Memories of Max Teichmann

There were three Max Teichmanns, really. I came to know only one of them.

Max the First was the one born (1924) in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton, then not at all its current gentrified self with bookshops, foreign-film cinemas, and swish Italian restaurants, but rather, working-class with the emphasis on working. His German father had, Max later informed me, fled the old country because of the conflict between his own radical-leftist principles and what Kaiser Bill would do to him if he attempted to put those radical-leftist principles in practice. (Max never once mentioned his mother in my hearing.) Young Max himself, against paternal opposition, joined the Australian Army, and reminisced with such vividness in print about his wartime days that a summary here would be futile.

Max the Second was Monash Max, Televised Max or, to his numerous Vietnam War foes, Mad Max. A long-standing activist with—and, I presume, card-carrying member of—the British Labour Party, he had studied at Oxford when such political scientists as Sir Isaiah Berlin and Lord Beloff flourished; and he was never, to my knowledge, even tempted by the workers’ paradise. After 1965, and back in Australia, he belonged to that social-democrat group which hated communism and the American-Australian war effort in about equal proportions, though censures of the latter got more publicity than censures of the former, especially since Max could wow a crowd. I am speaking now of the days when Melbourne’s newest seat of tertiary learning was known as “the Monash Soviet”, B.A. Santamaria’s preferred description being “that dunghill”.

Max the Third (Beyond Thunderdome) was the one who in the 1990s started contributing sharp, often abrasive, always amusing political commentaries to Quadrant and (during Christopher Pearson’s editorial tenure) the Adelaide Review. When, in Quadrant’s pages, he suddenly had John-Hewson-era Liberal ideologues in his sights, he administered to them the sort of hammering which if committed by a pugilist would require the referee’s intervention after about forty-five seconds. Having only vaguely known of his name before, I docketed the article in my mind and told myself: “This guy, whoever he is, has panache.” His subsequent Adelaide Review appearances confirmed my opinion. But not till seven years later did I meet him (we had spoken once on the phone beforehand), and even then I never supposed that I would eventually be a guest in his apartment.

This situation changed when, early in 2001, I was offered a position at the National Civic Council and therefore moved from Sydney to Melbourne. Far and away the best things which News Weekly consistently published during my time were Max’s columns, most of which bore the rubric “Straws in the Wind”. And that is exactly what they were.

Maybe one never comes to know writers well unless one has worked in an office where their output is printed. Some News Weekly contributors wrote so stylishly that we copy editors were rendered redundant. Others required such orthopaedic work as Clive James needed to perform when confronted with unsolicited newspaper submissions: “All I had to do was change everything in them and then they would be fine.” Max’s column fell into a third category. (I refer to him here as “Max” rather than as “Mr Teichmann” or “Professor Teichmann” because Max insisted on first-name terms in his case, nickname terms in mine. For him, starting on Day One, I was always “Roberto”, “Digger”, or simply—and most frequently—“Dig”. Whenever the phone rang at around 7.45 a.m., my “Rob Stove speaking” would be responded to with a bellow of “G’day, Dig!”)

Paul Goodman once accused Dwight Macdonald of “thinking with his typewriter”: to which Macdonald replied, with considerable dignity and with still more considerable verisimilitude, that thinking has to start somewhere. Nobody ever accused Max of thinking with his typewriter. Max belonged to a generation where the rare Australian male who could touch-type risked accusations of effeminacy. He got around his lack of keyboard technique in two ways: jotting down handwritten, food-stained, tobacco-stained notes which could seldom be deciphered, least of all by himself; and—his preferred method—dictating to a word-processing operator. Sometimes I was that word-processing operator, though more often my superior Brendan Rodway did the honours. At this stage Max remained well enough to sit in an NCC office chair and simply announce what he wanted his column to include; or rather, with that well-stocked brain of his, he would free-associate his copy into being.

