The Devil and James McAuley
By Cassandra Pybus
University of Queensland Press 1999
I want my money back!
Almost 100,000 dollars of public money went into this project and what is one to make of the expensive white elephant that has come off the press? As a taxpayer who unwittingly contributed to the funding I would like to ask for my money back. However if Cassandra Pybus is prepared to make the trip I would be willing to support research in the Moscow archives to document the flow of Soviet funds to the communist party in Australia and to fellow-travelling writers.
Under normal circumstances, one of the minimal requirements for writing a biography is a degree of sympathetic interest in the subject. Sympathy in this situation does not mean uncritical admiration of all facets of the character and achievements of the subject, merely the capacity to give credit where it is due. On this criterion one would wonder why Cassandra Pybus bothered to research and write the story of James McAuley. Apart from a flicker of sympathy for the emotional coldness of his upbringing, this account is almost entirely lacking in empathy or understanding of McAuley's motivation and his strengths.
McAuley had at least three public faces: the poet, the scholar and the political/religious activist. It seems that Pybus has a tin ear for verse and so is unable to convey any sense of his achievements in that area. Instead she mines his poetry for symptoms of sexual, religious and political hangups. Religion has traditionally been a vehicle for the highest spiritual aspirations, but she is apparently tone deaf to this area of human experience as well.
The English historian and philosopher R G Collingwood deplored the decline of religion and the rise of the 'Prussian philosophy' of political bullying. Obsessed with the rise of dictatorships in the 1930s he felt that democratic principles had lost the 'punch' that religious faith had once imparted to them. This amounts to a repetition of the mournful commentary by Yeats in his poem 'The Second Coming.'
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...
This was the situation confronted by McAuley when he turned from the romanticism and anarchism of youth to Catholicism and political engagement in the 1950s. It is the domain of politics where Pybus is most at home. Reporting on an address by McAuley at the University of Sydney she writes "It was not the poet I went to hear all those years ago. Then, as now, it was the political ideologist and cold war warrior who compelled my attention". Unfortunately her attention must have wandered, or maybe he said things she did not want to hear because she went on "I don't remember what it was he said".
Of course it is unreasonable to demand that McAuley's biographer should be a poet with religious sensibilities, however an academic historian should provide something more than a journalistic account of the work of Santamaria, Krygier and others who opposed communist influence in the trade unions, the ALP and the universities. Pybus provides no historical perspective on these activities. A younger generation of readers may need to be reminded that there was a cold war, sometimes more than cold, as in Korea, Malaya, Vietnam and other insurgencies, not to mention Hungary. During that time a hostile totalitarian power threatened peace and security all over the world, with its agents in the west, including Australia, being funded and directed from Moscow. Due to the treason of the intellectuals, who as Pybus pointed out, mostly supported the other side, those who did not, such as McAuley were called all manner of names.
Andrew Riemer injected a note of realism when he noted (SMH 24 July) that Quadrant first appeared at the time that Hungarian refugees started to turn up after escaping from Russian tanks in the streets of their home town. Many Australian communists such as Philip Adams left the party at that point, though the realities should have been apparent to well informed people from the 1930s, from Koestler's Darkness at Noon, from George Orwell's journalism and from the wharfies disruption of the allied war effort during the Hitler-Stalin pact.
It appears that Cassandra Pybus has missed the moral point of the anti-communist stand of the Quadrant supporters. They were a small part of the worldwide intellectual resistance to an aggressive dictatorship. As for the CIA funding to Quadrant which provided so much delight to Humphrey McQueen and others, it is unfortunate that Quadrant could not raise more funds locally but nobody has suggested that Krygier and co took their orders from overseas in the way that the communists did.
The outcome of the cold war remained in doubt until well after McAuley's death. The stakes were high and this no doubt contributed to the sense of urgency and impatience on the part of McAuley and others, especially in the face of indifference or obstruction by people who should have known better. The final collapse of the Soviet empire surely revealed to the most empty-headed Vietnam Moratorium marcher that there was something rotten behind the Iron Curtain.
Pybus merely notes that McAuley was on the losing side in the 1970s. It should be added that this was mostly because the leadership in Australia and the US destroyed their moral credibility by introducing conscription for the Vietnam war. This was hardly McAuley's fault because he was a not a rightwinger of the coercive kind. He probably would have endorsed Hayek's statement "Why I am not a conservative" (Postscript to The Constitution of Liberty). A real conservative such as Malcolm Fraser showed his true colours when, in addition to supporting conscription and retrospective taxation, he cut back funding to Quadrant and raised the tariff barriers to impede free trade.
Defects in the research in this book have been documented by other reviewers who were closer to the action than myself. The embarrassing gesture towards homoeroticism as a spring of McAuley's motivation has been rubbished by commentators across the ideological spectrum.
Almost 100,000 dollars of public money went into this project and what is one to make of the expensive white elephant that has come off the press? As a taxpayer who unwittingly contributed to the funding I would like to ask for my money back. However if Cassandra Pybus is prepared to make the trip I would be willing to support research in the Moscow archives to document the flow of Soviet funds to the communist party in Australia and to fellow-travelling writers.
Review published in The Adelaide Review.
