Not even clever

Dear Editor,

I have long been a fan of Humphrey McQueen’s. I’ve respected his learning and his commitment as an independent researcher and writer. I’ve often enjoyed his burnt-earth reviews, even, a bit guiltily, their recurrent academic bashing. I suppose it serves me right, then, to find myself in the firing line with his review of The Ideas Market (ABR, December 2004–January 2005), a collection of essays I put together with writers such as Guy Rundle, Mark Davis, Catharine Lumby and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, on the subject of ‘public intellectuals’ in contemporary Australia.

The problem with Humphrey’s review is not that it picks a fight with some of the book’s arguments but that it’s not much more than a grouch at academics. For a start, this leads him to misread the collection as identifying intellectuals with academics: ‘those academics who promoted the category of the “public intellectual” to justify their existence in the ideas market.’ It doesn’t. A consistent theme in the book is a thoroughly sceptical interest in the way that certain academics (and others outside the academy) have promoted the category of the ‘public intellectual’ or been identified as such by the media and the market. Another is the limits and pretensions of the notion of the ‘public intellectual’ as it currently goes around, not least the limitations of restricting the term to academics. None of the contributors is particularly interested in claiming the term for themselves, contrary to what the review implies, though some have as good a right as any. But nor are those who are academics embarrassed about being academics (unlike some who want to be ‘public intellectuals’). They want to be good academics.

There are other misreadings, too. I don’t charge Keith Windschuttle and his ilk with ‘turning themselves into historians’, as if I were defending the discipline. The point was to note the diverse ways in which national histories had (again) become prominent in all kinds of public talk from all kinds of talkers – a Malouf as much as a Windschuttle. The criticism of Lumby’s essay seems beside the point (it certainly misses the points about outside fantasies of academic life). And if one or two contributors are happy to quote Edward Said’s claim about intellectuals ‘speaking truth to power’, one or two others (Carter and McKee) are explicitly sceptical of any such claim.

The swipes against the academics go off in all directions. At one moment they are ‘fact grubbers’, at another ‘theory’ is the culprit (or not really doing theory, or not really doing).

But the fundamental problem seems to be that academics work at the taxpayers’ expense. ‘Public intellectual apparently means publicly funded.’ No, again, the book doesn’t identify public intellectuals with academics. Even better: ‘All but two of the fourteen contributors are dependent on the taxpayer’ – i.e. they’re academics! – rather than making ‘their livings by their own creativity’ (perhaps that means being dependent on the tax accountant). That can pass without comment. Not so the mean opening paragraph of the review which picks up a sentence from the book’s acknowledgments, an acknowledgment to the European Association for Studies of Australia. I had first spoken on the theme of public intellectuals at one of their conferences (they invited me, they didn’t pay). This becomes ‘displaying interest in Australia as a way to get one’s fare paid to leave the country’. As my mother might have said, that’s not even clever. Odd, too, from a former professor of Australian Studies at Tokyo University.

Perhaps Humphrey read the book as an attack on independent ‘intellectuals’ – or a defence of academics. It is neither. Whatever the case, the grouch against academics means the review tells readers very little about what’s actually in the book – except that it’s mostly written by academics.

Incidentally, I was interested to read in the same issue of ABR Delia Falconer’s comment that The Best Australian Essays 2004 could have done ‘with some more challenging essays from writers with a foot in the academies’. There are some challenging essays in The Ideas Market.

David Carter, Brisbane, Qld

Unsociable Page

Dear Editor,

To the best of my knowledge, Geoff Page has written two reviews concerning the poetry of Syd Harrex; firstly about Harrex’s inaugural collection Atlantis and Other Poems, and secondly the more recent contribution regarding Under a Medlar Tree (ABR, December 2004–January 2005) spanning a twenty-year appreciation. Both reviews have made their mark with sweeping statements about Harrex’s academic status, as if employment within academia might constitute an undeniable opposition to the writing of a poem that anyone could read.

I recently had the opportunity to collate material from all five of Harrex’s poetry collections and was amazed at the diversity and range of the poet. Harrex writes with a clear and conscious eye about matters and places that are often neglected by other poets. He is not, as Page suggests, simply concerned with the time-honoured themes of ‘love and death’. Nor do we find within his work the ‘rhythmic roughness’, ‘opacity’ and ‘slyness’ that Page attributes to it. Out of context, anything can look opaque or rhythmically awry. Because the poet used the word ‘sly’ (to illustrate growth where none was at first conceivable) doesn’t mean that it would take a sleuth to understand what has been written.

If I were to accuse a poet of being overly academic, I would draw the reader’s attention to the use of technical or jargonistic language (as much as I would point out the jingoism behind the use of language in a lot of contemporary rhyming poems). Such language would exclude readers, something Harrex’s poetry has never done. His work is intelligent, witty and erudite, qualities (or virtues) that should not be confused with academic writing, though that might be an admirable quality if found more often in the latter.

Alternatively, Harrex’s knowledge of literature, especially poetry, leaves the poet open to an occasional playfulness that could be best imagined being shared between a group of professors letting their hair down on a Friday night at the local watering hole. The unsociable Page is simply whingeing about things he knows nothing about.

Lastly, the list of poets who are also academics is conceivably long. The poet will be a poet regardless of his or her profession. Does Geoff Page hear from critics who complain about English teachers chugging up the arteries of our poetry pages? I bet not, since in all likelihood such pettiness belongs to the realm of Page’s reviews.

Richard Hillman, Menningham, SA

Mysterious potency

Dear Editor,

It is perhaps because Peter Goldsworthy is a doctor that he feels the need to explain the existence of music in terms of some evolutionary theory tied to language (ABR, February 2005). In partial support, he cites an example of people remembering the second line of a pop song they have not heard for twenty years. Rhythm and rhyme are surely part of this, but the mass memory is overwhelmingly due to the mysterious potency of a simple diatonic tune. Despite a few peripheral shared features, music, Western diatonic music anyway, has nothing whatever to do with language; it is in fact a world of its own, generating its own peculiar laws and dynamics. Which is why, in the ‘marriage’ of words and music, the former must always strive to serve the latter. A song is only ever successful if the music works. Which is also why, if Goldsworthy fully understood this, he would never have boasted about writing a line for an opera so completely unsingable as ‘The moth of death eats both’.

As for Lorenzo da Ponte, if for some personal reason he became a grocer afterwards, he successfully established a post-Mozartian career as Professor of Italian Literature at Columbia University, where he wrote his lively memoirs, and also where, I understand, a bust of him still stands in commemoration.

Leigh Swinbourne, Bellerive, Tas.