A bit of a follow-up to the Peter Craven edition of Pseuds Corner a while back. A few things have been pointed out to me by the Stage's 5.5 readers that bear on the Craven case and I think are worth repeating.
The argument from one quarter was that the Special Edition neglected to give the impression that Mr C can at times write better prose than what was on display in the 7 extracts I picked on a few weeks ago. This recent op-ed piece was cited as an example:
"Would that politics in this country were as well run as the ABC's political panel show Q and A - on a good day. Television transforms our apprehension of politics by its vividness, its accuracy and the sense of occasion with which it presents it. - Q and A began only last year, but is already essential to the political landscape. It presents a panel that includes a member each from the government and the opposition, a couple of journalists or intellectuals, perhaps someone from business or a think tank - five in all plus the presenter (Lateline's Tony Jones) - and subjects them to live questions from the audience plus a sprinkling sent in electronically. The format works superbly, highlighting both the political skill of our politicians and the fact that there is a lot more to the governing of a country than mere party political differences." (Peter Craven, "Question: What makes tv great? Answer: Q and A" The Age)
The argument from another quarter, precisely along these lines, was that the case against Craven's writing made in the Special Edition actually didn't go far enough. James of Coburg made the point that if he had submitted a single line of the prose from exhibits (a) through (g) to the editors of any of Australia's major literary publications then he would probably have been told straight-up that he was writing unpublishable drivel.
In the case of submissions (a) through to (g), professional editing would have meant refusing Mr Craven column space on the grounds of egregious lack of merit, coherence and substance, though some exceptions, James suggested, might be made for exhibits (c), (d) and (e), which, to quote James himself, "are more in the nature of a gossip column". (Decide for yourself whether the Lilian Frank persona Craven adopts for his Australian Spectator column is innocuous or intellectually offensive. I'm happy to concede James's point: lowering literary standards is fair enough if the only point of a piece really is to let Peter let the world know he saw Eddie and Carla Maguire at the latest Mary Poppins production.)
James's more important point though is that Mr Craven is being seriously indulged by many of the major editorial powers in the land, who, in publishing material of the - to use a Cravenism - loose baggy monstrousness of exhibits (a) through (g) are effectively refusing to edit. In this, I have to say, I agree. Like James, I find it hard to believe that a sane editor who'd been set the task of exercising his/her professional skills on exhibits (a) through (g) - from behind a veil of anonymity for instance - would have failed to apply the red pencil to every sentence even vaguely like this one:
"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)
I also agree with James that there are aspects of grotesque awfulness to Mr Craven's prose - and his general mindset - that I actually left out of my initial collection. The list of excesses and foibles I started the Craven edition of Pseuds Corner with wasn't meant to be exhaustive and I now think I could've come up with a better list. At the top of it would have to go Craven's love of superfine comparisons between the works - or even the whole literary oeuvres - of his favourite literary geniuses - sometimes 4 or 5 per paragraph. To quote the above splurge about Nicholas Rothwell again:
"Of course, putting it like this is unfair to Rothwell, whose work is as moving and eloquent and imaginative (and as willing to stare down the truth no matter what mesmerising abyss it lurks in) as contemporary writing can be. But he is at the same time at an edge of artifice and distinctiveness where a lot of wise heads and smart money are liable to reject him. What was it that Dr Johnson said of Milton? That, as Ben Jonson had earlier said of Spenser, he writ no language, that he wrote a Babylonish dialect? And wasn't it Joseph Conrad, himself a latter-day Homer of the sea, who said of that most Miltonic of prose epics, Moby Dick, that it didn't have a single line of sincerity in it? - This is the hyperbole of the anti-hyperbolic. . . Rothwell is a remarkable writer and he has the exorbitant pretentiousness that goes with everything that is exquisite and mandarin and expectant about his whole endeavour. - Whether he's waiting for God or Godot in the desert doesn't matter, or only to him. His Northern Territory is a kind of junkyard of the detritus of a formidable if decadent European cultivation, but who could object, that's how Dostoyevsky saw the West and its gaming tables: with cold, engrossed eyes."
