R.J. Stove. The political commentator Max Teichmann also noted the early disappearance of my mother from the story and my total silence about my father’s second wife.

Other reviewers were closer to what I had set out to do. The poet Patrick Coady and the historian Nicholas Brown, for example, saw that the book was not meant to be an intimate personal autobio­graphy. Its real theme is the cultural and political turbulence of the 1940s and 1950s—a turbulence that had formed me. According to Jeff Shaw, later a Labor Attorney-General in New South Wales, the book is a “document” of Australian intellectual life. (I should have stuck to writing, he said, and not strayed into parliament—“a mistake”, he told me when I met him while door-knocking his street in suburban Gladesville.)

The American critic Margaret Boe Birns took this a step further: the point of the book is “the larger life of the mind”. Forget about my supposed reticence. When the book is read properly, “We learn more about Coleman than we think we do.” More precisely, the memoir is about the reach and limits of secular liberalism. Teichmann thought my deconstruction of the Left, in which I had grown up, was accurate enough but I should also, he said, have got stuck into the conservatives. Stove would have liked more “astringency” in presenting Sydney’s bohemians. Birns thought she found a key in my sketch of Manning Clark—the anguished historian and sage torn between the Catholic Church and the Kremlin. In a word, the book is, as Christopher Pearson put it, a Bildungsroman.

Doug Buckley, writing in a Christian magazine, was the most pointed of all. Far from being too reticent, Memoirs of a Slow Learner was, he said, “amongst the most self-revealing” books he had ever read. Its core is an “ardent life-long search for political and spiritual truth”. It takes its sympathetic readers on an “expedition to the edge of Christianity” (but stops short of submission). This fancy high-mindedness of mine irritated some readers. Was it too prissy, ultimately evasive, a little ridiculous? John Douglas Pringle, a former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, in a broadly sympathetic review, found something “comic” in the book’s excessive earnestness, its “magnificent obsession” with spiritual truth. Patrick Coady, also sympathetic, thought some of my more earnest passages may be “tongue-in-cheek”. One anonymous reviewer in Gerard Henderson’s Media Review, more exasperated than the generous Coady, found all that heavy stuff “boring”, “depressing” and “pretentious”; the book should be renamed Memoirs of a Slow Failure. Fair dinkum! he expostulated.

Readers will make what they will of these reviewers. But looking back across twenty years I see more clearly than I did at the time that the real origin of Memoirs of a Slow Learner was my immersion in the poetry of James McAuley (my old co-editor at Quadrant). I had already written one response to his work and genius, The Heart of James McAuley (also republished by Connor Court). His autobiographical poems moved me deeply, especially his “Letter to John Dryden”. It distantly echoed a similar family background to mine (freethinking father, Protestant mother), a similar education in a selective state high school and Sydney University, infatuation with communism, mysticism and Christianity. But whereas McAuley found a resolution of his quest in the Catholic Church, I persevered with secular liberalism, in the belief that imagination and feeling could still moisten its parched landscape. Several writers published rejoinders to McAuley’s “Letter”—Jack Lindsay, Amy Witting, A.D. Hope. Memoirs of a Slow Learner was mine. It could be called A Letter to James McAuley. In the years since, I have come to accept many of McAuley’s criticisms of my liberal secularism—many but not all. I am now more sceptical of the freethinkers who influenced me in my youth such as the philosopher John Anderson, and far less sceptical of church leaders like Archbishop Gough who deplored their influence. The conversation continues.