The Only Justifiable End of Eloquence

I realised when I was emailing the typescript to Quadrant’s Editor for consideration for his issue of June 2013, that it was a little different from the usual run of my copy. The essay dealt, in general, with the awfulness of the education being handed out nowadays to the unfortunate children in all too many of our schools.

I hadn’t consciously intended any change of approach or style or tone, but there it was: a substantial part of the article had certainly taken the form of an intimate memoir of my own eleven years of schooling. This I received in a very unpretentious and ill-equipped Anglican Church grammar school in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern. By piquant paradox—like a tramp wearing a top hat—this modest institution was housed in the unimaginable splendour of marble halls—the ornate mansion of a busted millionaire of Victoria’s appalling Land Boom of the 1890s.

The Editor, noble fellow that he is, made no comment about any change of style, but applied his usual meticulous hand to all my normal slips and botches; faultless page proofs came back four days later for a final OK.

But, as it is with monthly magazines, printing and distribution occupy several weeks before readers will cast their eyes upon it, and turn their thumbs up or down. A silent fear filled this interval for me: Would many of them mutter: “What is Ryan up to here? Has he wandered off into some private fugue of his childhood?” Would they all pass it by as beneath their serious attention?

I need not have worried. Although today it remains not unknown for my column to raise an occasional polite letter to the Editor, or directly to me, whether in support or in contention, it is twenty years since printed words of mine set flowing anything like a “torrent of correspondence”. That was when Quadrant of September 1993 published the first of my essays exposing the fraudulence of Manning Clark’s History of Australia. And little of that could have been called “polite”!

Much of the recent essay we are discussing comprised cosy, almost family-circle anecdotes of Malvern pupils who attained high distinction, or tales of loved or eccentric teachers and suchlike humble fare. I told a little of my special desk-mate Frank Hughes, who became one of the most highly decorated (DFC and Bar) air crew to fly with the famous Pathfinders over Germany, and who returned home to become our most celebrated field geologist, presenting his fellow Australians with stupendous riches from the discoveries, for example, of Mount Tom Price (iron) and the Kimberley (diamonds). I placed briefly in their gentle early Malvern settings such charmers as John Landy (athlete and state governor) and Robin Boyd (architect and critic).

That literary tough-egg (and my hero) George Orwell confessed readily how much writers enjoyed attention and appreciation—that a book review to an author was like a tummy tickled to a cat. I can’t quote him, but I feel sure he would have agreed that even a condemnatory review was much preferable to the even more damning dismissal of not being noticed at all.

In any case, the unexpected response to my quiet “takes” on school days was enough to tickle my tummy for me most agreeably, pitiful though it might appear to big-time fan-mail addicts like Madonna and Kevin Rudd.

Quadrant had been on the street only a few days when a letter reached the Editor. After that, a number of letters direct to me have popped out of my mail box over several weeks. Only today the postie handed me a stoutly stiffened large flat envelope, and that is what prompts this present writing.

My correspondent can hardly imagine the joy his present affords. It is a fine photograph of a huge rough boulder, sitting on an area of bare red soil. To it is bolted a metal plate, telling the story of a young Australian Second World War airman who won renown in operations in Europe, returned home, and as an exploration geologist, won riches for his countrymen. This was, of course, Frank Hughes, and the plaque marks the spot near Mount Tom Price where Frank’s ashes were scattered on September 3, 2006.

This (to me) precious record will soon be framed, and hung below the striking portrait of Frank which (with other heroes) hangs already in an alcove of my study. 

For a writer, the small moral behind all this is that he shouldn’t let himself slip, unawares, into a set style, a formula.

I ought to have understood this trap better than most people. Long ago—back in my twenties—I contracted with an Australian pulp publisher to supply him with two “Wild West” cowboy novelettes a month. I think they were of about 10,000 words, for which I got paid ten pounds. I would catch sight of them sometimes on the news-stands, and look away shuddering. The sturdy portable Royal typewriter on which these crimes were committed would, given the capacities of a modern computer, have ground out for itself the requisite quota of “why, you ornery, low-down, side-windin’, rotten son of a coyote …” To justify this secret vice, I couldn’t even plead that I had a wife to keep, though I did have a wife. The fact was that she was keeping me, by staying on in the job she had held during the war. It was she who bought me my typewriter, still retained by the family as heirloom.

Although all this “cowboy” bilge I was pumping out was neither criminal nor sinful, I knew it was shabby. I knew from Joseph Conrad that the proper purpose of a piece of prose is “to make you see”, and from George Orwell that language is not to be perverted as gimmick or ornament, but used as a clear pane of glass through which the writer’s ideas may be studied. I held, with Charles II’s great Lord Chancellor Clarendon, that the “only justifiable end of eloquence is to be believed”. I understood perfectly the sense of Machiavelli, that even the humblest writing was—or ought to be—a dignified pursuit, so that, after his banishment, the great Florentine put on his rich curial robes when he sat down in the evening to write in his study,

How, precisely, in any particular case, to set that live electrical current running between the poles of the writing mind and the reading mind can never be laid down, but in the case of Malvern Grammar it seemed to hum: in the weekends which followed that particular Quadrant, unobtrusive pedestrians and motorists were noticed giving the splendid old pile a quiet eye-over from the street.