"In one way it's a form of landscape novel writing in which the world of characters in an ongoing drama is replaced by the brooding consciousness of the narrator who, by necessity, arrogates to himself whatever more or less Wordsworthian fascinations interiority and its thousand minute modulations might disclose. - V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival is one kind of locus classicus of this kind of writing, the fiction of Gerald Murnane is another. It is, in any case, a form of documentary fiction-making that realigns fiction (or non-fiction, because it confounds the distinction) with the long backward arch of Romantic poetry. You can no more argue with Sebald's The Rings of Saturn than you can with Wordsworth's Prelude or - if you want to change the game a little - with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets and Rilke's Duino Elegies." (Peter Craven, "Appointment with the sublime", Australian Literary Review, The Australian)
Prima facie, what we have here is a species of literary name-dropping, which was something I did suggest Craven did a lot of, along with (a) invoking High Art as a quasi-metaphysical value, (b) theatrically purporting to explain himself without explaining anything, (c) coining bizarre metaphors (d) badly imitating the earthy side of Robert Hughes and (e) referring to God for rhetorical effect. In a more rigorous survey of Mr Craven's prose-style though, the superfine comparisons and general analogy-mongering, I can see now, would belong in a different category to the vulgar "met Charlotte and Cate for lunch"-style shop-talk.
The reason why material like the ghastly Rothwell review belongs in a category of its own will be obvious to anyone who's ever opened the arts pages of an Australian newspaper looking for a critical interpretation whose basic line of thought he can follow: all the huff and puff about great writers in Craven's reviews endlessly defers the point where he has to justify his responses, as opposed to giving his readers unargued demonstrations of his own overwhelming knowledgeability. Yes, the tone is so snobbish it's ridiculous, based as it is on the premiss that normal readers of the The Australian could mentally reference the nuances contained in a library-worth of books with the ease that Craven appears to be able to do so. But much more important than that is the fact that writing like Craven's bears very little thinking about. Read it and imagine yourself putting the question to Mr C "How would you actually flesh out that grand-sounding analogy between St Paul and Montaigne, Nicholas Rothwell and Milton, Mahler and Cormac McCarthy, Kodi Smit-Macphee and the patriarch Abraham etc etc etc?" What could Craven possibly say? All I can imagine is a sort of authoritative pre-discursive groan, signifying something like "CAN'T YOU SEE I'M VERY CULTURED! (Get you gone.)"
However, bad writing created by a desire to seem massively well-read is maybe only part of Craven's problem. The other half of the problem is the result of a bad mental habit and here again more needs to be said about how Craven gets himself into it. My sense is this. For Craven, the basic game of reviewing is to indicate in a roundabout way what the aesthetic experience of a book or a film reminds him of, which turns out to be another aesthetic experience. The reviews then spend much of their time joining the dots between these singular points of personal aesthetic experience without communicating the least part of the content of that experience to the reader.
Another grave problem for Craven that I didn't mention in the Pseuds Special Edition are all those sentences choking on linguistic fetish-items: the "rich and strange" stock-phrases that read like the first things that enter Mr C's mind rather than fully-formed subject-plus-predicate-style thoughts about the matter at hand. When Craven is at his worst, the bold metaphors simply get thrown together to create a sort of chaotic high-toned poetry:
"In that respect, as in others, McCarthy is the heir of Hemingway, with a thundering command of action that enthrals, though his cadences are stately and artful and the feeling that runs through his books encompasses the pity and the terror and the tears in things. You begin reading All the Pretty Horses, which opens his Border Trilogy, thinking that you are experiencing the Platonic idea of escapist writing because you are enjoying a cowboy book for the first time since you were ten only to discover that this is no reanimation of the delights of childhood. It is a [sic] Kindertotenlieder. . .
From the outset, the film [of McCarthy's The Road] skilfully establishes the moral gravity that underlines the horror-style narrative momentum. The father's narration tells us that if God's voice does not come through the child, then he never spoke a word. And so it goes as father and son move over the bleached and devastated landscapes of some rural Pennsylvania or Oregon of the mind, some Montana that may be coterminous with a world where men rove like wolves."("Baby Dante and Apocalypse" ABR) [my italics. Ed]
What is basically at issue in McCarthy as a novellist and in the film versions of The Road in particular? What are the basic themes here? Isn't that the simplest question that the reader of a review might expect to get an answer to? Can Mr C answer it? Well, he can run through the plot of The Road, throwing in semantically unmotivated references to Platonic ideas, "literary high-jinks", the "tears of being", a "Montana of the mind", seeing various things through a glass darkly, "all that is red and tooth in claw" - oh and "the ineffable" (which he proceeds to say an eff'ing lot about).
