For Real Readers

A happy coincidence with the Easter just passed was the arrival of the Spring issue of Slightly Foxed. Spring? Well, it is published in England. “Foxing”, as bibliophiles will know, is the term for those brown freckles which start to appear—faintly at first—in the paper of books which have (to put it gently) begun to mellow.

Slightly Foxed (subtitled The Real Reader’s Quarterly) calls itself “the lively … review for the independent minded”, and it is. Moreover, into the bargain, its 100 small pages of creamy, no-glare-in-your-eyes paper are beautifully edited, designed, printed and bound. Though not in hard covers, it is sturdily thread-sewn—not one of those glued-together ghastlies that fall apart in your hand. Even the grandest imprints in Australia might look to Slightly Foxed as a model for the faithful performance of every publishing punctilio in the craft.

This gem is produced by Gail Pirkis and Hazel Wood, proprietors of the Slightly Foxed Bookshop in Gloucester Road, London. Their Slightly Foxed journal is a sideline, conducted from Gail’s own flat where, one gathers, the sideline is creating an ever-tautening squeeze.

The ladies confess to being “addicted royal watchers, taut with anticipation of the looming William and Kate nuptials”. Before dour and dogmatic Australian republicans curdle and switch off, may I suggest they lighten up a little—sufficiently at least to enjoy Slightly Foxed’s tale of an earlier royal wedding—that of Queen Victoria’s son the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. On the occasion, an abominably-behaved brat of a four-year-old royal nephew ran wild, biting British uncles in the legs. Here, surely, in an earlier century, was a foreshadowing of the First World War: the feral child grew up to be Kaiser Wilhelm II, principal author of the horrors and miseries of 1914–18.

Who are those “real readers” at whom the editors aim their cunningly-crafted quarterly arrow? Well, for a start, not academic elites, nor self-satisfied bluestockings of either sex. Nor is Slightly Foxed “a literary shelter … in which nostalgics might escape from the storm of the times”. Yet, even while one is eagerly devouring each newly-arrived issue, “the tinnitus of present worries” fades, though without “lapsing into the trivial or pining for some Paradise Lost”.

Slightly Foxed’s readers, I rejoice to say, are “uncommonly like you or me”. For no other reason than their own delight or nourishment, they graze the lush pastures of the English canon, chewing the cud over many a thoughtful clover clump: writings from, say: Piers Plowman to Anthony Powell; from Shakespeare to Shaw; from William of Wykeham to Oscar Wilde; from Mrs Gaskell to Graham Greene; from Coleridge to Conrad; from Keats to Kipling; from W.W. Jacobs to James Joyce; from Dickens to Dunsany; from Waugh to Wodehouse.

A typical quarterly issue of Slightly Foxed offers some twelve to fifteen essays, each of them three to six or seven pages long. Occasionally I find one not of much interest, or perhaps above my head. Specifically Australian topics are rare. But once every three months I am quite content to browse along without the misgiving of some waiting ambush by Ned Kelly, Manning White or Patrick Clark.

But the catholicity of coverage means that many of the articles are not at all remote from our concerns, but offer us enlightenment and relevance. Consider, for example, the anti-Jewish antics of our (possibly deranged) Marrickville Green municipal council, which makes noises uncomfortably reminiscent of crude anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Those matters seem to be the only aspects nowadays remembered of the fundamental vileness of German fascism. But to my generation, which spent six years in battle with it, in which tens of thousands of us died, there was a great deal more to it than that. The totalitarian flavour is well conveyed by the following short quote from Slightly Foxed, drawn from an official lesson in a Hitler-period German girls school: “Our Fuhrer wants and needs soldiers to destroy his enemies. You all know that soldiers don’t just grow by themselves. They must be born. Don’t wait too long. You are now fifteen—in a year or two you can have babies. Meanwhile, become acquainted with some good Aryan soldier.”

One of the liveliest essays is Michael Barber’s little study of Gore Vidal, and for that alone I would have bought the Spring issue. Still writing merrily away as his eighties loomed over him, was Vidal chiefly a novelist, an essayist, a Hollywood “creator” of films and television scripts, a rather tinselly philosopher cum all-purpose smarty-pants, or a celebrity who hung out with the Kennedys? Gore Vidal was all of the above. Only time will sort out the order of his talents, and it is far too early to decide.

Barber titles his essay “the fatal gift of phrase”, a quote from Vidal himself. The problem is that some writer’s mere quips and sallies, his smart crack or his bon mot may be so apt, so cuttingly cruel, so amusing that they become the author’s trademark, and little else is remembered. Oscar Wilde at times stood close to such a danger. It was no doubt very funny when Vidal described the newly elected President Ronald Reagan as a “triumph of the embalmer’s art”. How did it sound a few years later, at the West’s successful emergence from the Cold War?

