A Lifetime’s Erudition

The Shock of Recognition: The Books and Music That Have Inspired Me
by Barry Jones
Allen & Unwin, 2016, 412 pages, $32.99

Three of these books deal with subjects of which he is so ignorant that he will have to read at least fifty pages if he is to avoid making some howler which will betray him not merely to the author (who of course knows all about the habits of book reviewers), but even to the general reader. — George Orwell, “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”

Don’t tell me you’re going to read all the books you said you were going to read when you retired?
—Overbearing wife to henpecked husband in ancient, school-of-Thurber American cartoon

Perhaps in 2016 it is priggish even to hint at distaste for writing in the first-person singular. But receiving a commission to review Barry Jones’s exceptionally fine new volume renders such writing preordained, unless one wishes to attempt the first-person plural, at which even editorialists for the Age must now be jibbing. This is because Mr Jones very courteously encouraged me—when I was still in my twenties—by writing to me, sending me a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (which, to my shame, I had not then heard about), and suggesting that my youthful prose might benefit from it.

I had not then met Mr Jones (nor have I since) and he owed me—putting it mildly—no debts, intellectual or otherwise. Intellectual indebtedness went all in the other direction. Already I had bought, and read at every spare moment, his Macmillan Biographical Dictionary, which in the pre-internet epoch performed far better educational service than Wikipedia can hope to do (more of Wikipedia anon). Well before that, Mr Jones’s anti-totalitarian political courage had become impossible for me to avoid. On my work-desk there currently reposes a pleasing childhood talisman of mine: Quadrant’s January-February 1969 issue, the cover story of which is Mr Jones’s remarkably percipient Melbourne interview with Arthur Koestler.

The Shock of Recognition—it is typical of Mr Jones’s diligence that he has found that phrase in a Herman Melville essay antedating by ninety-two years Edmund Wilson’s celebrated use of it—displays such versatility of reading, and so great a knack for unaffected communication of that reading, that by rights a magazine should farm it out to not one but several reviewers. Each such reviewer could separately report on Mr Jones’s observations regarding Virgil, Cervantes, Turgenev, Proust, Robert Musil, Thomas Pynchon, Marguerite Yourcenar, J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, J.-M.G. Le Clézio, or the umpteen other creators whom (with every appearance of authoritative appraisal) he treats. Me, I flatter myself that I could spot any blatant errors in Mr Jones’s treatment of classical music; that I would detect any obvious blunders in his coverage of the Bard; and that I might, with luck, show decent competence at assessing his verdicts on Dr Johnson, Camus, Simenon, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Murasaki Shikibu, maybe Stendhal, maybe Gide. Otherwise, when confronted by Mr Jones’s themes, I am not so much the Common Reader, more the Common-As-Dirt Reader. Nonetheless, Orwell himself said, “everyone in this world has someone else whom he can look down on”; and as against the outlook which equates authentically conservative culture-warfare with telling bereaved soldiers on camera that “sh*t happens”, I might almost be said to have reached ethical parity with Russell Kirk. (Kirk is one eminent modern author whom Mr Jones does not treat; more of that, too, anon.)

Not the least among The Shock of Recognition’s virtues is that for cash-strapped Australian parents of such high-school offspring as have exhibited an unhealthy interest in the liberal arts, it provides a competitively priced alternative to much of what now passes for tertiary humanities education. Through such ostensible education the little darlings will doubtless acquire encyclopaedic expertise in why Wagner and Eliot and indeed Wodehouse were Evil Homophobic Nazis, or why the moral life, properly considered, is a mere series of footnotes to Charlie Hebdo. Through The Shock of Recognition, on the other hand, they might actually be moved to crack open a few worthwhile books and CD jewel-cases. The choice, kids, is yours: subsidising your campus lobotomies by incurring American-type student debts which, on current economic trends, are unlikely to be paid off until approximately a generation after your own funerals; or else buying copies of The Shock of Recognition, for $32.99 each.

Some will be tempted to put forward comparisons with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia. Such comparisons will emerge wholly to Mr Jones’s credit. There is throughout The Shock of Recognition a genuine, as opposed to mock, modesty of approach which spurns the stand-up comedian’s gambits. Still more clearly, Mr Jones’s entire historiographical method is, as far as possible, to get out of his subjects’ way. Compare and contrast with Cultural Amnesia’s author, who just cannot (or at any rate does not) stop railing against his targets—Jorge Luis Borges, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Herbert von Karajan, the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius, the Romanian essayist E.M. Cioran, you name it—for insufficient anti-fascism. When James tells the world that “his [Richard Strauss’s] bravery soon evaporated when the Reichskulturkammer leaned on him”, the only possible response from any actual musicologist is on the lines of: And who assigned to James the dual role of hanging judge and executioner? Might not being leaned on by the Reichskulturkammer have elicited from even the proverbially lion-hearted Kogarah Kid (especially if, like Strauss, he had a Jewish daughter-in-law) hitherto unsuspected ebullitions of cowardice? Would not genuine scholarship entail acknowledging these moral dilemmas before undertaking a first draft, rather than continuing to ignore them after the chat-show promotion circuit?