The one major change I ever needed to make to Max’s copy was the mandatory elision of his four-letter words. Harold Ross at the New Yorker had the proverbial “old lady from Dubuque” to defy. When I was at News Weekly we defied no old ladies, from Dubuque or anywhere else. I vaguely remember being told of an ancient nun in a rural convent who would object if News Weekly were to include any term of a clinically sexual nature, but that was several years after the events I am describing. Presumably this rural nun really had made complaints, although she might have been a mere Jungian archetype invoked to keep staffers on their toes. 

Max drank so much red wine, ate fast food in such gargantuan amounts, and got through so many cigars that in his later years, visits to the NCC office became impossible. (I think he quoted to me—he certainly knew—Sibelius’s brag: “All the doctors who told me to stop smoking and drinking are dead.”) Either I would take his dictation down by appointment at his own den in Rushall, a twenty-minute train trip to the city’s north (somebody, somehow, had rigged up on his main table not only a computer but a modem), or else one of half-a-dozen other persons would do the same thing. Martin Sheehan, who had preceded me in the NCC job, fulfilled the secretarial role Chez Teichmann much more regularly than I did.

Never have I seen bookshelves to match Max’s. They were characterised, like Macbeth’s dinner guests, by “most admired disorder”. In the field of political science he appeared to own every hardback ever published in English from Machiavelli onwards. He always seemed to know where his stray volume of Hobbes, Malthus, Georges Sorel, James Burnham, or The Anarcho-Syndicalist Gazetteer 1928 could be found, though I never mastered the art of locating them.

Why Max never wrote (wrote “in cold blood”, to cite Dwight Macdonald again) the books he could and should have written, I cannot tell. It would have given him no particular trouble to furnish the definitive academic text on—a particular passion of his—the non-Leninist branches of German socialist doctrine in Wilhelmine Germany. I wish I had brought a tape-recorder when Max vamped a remarkable discourse about how August Bebel dreaded the advent of upright pianos in blue-collar German homes, because this advent (so Max said Bebel said: what would I have known?) would turn the proletarian into an emasculated bourgeois more rapidly than a hundred Bismarckian pension funds could do. But the big scholarly footnoted books from Max never did get finished or, to the best of my knowledge, started; and so his achievement as a scholar—leaving aside for the time being his skill as a polemicist—rests, perforce, upon the testimonials of people like me.

One theory of his, not scholarly in itself, could someday be the cause of scholarship in others. While Gough Whitlam cooled his heels as Opposition Leader, Max spent substantial time in the company of Whitlam’s second-in-command, Jim Cairns. Any Australian whose memories stretch back to Vietnam at all will remember hearing about from news-readers in 1969, or discovering from books afterwards, the beating which Cairns received during a break-in at his own home. In casual talk I have heard this beating ascribed variously to Ustashi hoodlums, to Tammany Hall ALP hoodlums, to ASIO over-reachers, and to DLP voters so unutterably stupid as to think that they would help their own cause with fisticuffs.

Max (he told me circa 2004) concluded at the time, and had seen no reason to change his conclusion since, that the beating had been carried out with the foreknowledge—and perhaps on the actual orders—of bosses in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). If Max’s hypothesis is just, then some CPA executive must have felt a certain eagerness to communicate to Cairns the tidings that peace, love, dope, navel-length tresses, and hippie bathrooms were all very well, but that (to adapt the old anti-Admiral-Darlan joke from 1942) “once you’re bought, you stay bought”.

Dictation at Rushall tended to be a somewhat more chaotic process than it had been at News Weekly, because the television news would usually be blaring forth. (Is my imagination working overtime or did Max cling to a black-and-white set?) This blaring shredded my powers of concentration, but not Max’s. While Max would intersperse his dictating with a kind of Greek chorus, comprising obscenity-laden reproaches aimed at the news’s talking heads, he indignantly rejected suggestions that I ease his temper by turning the television off.

