Pseud's Corner Special: The Peter Craven Edition

This week, a special edition of Pseud's Corner featuring a writer who has really been excelling himself over the years - Peter Craven.

Mr Craven has managed to get himself in the starting line-up for all of our previous five editions of the Corner of Shame; his sycophantic panting over artistic celebrities in The Australian Spectator and those unstoppable, barely argued reviews in a range of literary publications have made him a real go-to man when it comes to prose that is "pretentious, over-written, self-important, knowing instead of knowledgeable, name-dropping, cliche'd or sloppy to the point of meaninglessness" - as prose which deserves its place in Pseud's Corner must be.

Luckily, Craven's bad prose also seems to have inspired one of The Great Stage's 5.5 readers to draw our Grand Master of Pseudery in a costume provided by his own rhetorical self in a recent frenzy of off-key name-dropping (see below). We give you . . . "Peter Craven as The Widow Twankey" by "Anna Karenina". David Levine - you have a continuator! 

Some may find that the compilation we've made below of Mr Craven's monstrosities runs on too long. And yet there's no denying the man can be entertaining when he is writing this badly and getting away with it - for connoisseurs of tortured prose, maybe the freak show can't go on too long. Second, it's nice to give a sense of the different shades of Mr Craven's bad writing. After all, there's not just the infatuated celebrity tittle-tattle, there are the snobbish invocations of High Art, the great heaving gestures in the direction of explanation, the metaphors from the twilight-zone ("cobra-like steadiness of purpose" etc), the flatulent attempts to channel Robert Hughes ("the shit and slime of mortality, the ordure and torture of the act of dying"). And, of course, there's Peter talking about God.

Am I alone in thinking that most Australian arts undergraduates could produce more coherent critical responses than this guy? How does he get away with it? Anyone who thinks he has an answer - and of course anyone who's spotted any more of Mr Craven's gems - feel welcome to say hello at pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au  
  

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The audience was peppered with Beckettian spectres. I didn’t see Barry Humphries, who’d been a striking presence at the Bill Henson opening in Sydney two nights earlier but Geoffrey Rush, [Mel] Gibson’s Vladimir, and a triumph 30 years later as Ionesco’s exiting king, was there, as was his friend Bille Brown who had actually written an Aladdin pantomime in which McKellen played the Widow Twankey. So too was Max Gillies who had done Krapp’s Last Tape for Elijah Moshinsky at Monash 40 years ago. And Colin Duckworth, the professor of French who knew Sam Beckett himself, was in the audience, having seen most of the notable Godots since Peter Hall’s. . . With the passage of the years Waiting for Godot has come to seem less like a shocking paradigm of absurdity and more like the deep sad comedy of a continuing condition (call it human if you must). (Peter Craven reviews Sean Mathias' "Waiting for Godot", The Spectator: Australian Edition)

The easiest way into Rothwell is via Another Country, because that book makes clear without any overwhelming baroque turbulence that we are dealing with a cultivated sensibility, all but flypapered with the culture of Europe, the kind of bloke who jumped on a plane to see, as soon as possible, a newly rediscovered Titian in eastern Europe, who is steeped in the literary power of the 19th-century Australian explorers and is alive not only to his own desire for illumination and the potential for personal enlightenment and spiritual excruciation that comes from exploration (in all its literal and metaphorical ambivalence); but who is also, in a worldly sense, open to the fact that "spiritual tourism", like the taste for Aboriginal art, is a growth industry and a collective sussurration of which his own whispering is a part. ("Appointment with the sublime", ALR)

Later that night we were partaking of more Sydney luxury at the party of my old friend (and doctor) Jonathan Upfal and his lovely lady Susie Corlett, which was in the Pratt flat that overlooks Circular Quay the way a Martian spaceship might overlook Earth. It’s another of those views that make you feel, for a moment, like a master of the universe, even if what you’re listening to in the velvety darkness of the balcony with the lights in the water like inverted stars is that wild man Peter Booth talking about his paintings, or Bill Henson arguing that the films made by that left-wing aristocrat Visconti just got better and better as his career went on. Colin appeared to spend the whole night talking only to that gorgeous popular novelist Lee Tulloch. ("Peter Craven opens his diary" The Spectator online)

Charlotte Rampling (a strikingly thoughtful and self-possessed woman with whom Colin and I had dinner on Saturday night at Jane Badler’s South Yarra home) was 24 when she made The Damned for Visconti, and is still a regal presence in the French cinema. She is playing a dying woman in Schepisi’s White film and Judy Davis her daughter, the Princesse de Lascabanes. On the previous Sunday we went to the 80th birthday party of Jonathan Upfal’s mother, Bunny, a lady who used to vote communist but who is now (and she finds it a great lark) la comtesse de Saint-Ferjeux. . . A couple of days later I was at the memorial service for that great Australian-born London-based poet, Peter Porter. His daughter Jane told me that at the actual London funeral –– at which Clive James, visibly moved, had read from the Bible — Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan, those lions of modern fiction, had all showed up to honour the man who gave up a job in advertising to make a living writing reviews but will be read as long as the English language is spoken. At the service at Newman College, Fr. Peter Steele presided, Morag Fraser read psalm 39 to the manner born, and Peter Rose talked of the funny, generous man who always thought everyone was likely to be run down crossing the street by a dark Daimler sent by the British government. Craig Sherborne read a late poem by Peter, ‘After Schiller’, which had a staggering formal power, magnificent and moving. They sang Mozart, Wolf and Schubert, with Anna Goldsworthy at the piano, and then in the high reverberant acoustic of that Catholic chapel we heard the voice of Peter Porter reading his own work: so warm, so understated, a commingling of Britain and Australia. The congregation –– which ranged from the comedian John Clarke to the critic Owen Richardson –– melted. ("Peter Craven opens his diary" The Spectator online)