Again, Australian experience provides a parallel. During John Howard’s rise and rule, the Canberra press gallery in general showed him, not merely broad disapproval, but a visceral detestation which shaded, with certain individual journalists, into a mouth-foaming irrationality, where capacity for objective judgment had vanished under insensate rage. It is quite true that Howard was everything the gallery was not, but they never stopped to consider in whose favour the balance might lie. That the voters simply preferred Howard was to them not an acceptable reason—never mind about democracy. Gallery members fell about laughing at their own brilliant drollery when someone named Howard “the unflushable turd”. I have heard this invention ascribed to gallery veteran Mungo MacCallum but also attributed to my old mate, the huge and booming Fairfax man Ian Fitchett, sadly now departed from among us.

Very funny again, but how does it look now? After years of a Howard government which, with all faults, was a stable and (mostly) serious administration, financially under control, we are all (and especially Labor supporters) embarrassed by a government which regularly cuts its own throat, stabs itself in the back, shoots itself in the foot, and fumbles every important portfolio of state. And all the time captive to a minority party of mad people and a flaky group of independents. 

As a final sample from the current number of Slightly Foxed, let us glance at its account of a series of books of collected war poems, inspired over a brew shared by three men in a Cairo coffee shop in 1942. Just then, our desert war was in a precarious state. Rommel’s Afrika Korps still threatened to surge eastward, and Montgomery was still to win his crushing victory at El Alamein. At such a juncture, these three had the idea of collecting the poems they felt sure the men and women serving in the Middle East must be writing. (Had not the First World War called forth Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Leon Gellert … Was not the present Field Marshal Wavell himself a poet?)

Official approval (and an adequate supply of printing paper!) were forthcoming, and the amazing number of 3000 poems were submitted. In 1943 appeared Oasis: The Middle East Anthology of Poetry from the Forces. It was a sell-out.

The article is of particular interest to Australians, for it distinguishes for special mention a short poem by Michael Thwaites, a “24-year-old Australian sailor”. He is praised for having captured perfectly the serious mood in which most young men took the step of enlistment in the Second World War: no dreams of plumes, banners, trumpets and glory. (An unpoetic expression of their feeling would have been: “Let’s get this bloody job done and get back home to Mum.”) Michael Thwaites got it exactly right in eight lines; I can remember: 

No drums they wished, whose thoughts were tied
To girls and jobs and mother,
Who rose and drilled and killed and died
Because they saw no other.
Who died without the hero’s throb,
And if they trembled, hid it,
Who did not fancy much their job
But thought it best and did it. 

But how many Australians recall the name of Michael Thwaites today?

From an Australian Rhodes scholarship and a brilliant Oxford degree, he joined Britain’s Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Soon, as a young lieutenant, he took command of a sturdy little fishing trawler called Wastwater. Her hunt for German U-boats took her on an immense voyage which traced the perimeter of the whole Atlantic Ocean. (Later, at Melbourne University Press, I published for him the beautifully told story of this remarkable wartime feat, which he called Atlantic Odyssey.)

After the war, a teaching post in the English Department at Melbourne University did not welcome him with any special warmth. (“Good God! Still interested in John Masefield and A.E. Housman!”) And in one quarter there was academic envy that the Age Saturday literary pages had so swiftly offered him generous hospitality for his regular “Poetry Notebook”, where he displayed poets and poetry for the enjoyment of ordinary readers. To cap it all, he was a frank and enthusiastic practical Christian believer—not necessarily a sure-fire signpost to the top in university departments in the early 1950s (or now).

To Michael’s vast astonishment, Charles Spry, director-general of ASIO was (as he said) seeking to “infuse some imagination” into his security establishment: perhaps a poet would have imagination? So he offered Thwaites the post of head of counter-espionage, which he accepted, and held for nearly twenty years.

Spry’s appointment was a brilliant intuition, but no huge surprise to those who knew the director-general well. He had been a fine serving officer during the war, and a man of high capacities. The ABC’s recent television program on him was (even for the ABC) a disgusting travesty. Michael Thwaites directly produced one of the most outstanding intelligence coups of the Cold War—the defection in Australia of the Soviet spy Vladimir Petrov, and the production of the Venona transcripts. In the confused mass of recent media coverage of espionage and subversion in the Cold War—from Petrov to Doctor Evatt—have you seen even one credit to Michael Thwaites?

But it was pleasant to read the brief but honourable mention of his name far away in England, in Slightly Foxed.

Information on Slightly Foxed appears on the website, www.foxedquarterly.com.