Sometimes he would, by turns, dictate his copy and curse the SBS/ABC bulletins and burst into song. The occasional wartime ditty would emerge from the stream of his consciousness. Every so often this ditty would be one I recognised from my father, who had been just too young for a uniform when Hirohito surrendered, but who had had relatives and friends in the armed forces. An example of such a ditty was the one where the refrain may be politely rendered as follows:

Please don’t burn our [outside lavatory] down!

Mother has promised to pay!

Father is gone on the rolling deep

And won’t be back for many a day …

I have no idea whether Max had attempted original poetry in youth, but he certainly extemporised it in old age, often setting it to a tune which had come his way from The Student Prince or The White Horse Inn or some other lovelorn operetta known to his family and to every other Central European Jewish household in Melbourne until about 1975. Who else but Max (I asked myself), having carolled the quintessentially gemütlich words “eyes of tender blue”, would proceed to rhyme them with “Filthy New Left Jew”?

In conversation he felt grateful, I think, for any listener who could follow perhaps 10 per cent of his historical allusions; I probably managed an 11 per cent comprehension rate, no more. However often his erudition mystified me, it never bored me. Once our talk turned to a gentleman whom I had met only a few times, but whom Max knew very well. The gentleman had an ordinary Australian accent, but in my view, his name seemed Spanish or Portuguese. Was he of Iberian origin, I asked Max? What resulted is the sole sizeable snatch of dialogue where I remain convinced I can recollect every word:

Max: Nah! He’s a Gib!

Me: He’s a what?

Max: A Gib!

Me: What’s a Gib?

Max (as if to a two-year-old): Gibraltar! He’s from Gibraltar!

Me: Ah, right. Well, I gather Gibraltar has lots of Anglophiles in it.

Max (as if I had proven his point): Yeah, he hates them [gerundial form of F-word] greasers!

Near the end I saw Max less often; I think he wanted it thus, though he appeared amenable enough to my calling in a half-dozen times at Melbourne’s Mercy Hospital (by appointment, just as his own NCC visits had been). What I did see for myself was that he latterly needed to supplement the drink, fast food and cigars with an oxygen tank, surreptitiously violating as a matter of daily ritual the nurses’ injunctions against consuming nicotine whilst using the breathing tube. Although he never choked, a more immediate danger—to laymen like myself—appeared to be that of setting his bedclothes on fire like Lucky Jim, or else spontaneously combusting like Krook in Bleak House. Mercifully, he did neither, but I dread imagining what he went through in hospital towards the end, when he could no longer drag himself outside the intensive care ward to declare, if not life and liberty, then at least the pursuit of smokos.

Around 3 p.m. on November 29, 2008, my mobile phone rang. Overall I regard call-number-display devices as the greatest invention since e-mail, but that afternoon I had cause to curse them. I saw the words “Teichmann Max” on my mobile’s screen, fell avidly upon the answering button, and shouted, “Hello Max!”

There came an unfamiliar voice from the other end. “No, I’m sorry, it’s Zac Teichmann [one of Max’s sons] here. Max has passed away.” 

Oh.

His funeral took place at the sort of Melbourne high-Anglican church where they used to call the Vatican “the Italian mission to the Irish peasants”. Max once confided to me his frustration at one aspect of his academic life (he had retired in 1989): needing to inform Catholic pupils—plenty of whom can scarcely have read a book in their lives before they attended his lectures—of their own popes’ teachings on capitalism, communism and social justice. (Were Max still alive and still lecturing, he would observe one difference between today’s campus Catholics and their predecessors. The average Catholic undergraduate in 2012 has managed to read four books. Unfortunately, all four are about hobbits.)

What Max’s own religious views had become at the end, if he harboured any, I shall not presume to inquire. But part of me wants to envisage a possible scene at the pearly gates, with St Peter’s announcement of his weary finding:

St Peter: Well, Max, you’re far too decent a man to have been sent to hell, but you would never have stayed still for long enough to endure purgatory, so, we made an executive decision, and here you are.

And the Max Teichmann whom I met will greet this adjudication with one, last, rapturous expletive.