But how does McCarthy's novel actually work? How does McCarthy's literary apocalyptic or Hillcoat's film version of it relate to the reality of our present world or that of the future? Admittedly these aren't the most sophisticated literary critical questions. But if as a reviewer you can't even give a vague sense of an answer, your review just doesn't belong on the arts pages of a broadsheet newspaper. The trouble with Mr C as a reviewer is that he rarely answers any of these sorts of entry-level questions about structure or significance and the constipated prose-style is part of the reason why: Craven habitually spends so much of his time in most of his reviews chewing and re-chewing the same pet phrases that he fails to give a critical impression of a book or get across a coherent line of thought about it.
If we were just talking about a literary tic that we had to ignore in order to get to the analysis, interpretation and evaluation that form the essence of any really substantial criticism then maybe it'd all be worth it. But in Craven's case, the reviews seem to be all tic and no text. On a good day, Craven can indicate, in a roundabout way (roughly as he does in his response to Q and A) whether he thinks something is good or bad, pointless or worthy: the evaluative bit. But most of the time, he's so busy tweaking silly phrases that analysis, interpretation and evaluation are nowhere in sight.
*
Six months ago, Gideon Haigh sparked medium-level controversy in the literary world by suggesting that Australian criticism is nowadays light-on and uninspired. Book reviews in particular, according to Haigh, are increasingly being farmed out to general staff writers who, in the absence of special knowledge, drown the reader in vague impressions and almost never venture strong-minded critical opinions. Yet while it's true nowadays that Australian literary editors seem to have a preference for favourable reviews, especially of local fare, there's a double-edge to this particular sword and I'm guessing Haigh is aware of it. The trouble is that there's something far worse than reviewers giving everyone who managed to get into print an encouragement award. And that's reviewers giving what they don't like an unargued critical caning.
"Bestial metaphor abounds in Shakespeare's tale of sexual jealousy. Director Peter King takes his cue from it, entering the jungle of physical theatre to deliver a production canopied by a writhing tableau of carnal play. . . [Annie] Last's Desdemona carved out an unlikely wedge of dignity for herself. King's work, as he puts it, ''continues to disdain naturalism, whatever that may be''. - It's the kind of statement that makes naturalism seem like pornography: you can't describe it, but you know it when you see it. - In fact, Shakespeare is both naturalistic and not. To the extent that the burgeoning sensuality of King's conception accentuates the trauma at the heart of Othello, it's fair enough. - But this production seems more interested in playing with itself than to the audience, and some of its rude tricks seem to be compensating for a lack of technique." (Cameron Woodhead reviews "Othello" at fortyfivedownstairs, The Age)
Ignore the wretched word painting. (Anyone up for a ticket to a production "canopied by a writhing tableau of carnal play"?!) There's another thing that Craven and his protégés are very good at. And that is filling out reviews with casual put downs. Take the pointless sneer from Mr C himself at the end of this paragraph:
"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). As with Eliot’s Waste Land, the brilliance of the comic surface has almost outlived the existential insecurity it is shaping. - Sean Mathias’s quietly brilliant production takes this fact as its opportunity by constantly emphasising the mature human face of the grinding rituals through which his two ageing tramps wait and wander (wittily and witlessly) as Godot puts them through their paces in his failure to come. McKellen and Rees, in contrasted ways, have the rueful stoicism of age, and their comic embrace of catastrophe — McKellen’s boggle-eyed and flailing, Rees’s dapper and wincing — is light years from the contorted angst of young actors with the world before them as an enigmatic agony." (Peter Craven reviews Sean Mathias' "Waiting for Godot", The Spectator)
Off we go again. The stars of Craven's literary canon twinkle brightly. In the foreground phrases get made, phrases get murdered, the storehouses of the English language are laid waste in the search for a maximally colourful figure of speech or an intermediate term in a world-historical literary analogy. The Craven caning that comes at the end of the paragraph is a model of how not to proceed as an intellectually responsible critic: spend most of your time cueing your readers as to how well-read you are, denigrate your critical object by rhetorically screwing up your face - never put it in a context in which its failings become comprehensible from a broader point of view.