I meet Rampling twice, once at a dinner party, then two days later on the set. At the dinner table, without make-up and with clearly no desire even for the most casual limelight, she looks the opposite of vain, with no hint of the star. - On the set, though she is made up to look very old, all the familiar beauty, the sense of bewitchment is there, even as she strives to explain how it was the core of spirituality that illuminates the character she is playing. . .
It is hard not to have the highest hopes for Schepisi's film. The man who as a director can range from what is, I suppose, the greatest representation, in any form, of an Australian Catholic childhood in The Devil's Playground through to the easy sophistications of Six Degrees of Separation and who also elicited that performance by Meryl Streep as Lindy Chamberlain: who better to direct a film of this dark yet luminous masterpiece about womanhood and the mystery of things in the face of death? - That he is doing this with an actress who has been famous for decades and has pursued a career not of stardom but of dramatic truth . . .what could be more appropriate for the first major film that is being made of a book by a man who presented our world as one of the dark and God-kissed places of the earth? (Peter Craven on the making of Fred Schepisi's Eye of the Storm, "Demise of a dominator", ALR)

THE paradox of The Eye of the Storm and the thing that makes it unlike any other novel is that White gives the fullest possible weight to the shit and slime of mortality, to the ordure and torture of the act of dying, while also providing with a dazzling and kaleidoscopic realism for the vision of spiritual illumination that makes Elizabeth Hunter more than the twitching corpse of her pent-up vanities and seductions and capacities for betrayal. - It's a brilliant novel in what might almost have been a gothic mode (the grand old dame croaking and gabbling in the grand old house) except that the writing has such a consistent verve, as it continues to find the stuff of drama in the crazy poignancy and comedy of this woman dying, with all her girlhood and her womanhood in flower, through the action and invention of memory and the marvellous counterpoint that is executed between the predicament of the ravaged and the ravishing Elizabeth Hunter and her two dreadful children, the feckless narcissist actor and the insecure "French" aristocrat. - It's an extraordinary performance even at the incidental level of its orchestration. Apart from anything else The Eye of the Storm is a kind of recapitulation of King Lear for the female voice and face. This de Kooning-like creature bedraggled in bed and physically and mentally degraded by the crawl towards death is, like Lear, one of the supreme tragicomic portraits of human life where (to use Shakespeare's language) nature is at the "extreme verge". And one aspect of White's translation of Lear to a feminine mode and to a minor key -- and pointing to the harmony King Lear first intimates, then shatters with its "Howl" -- is to slyly underline the other analogues . . . ( "Demise of a dominator", ALR)

A few years ago, when Cormac McCarthy published On the Road, that story about a young boy and his father wandering an Earth that is coming to an end with maximum horror and bestiality, some people wondered where that writer of westerns with the infliction of tragedy and the eloquence of epic had left to go. The Road seemed a terminally bleak visionthough it was true that the figure of the boy was luminous in his innocence. . .
The play-like Sunset Limited has a kind of didactic brilliance that constantly suggests a different context, as if [it] were the fragment of some subordinated allegory that had its place in a larger novelistic frame-work like the Grand Inquisitor of The Brothers Karamazov. - But because the structure of the work is so dialogic and neo-theological, because it is such a duet for dominant bass and receding tenor to the theme of the problem of evil, it becomes increasingly apparent that there is only one way the action can twist in its climax, and that turns out to be precisely the turn it takes. - The Sunset Limited has a compelling, nearly monomaniacal consistency of tone that fascinates the reader with a cobra-like steadiness of purpose, and then it leaps, as it must, into contrast with a stabbing intensity. ("A life and death debate", The Age)

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Hm, and it seems Mr Craven isn't the only critic that the recent Beckett production has inspired to a spot of, um, foggy-minded "fanoodling". . . [Lunch on CS and an honourable mention in Pseud's Corner 7 for the person to come up with the best definition of "fanoodling" (entries to pseudsaustralia@yahoo.com.au). The Urban Dictionary's definition - "to mess about kinkily, like cuddling only better" - is not acceptable. But apart from that, well, let your imagination wander. What were Beckett's tramps really up to? And what does Julian Meyrick really mean?]

A SHIFTING, shuffling, furrowing, cogitating noise. A cross between a wheeze, a sigh and a snort of determination. This is the sound emitting from the Comedy Theatre at the moment. The sound of Australians facing up to Culture. . . That Waiting for Godot should be presented commercially 50 years after it was damned by New York critic Walter Kerr as "a play in which nothing happens, twice" suggests either the world has lost its mind, or changed it. Beckett's two tramps, fanoodling and despairing their days away waiting for a mysterious Godot who never appears, is stamped on our collective consciousness as the archetypal existential statement. A ditch, a tree, a few guys killing time. That's it, folks. After all the unwanted Christmas presents, great loves, political upheavals, promotions, demotions, technical advances, broken marriages and lost biros, that what we're left with. That's life. - A production of Waiting for Godot is a compelling event because it is still an affront to theatre-going sensibilities. Or once again an affront. Discontinuity is the dominant mode of the modern world, as we frazzle and fragment in unrelenting competitive locomotion. Harried, hurried and chronically overwhelmed, waiting of any kind has been banished, an unmitigated bad. So Beckett's tramps, who literally do nothing for two hours, is a poke in the eye, a ''f**k you'' from beyond the grave. Having to sit in the theatre and think for a prolonged period demands skills all but forgotten, like tuning a crystal set. Something more is required, a quality of attention we reserve only for things that touch us deeply. Things that really matter. (Julian Meyrick, "Beckett can teach us how to wait", The Age)