Apparently channelling Matthew Arnold, Wallace-Crabbe then accuses me of philistinism. We know that Arnold, an English public schoolboy who became a professor of poetry at Wallace-Crabbe’s beloved destination, was also a terrible literary snob. Accusations like this always say much more about the accuser, of course. Our Oxford traveller then imagines that the right and the far-left are equally bereft of ‘the concept of style’, if I read his peculiar last sentence correctly. Of course, others more typically suggest that it is those in the middle who are in fact sorely lacking in this department: the well-to-do middle classes, for example. I must say that I was amused to be thought of as ‘far-left’ in this odd little tirade.

Wallace-Crabbe’s diary simply tells us that he is himself a well-to-do member of the literary middle classes. He dines out at clubs and goes to ‘merrily literary’ dinner parties, travels to Oxford and Rome, goes for idyllic walks in the country, reviews John Betjeman (with whom he also dined), longs for a wealthy patron, gets a new pergola, uses the word ‘horrid’, and constantly preens himself with his own ego. This kind of thing may be fine for the pages of ABR, but an insult is an insult (is an insult), and it needs to be replied to.

Ken Gelder, University of Melbourne, Vic.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe replies

Maybe we have a bit of class war in action. Admittedly, I got down to rereading two traditional classics, though not while travelling overseas. And I suppose it was disgraceful that I went to Oxford for a few days, before Warwick and Manchester. Further, the Abruzzo Club in Brunswick is far from posh, while my only encounter with John Betjeman was at the staff club of our university. Gelder is really hung up on the rotted pergola on the front of my partner’s house, an old structure which had to be replaced: has he confused a pergola with a gondola? Let me agree that I shouldn’t have assigned Gelder’s position to ‘the far-left’. He is probably part of the same imprecise middle-class left as myself. As for ‘well-to-do’, he’d be doing very well compared to me in terms of income or of property.

But the main thing is that my comment reflected a diarist’s moment. It was not part of a critical essay. Gelder’s own piece, designed for an open readership, was avowedly a criticism of ‘Tory literary tastes and positions’, within which Anglophile category he would no doubt include my own rather traditional – or some would say ‘modernist’ – bundle of views. Hence, I was annoyed at the time. It is odd, then, that he is so shocked by my response, although I courted difficulties by using it in the public arena, much as he does by mounting a personal attack on my imagined living conditions.

Living in the crevices

Dear Editor,

I thank Melinda Harvey (March 2007) for an astute reading of my essay ‘A Writer in a Time of Terror’, which appeared in Griffith Review 14. My essay looks at sixteen or so recent intrusions by the security agencies and the attorney general against freedom of expression in Australia. I wish only to elaborate, for reasons of historical interest, on Harvey’s affectionate description of me as a ‘diehard leftie’.

I was certainly a teenage leftie. A ‘cooperative’ or ‘guild socialist’ is how I described myself back then: that is, favouring cooperative enterprise rather than the capitalist marketplace. But the most significant early political shift in my thinking came from my involvement with the Sydney Libertarians, who did not consider themselves on the left, in the sense that they did not have a plan or commitment to radical change of the economic and political system. Libertarians were apolitical while still being students of politics. We had lectures, meetings (both at Sydney University and downtown), newsletters, weekend schools and endless bar-room conversations, but we weren’t political activists. If we could avoid it, we did not vote (a few of us were not on the electoral roll), and at elections we put up posters saying, ‘Whoever you vote for a politician always gets in’, urging people to vote informal. We regarded all political parties as fundamentally puritanical and authoritarian, and thus as enemies of civil liberty and freedom of expression and inquiry, which we considered central to the good life. We particularly regarded the radical left parties – socialist and communist – as enemies of freedom. We had a romantic affection for classical non-violent anarchism, and anarchism is of course a diehard opponent of communists and state socialists.

We believed that the best way to lead a good, free life was to live in a cunning way in the crevices of society and to stay, whenever possible, ‘out of the system’. Later some of us became more active – in campaigns against sexual censorship in the early 1970s, for example. Some Libertarians engaged in symbolic acts against the state, but that was somewhat uncharacteristic of libertarian life. Now, when I engage in politics, it is to use my talents to, say, try to enlarge and protect freedom, and to frustrate inhumane behaviour by the state. But the anarcho/libertarian attitude remains pretty much my political magnetic north.

As I illustrate in my essay, the threat of terrorism has caused the current federal government to behave in an alarmingly authoritarian way and to begin reducing the accepted boundaries of freedom of expression and civil liberty. Thus, while some of my friends belong in that category, I doubt that I fit the conventional description of leftie. But I may well be a diehard on some other causes.

Frank Moorhouse, Sydney, NSW

Mark Twain and smaller nations

Dear Editor,

Jack Bradstreet helpfully pointed out to ABR readers (April 2007) that the English edition of Mark Twain’s travels, More Tramps Abroad, is a fuller and more reliable text than the American version, Following the Equator. The latter is, however, the basis for the latest reprint of the Australian section (MUP) and for previous editions published in Australia. The difference between the texts, Bradstreet comments, has been long ignored – ever since the famous Australian bibliographer Sir John Ferguson nodded. Yet American scholars have long discussed the differences.

The English edition, however, omits some material. Twain, who regarded Marcus Clarke as Australia’s foremost writer, intended to include in Tramps an excerpt from one of the latter’s historical tales, ‘Buckley, the Escaped Convict’. Twain left part of the story for the London publisher to copy from the posthumous Austral Edition (Melbourne, 1890) of Clarke’s selected works, but an anonymous pencilled note attached to Twain’s MS states: ‘C and W [Chatto and Windus] never had this extract … the book is not procurable in England.’ This episode is a reminder of the continuing difficulty of circulating Australian books abroad, in the face of increasing ‘globalisation’ or, to be more specific, of the financial domination of publishing conglomerates, which have little space for the literatures of smaller nations.

Laurie Hergenhan, St Lucia, Qld