The vague swipes are more than faintly insulting to artists and readers alike. And perhaps the only excuse Australian arts editors have for filling out review pages with tepid positivity is to avoid the negative consequences of badly-written reviews that attitudinise instead of arguing in just this style. Tepid critical praise for every work has one advantage over nasty pseudery. It avoids everyone involved in the arts, including your newspaper's dwindling readership, from feeling justifiably offended.
*
Now, there are people in the Australian arts world who are willing to call Craven on his sloppy intellectual habits and the poor standard of his writing. From memory, Gideon Haigh didn't single out Mr C for special treatment at Readings six months ago. Alison Croggon by contrast has been consistently willing to do so, for instance in this hard-hitting reply to Craven.
For the sake of background, here's a moderately pseudish snippet from the comment-piece by Mr C that got on Croggon's nerves:
"Naturalism and disruptive high jinks: the theatre needs both. Yes, we need a writer's theatre that is also an actor's theatre, where the director serves the text and highlights — and disciplines — the strength of the actor. We need Rush and Steve Sewell and a director such as Kate Cherry, who can quietly find the music in a Hannie Rayson play. Maybe in the end we need it more than the declamatory atonal music of Andrews and Kosky. - Half the trouble with Australian theatre is caused by talented directors who feel they are above realism and well-made plays. Often they cut their teeth with student theatre and have been too narcissistic to grow up. It's much easier to treat student actors like puppets and to improvise a text than it is to treat Judy Davis like that. Most cut-and-paste postmodern tinkerings with classics make Joanna Murray-Smith look like Racine on a good day. But for every production such as Osage, there's hand-me-down cardboard rubbish of the traditional kind. - We want the best actors commanding the respect of directors who will allow the best of our playwrights to take their places alongside the Pirandellos and Greeks. A theatre which is ancient and modern, classic and cutting-edge, Australian and internationalist, with a deep instinctive sense that to make it new, you have to have a theatrical eye for the glitter of the old. Where is naturalism in all this? Well, we need a theatre that has emotional truth, and we need a theatre that understands the magic of its own artifice." ("The trouble with Australian theatre", The National Times)
As ever, the main argument gets lost in the muddy swirl of tenuous comparisons. It shouldn't take a paragraph with fifteen proper names to tell us that in Mr C's opinion Australian theatre needs to strike a balance between naturalism and experimental disruption. However, without a definition of his main terms (naturalism//"disruptive high jinks", mainstream vs experimental theatre, emotional truth vs deconstruction of traditions), even that relatively simple point evaporates into thin air. The run-through of recent productions by major Australian theatre companies in the rest of the piece contains plenty of examples that seem to fall on both sides of the apparent divide between naturalism and "disruptive high jinks", so you fast end up wondering what the complaint that there's too much "disruption" really amounts to.
Croggon's point is essentially the one about definitions and it's very well taken: surely no one who had thought a little about the term "mainstream theatre" would be silly enough to claim that most mainstream products are particularly "naturalistic", or that the popularity of mainstream shows follows from any notable adherence to "naturalism". In short, Craven - to the extent that he is arguing anything at all - is re-hashing an age-old debate between naturalism and its opponents - a debate which any sophisticated critic ought to know is completely unresolvable when framed in these simplistic terms. For anyone who didn't do Aesthetics 101, let it be said that in the Nineteenth Century, the advocates of aesthetic naturalism extolled naturalism as an escape from arbitrary stylisation, while the advocates of aesthetic anti-naturalism condemned it as a step backwards from the reality-sublimating and reality-subverting functions of art itself. Anyone with a rough grasp of the history of criticism can see that insisting on a "theatre of emotional truth", as Craven does, loads the dice against art which doesn't take truth or emotion as the measure of aesthetic significance. More than that, arguing for naturalism in this simple-minded way overlooks the relatively obvious point that naturalism is itself a form of artifice - one which in some circumstances becomes less than fully aware of itself and under the conditions of mass cultural spectacle often leads to nothing but the repetition of emotional cliche's and psychological stereotypes.
