Two Naked Emperors

Perhaps I should begin with a warning—you know the sort of thing; we see them at the start of certain television programs: “Viewers are warned that this presentation contains expressions so disgusting that a bullock-driver might blush”. Or: “Some of the scenes following are so revolting that no one with a trace of sensitivity would have filmed them in the first place”.

One would like to think that those tactful cautions are displayed so that the innocent or the unwary do not fall into occasions of sin. But they may only be disguised promotional aids; it is not hard to imagine households where they would produce excited squeals: “Come quick, Marcia! Don’t miss this program—it’s absolutely putrid!”

My own warning is that, later in this article, I shall make certain confessions. Read on at your own risk. Other people’s confessions are mostly boring and incomprehensible; they are usually written by egomaniacs convinced that we should be interested in the moral stumbles they made, perhaps as long ago as their pimply youth.

Most of the famous Confessions of the literary classics are a let-down. Those of Saint Augustine offer soothing reading at bedtime, but they contain only one veritable nugget: “Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet.” One knows (or at any rate remembers) the feeling.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was beyond doubt the nastiest man ever to achieve enduring fame, and much of the spirit of his Confessions survives today in the under-lying currents of left-wing thought. Heine described him savagely as “the bloody hand of Robespierre”. Isaiah Berlin, urbanely but perhaps more deadly, said that Rousseau was “the first militant lowbrow”. But he had an uncanny foreknowledge of what modern social services offered to a man like him: he had five illegitimate babies, and promptly shovelled each one of them into an orphanage.

Only the title of Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater remains well known. It caused a flurry on publication (1822), but you will search long today to find someone who has actually read it. De Quincey (his real name was Quincey—he added the “de” for swank) was a literary hanger-on who hung out with Wordsworth and Coleridge—almost his only claim to fame. His Confessions are about as boring as it gets, and also suspect as to their facts. Pharmacologists say it is barely possible for him to have survived the height of his addiction, when he claimed that he was taking 8000 drops of laudanum a day.

James Hogg, a Scottish shepherd who taught himself to read and write while minding the sheep, became a noted poet and a friend of Sir Walter Scott. (Hogg wrote the words of our former national anthem, God Save the King.) In 1824 he published The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and anyone who has not read it has a treat in store. But this does not invalidate my point that Confessions are usually a poor read, because the book is a novel—an exercise in phantasmagorical horror fiction.

And in Australia, E.J. Banfield’s Confessions of a Beachcomber turns out to be a collection of genial stories of life on Dunk Island early in the twentieth century.

If you read on after all that discouragement you have only yourself to blame, but here is my confession: For over sixty of my eighty-odd years, my attitude to certain leading cultural symbols of our age has been phony.

Take James Joyce’s Ulysses. This cartload of crap was banned in Australia in the 1930s, adding attraction to the possession of a contraband copy: it was a “transgressive” novel, wasn’t it? What more appropriate than to read a copy which had transgressed the Australian Customs laws? “Crap”, let me stress, expresses only my own true and private view; so long as we aren’t living under Stalin, we can all like what we choose to like, according to our understandings. But it was my valued friend Cyril Pearl who introduced me to Ulysses, for which his enthusiasm was boundless. I “liked” Ulysses because Cyril liked it, but my approval was hollow at the heart, born of a shallow desire to be “in the club”. What pains I suffered for my falsity! How many “Bloom’s Days”?