If I could alter the course of an artist

Critics can’t influence the course of artists, and look foolish trying. There is no magnet that powerful. If I could alter the course of an artist like David Malouf, however, I would bring the focus of his attention closer to here and now. His historical novels and stories are richly imagined, but they are all too easily employed as referential ammunition in sterile battles fought about the supposedly formative experiences of colonial Australia. The experiences undoubtedly did happen, but it was minds, not events, that were formative. It didn’t take unusually sensitive young men on the land, for example, to realize that there was something wrong about killing Aboriginals: Governor King knew it before he arrived in Sydney, and one of his first initiatives was to post a law that said so. There is an element, in much of Malouf’s work, of being mired in Arcadia. Imagine, for an equivalent, a modern American literature in which Saul Bellow wrote about General Custer, Philip Roth wrote about the Gold Rush, and even Gore Vidal wrote less about Lincoln and Aaron Burr than about the Lewis and Clark expedition. The mismatch of time and attention is made all the more piquant by Malouf’s startly gift for talking about the complexities of modern history. If I were to say that he was hiding in the far past, however, it might well be an impertinence. A talent does what it must, and Malouf is as talented as a writer need be. His memory, in particular, is a poetic instrument which I tried to praise in this piece but still didn’t praise enough. In my own book Unreliable memoirs I thought I had done something to evoke the house I grew up in. Then I read Malouf’s 12 Edmondstone Street and realized I had got no further than the bricks and mortar. Malouf gives you the feeling of the carpet under your sunburned bare feet, the itch of blistered skin about to peel. I think it fair to say that he would have been less sensitive to these nuances if he had not had an immigrant background, and that the emergence of the post-World War II multicultural Australia, with all its new concentrations of power and social prestige, is the even greater tale that remains for him to tell. There are touches of it in his short stories, especially the autobiographical ones, but so far the novels have been informed by it more in the rind than at the core. There is always the chance, of course, that Malouf’s next book will render this footnote nonsensical at a stroke. I look forward to that.

A memory called Malouf [postscript]
uit: The meaning of recognition : new essays 2001-2005 - Clive James