In any case, the sort of ideal Australian theatre that Craven manages to build out of his insistence on "emotional truth" is so vague as to be largely meaningless. A theatre with a "deep instinctive sense that to make it new you have to keep an eye on the glitter of the old"? A theatre that "understands the magic of its own artifice"? What on earth would that amount to specifically? I suppose here at least we can be glad that Craven's pseudo-ideal is captured in a sentence with a beginning that relates to its middle and end according to a principle other than literary free association. Still if the actual content of the ideal would make a meaningful difference to theatre programming or theatrical practice, then Craven leaves us clueless how.
If I had to guess what Mr C is trying to say at this point - it's that he wants to be emotionally moved when he goes to the theatre - that Great Art is deeply moving and so could be truly popular if it weren't being screwed up by "narcissistic" avant-gardists. Let's take it that that's what Craven would be saying if he weren't beating about the bush. Let's also take it that Mr C's desire to be moved by the theatre is basically irrelevant until it's raised from the level of a personal hankering and made part of some sort of meaningful critical discourse about the place of emotion in our responses to theatre. What of the idea that Great Art could potentially wow the masses - if not quite with the success of Mary Poppins - because of the way it invests spectacle with grand pathos? This is obviously the topic that's hidden behind the crotchety debate about Arts Festival programming. However, it's a topic that needs the attention of someone who's prepared to argue in a sustained way about the relation between art and wider society - a true critic, in other words - not a drunken phrase-maker with a license to kill.
There's no doubt that the position of art in society is changing radically in today's world; high culture in particular is fast turning into a kind of niche product and in the process fast ceasing to be what it was until recently - a much more coherent medium of enjoyment and self-understanding for educated people who saw themselves as setting the cultural tone of society. With high culture, and indeed art in general, transformed into a cultural commodity, a lot of arts journalism exists - in spite of whatever good intentions its authors might have - to spuriously glamourise the product. And this is what Craven, in refusing to communicate intelligibly about art, becomes the ever more tireless, tiresome producer of: bizarre glamorisations of an aesthetic tradition that has come into almost entirely new relations to the society it used to be so central to.
The deeper reason why Mr Craven can't write starts to become clear: because the great - and admirable - high-mindedness he wants to bring to the role of the arts writer becomes ridiculous when it comes into combination with the Arts Industry as it exists in the present day and age, with its anti-critical and an-aesthetic imperatives: maintaining an artistic star-system, depositing small references to the arts in as many places as possible, bringing the occasional controversy to the boil and artificially maintaining that aura of sublimity we all know art loses when it is rigorously subjected to the logic of sales-volumes and bums-on-seats.
Question: What happens when the imperative to glamourize the artistic product becomes the practical-social driver of your activity as a writer about art? Well, unless you drop the pretence of great critical grandeur, then at the very least the strain starts to show: above all, your language goes on an extended holiday - a round-the-world cruise maybe, on which adverbs go fly kites of their own, assonance runs riot, half of what you say sounds like it comes from a tourist brochure or a real estate catalogue and everything smells heavily of alcohol and sex:
"The novel pulsates with the portent and momentum of revelations Tranter either foreshadows to the point of obviousness or keeps putting further and more far-fetchedly [sic] out of reach. This makes the book's endless foreplay between its thriller elements and its loftily conceived moral dramas and soaring [sic] realism a little bit of a tease. But The Legacy retains a lot of magic along with its roughness. Full of suave and stunning [sic] evocations of Sydney and Manhattan, this sparkling and spacious [sic] novel captures the smell and sap [sic] of young people half in love with everyone they're vividly aware of, and groping to find themselves [sic] like the answer to an erotic enigma." (Peter Craven reviews Kirsten Tranter, The Monthly)
Oh dear. Let's hope there's an editor out there who still has the courage to call this stray ship back to port. The captain's drunk and is doing weird stuff on the bridge. The whole thing's totally sic!