Mr Jones writes: “I could be accused, as an ageing white male, of being unduly Europhile in my tastes.” There could indeed be critics dim-witted enough to level that accusation, although whether any of them could match Mr Jones’s exemplary précis of The Tale of Genji (he has read all three of its main English translations) is dubious. Very well, let us concede that seekers after the Balinese Balzac or the Malawian Maupassant might be short-changed in Mr Jones’s pages. That still leaves a great many pages which short-change nobody, and which are likely to enrich everybody.

I have read few more succinct accounts of basic Western musical development than Mr Jones’s survey, and no accounts, it is safe to judge, which are more readily intelligible. You could broach this survey to a veritable classroom-full of Beavises and Butt-Heads with the confidence that it would capture their interest, if only for its statement that Hildegard of Bingen “described the female orgasm”. Whilst this asseveration could prompt even the most Gibbonophobic among us to crave a footnote reference (the abbess’s allusions to migraines are much easier to track down), I see nothing to complain about with any of his other music-related comments.

A particularly helpful feature is the supplementing of short composer biographies with tiny discographies, which are sometimes predictable but now and then commendably offbeat. The Dieterich Buxtehude CD mentioned, for example, contains his cantatas rather than his much better-known organ works. Elsewhere it is the recorded performances rather than the repertoire choices which are offbeat. For both Brahms’s piano concertos, Mr Jones recommends the insufficiently prized but admirable Leipzig versions with soloist Nelson Freire and conductor Riccardo Chailly, rather than the more famous performances of earlier times. Mr Jones must have grown up with the same early-stereo version (Alfred Deller’s countertenor fluting away) of Purcell’s Come Ye Sons of Art as I and innumerable others did, so more power to him for including that ancient release rather than more hip contenders. Ditto for his selecting the somewhat earlier, thoroughly treasurable, Viennese recordings (same long-defunct label: Vanguard) of two especially great Bach cantatas, BWV 78 and BWV 106.

There exists a school of—well, “thought” is too kind a term; “brain-snapping” comes closer—which maintains that straightforward, unpretentious life-and-works summaries of Mr Jones’s type have been rendered obsolete by Wikipedia’s ubiquity. A good rejoinder to such nonsense is furnished in Mr Jones’s profile of Telemann, a profile on which I cannot hope to improve, and from which I must therefore quote verbatim:

Until 2009, [Telemann’s] Wikipedia entry made the large claim that his exposure to a vast musical culture “prompted him to incorporate unusual elements into his music as well, most notably the exotic sounds of the Middle East, India, Australia, and even the bleak and distant Siberia. Examples of his avant-garde, exhibitionist style include usage of the darbouka—a Middle Eastern drum—as a substitute for the timpani, an inclusion of a vast array of Indian sitars in his orchestral compositions, frequent sonic effects produced by the Aboriginal didgeridoo” …

Which hoaxer or stoner perpetrated that particular Wikipedia masterpiece? What does it say about online criteria of quality control? Does it move you, gentle reader, to renewed respect for Wikipedia’s reliability? Me neither.

When it comes to foreign-language epics from Homer to Dante (this book presupposes a largely adult readership, so hobbits need not apply), Mr Jones not only summarises the epics’ contents but displays a fairly awe-inspiring awareness of all the major English translations. He makes some pointed criticisms regarding Clive James’s version of The Divine Comedy, and those—myself among them—on the public record as praising this version had better start thinking up possible responses. Even Dorothy L. Sayers’s performance, with its near-incredible preservation of Dante’s own terza rima, incurs a (justified) reproof or two. Ultimately Mr Jones plumps for Robert and Jean Hollander’s English in Dante, as for Robert Fagles’s English in Homer.

Selfishly, I would have welcomed reflections from Mr Jones on the legitimacy or otherwise of translating per se. If one assumes that Robert Frost was wrong to call poetry “what is lost in translation”—one can make a case for calling poetry “what even translation cannot ruin, despite Google Translate’s best efforts”—it would still defy the most utopian optimist to discern cultural improvement between Victorian Britain’s assumption that you needed at least French and German (plus Latin and Greek) to call yourself halfway civilised, versus the ease with which monoglots now monopolise the highest Australian and American political offices. Lest this remark be misconstrued as evidence of anti-Americanism (invariably by someone who has never actually visited America), let it be remembered that even the 1930s Vassar airheads of Mary McCarthy’s The Group could read Dante in the original.

What would make Mr Jones on the translator’s art a particularly commendable read is the fact that even his own linguistic disclaimers are dauntingly conscientious. He professes himself largely unable to follow Italian prose other than opera libretti and the gist of Italy’s newspaper reports, but how many Australian cabinet ministers—of either main party—since he himself quit the frontbench could claim comparable skill?

Here we are, almost at the 1800-word mark, and still I have not considered more than half the book. When it comes to eighteenth-century literature, there might be a better introduction to Tristram Shandy than Mr Jones supplies, but if there is, I have not a clue where it might be located. I consider myself the richer for having learnt, thanks to Mr Jones’s outline of Camus, that Le Monde’s 1999 list of the twentieth-century’s hundred best books placed L’Étranger at the top (the second and third places were occupied by Proust and Kafka). Nor had I suspected, either that Georges Perec spent three months at the University of Queensland—“Qunsland”, he would surely have spelt it, given his renowned phobia for the letter e—or that Tolstoy, on hearing of Dostoyevsky’s death, wept. Mr Jones seldom launches into explicit autobiography, but at the start of his section on the Russian masters he does so with good effect:

It is difficult now to explain, let alone comprehend, just how strong the influence of Russian culture, including politics, was during my adolescence. I had visited memories of World War II and its aftermath when the apparently genial “Uncle Joe” Stalin, having been the staunch ally of Roosevelt and Churchill in the war against Hitler, became again, as he had been before the war, the archetype of totalitarian rule, and the Cold War began … In 1947-48 I studied Russian, part-time, with limited success, my only lasting achievement being the ability to recite Pushkin’s poem “The Raven”.

Which is a damned sight more of a lasting achievement than I or 90 per cent of Mr Jones’s other readers will ever have managed with Pushkin’s tongue. The confession is especially striking in that overall, The Shock of Recognition implies that poetry and—Shakespeare obviously excepted—spoken drama mean incomparably less to Mr Jones than fiction and music (including theatrical music) do. One suspects that he regards Dante and Chaucer as fundamentally novelists (Chesterton seems to have originated the Chaucer-as-novelist interpretation) rather than poets. He discusses Sartre’s fiction, but not Sartre’s plays, though admittedly he analyses Chekhov’s dramatic output at considerable length.

Rather more surprising from a respected politician is Mr Jones’s apparent lack of interest in political science, however defined. Solzhenitsyn is respectfully examined, as are Mikhail Bulgakov—Mr Jones certainly makes me want to read The Master and Margherita—and Yevgeny Zamyatin; but there is extraordinarily little about Orwell, and nothing about Burke or Burke’s American disciples (Russell Kirk himself, for instance). It could be that sustained political science commentary would have extended an already 412-page paperback to binder-defying amplitude. It could instead be that Mr Jones as a legislator was force-fed enough political science to last him a lifetime, albeit a legislator of all people would have unique insights into, say, Machiavelli. The lacuna remains odd. Except for a section on Plato’s Cave and the odd reference to Nietzsche, philosophy is omitted, probably because with Mr Jones we appear to have a cheerfulness which (like that of Dr Johnson’s friend Oliver Edwards) keeps breaking in.

On the whole, the final response of any mere reviewer must be one of amazement that Mr Jones, despite his multifarious other burdens, has found the time—more astonishing still, the energy—to prepare The Shock of Recognition at all. In many respects the book conveys the impression of having been gestated all his adult life. It bespeaks not enthusiasm and prodigious erudition alone, impressive though both are, but the somewhat different (if allied) asset of aesthetic un-jadedness: what the late New York Times drama columnist Clive Barnes somewhere called “inbuilt virginity”.

The federal parliament did itself honour (as, before that, did the Victorian parliament) by accommodating Mr Jones for so long. Such honour is unlikely to have been comprehended by one Humphrey McQueen, who, in a characteristic too-clever-by-three-quarters jibe, dismissed Mr Jones—then Minister for Science—as “the Minister for Talking About Science”. (Since around the same time the same guru also publicly reviled the Australian Society of Authors as “the Australian Scabs’ Association”, we may be forgiven for detecting in Comrade McQueen the mindset that Dryden expressively called “disdaining to be pleased”.) Meanwhile, as long as there remain Australians capable of reading serious pedagogical works at all, so long will The Shock of Recognition be deeply valued. No, I’m as clueless as you are about what Comrade McQueen has been doing for the last twenty years.

Mr Jones was born in 1932. He cites with approval Montaigne’s words (so comforting when one enjoys good health): “If you do not know how to die, never mind. Nature will tell you how to do it on the spot, plainly and adequately. She will do the job for you most punctiliously: do not worry about it.” In his first chapter he asks:

How much time do I have left? A hundred days? A thousand? Young people may have twenty thousand. But that is no justification for postponement. If I knew that I was going to die next week, but could be taken to see The Marriage of Figaro tonight, would I go? Absolutely.

As I finished The Shock of Recognition, I involuntarily recalled lines from Thomas Flatman, a seventeenth-century painter and poet, lauding his octogenarian friend Izaak Walton:

Happy old man, whose worth all mankind knows,
Except himself; who charitably shows
The ready road to virtue and to praise,
The road to many long and happy days;
The noble arts of generous piety,
And how to compass true felicity.