Allen Lane

These two books were written in the last stages of a fatal illness. What is remarkable about them is their poise. They show no signs of anguish, anger, or remorse. They remind us of the discipline of a trained and responsible mind, nimble and true to its calling until the end.

The day I began writing this review, the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA) news service carried three items reflecting the umbilical nature of ties between the United States and Israel. One item reported President George W. Bush as threatening to veto an intelligence bill because it would require revelations about a mysterious Israeli air attack on Syria on September 6. A second reported the Bush administration’s delaying a request to Congress for approval of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia. The sale forms part of a $20 billion deal with Arab nations, aimed at a united front against Iran, but ‘some pro-Israeli groups and Congress members say it is risky to sell offensive arms to a régime that has at times harboured militant Islamists’. The third item dealt with a bill to fully integrate the United States and Israeli missile defence systems. The bill’s congressional sponsor hailed it as ‘a symbol of our shared values and a safer 21^st century’.

An immense irony: Noam Chomsky, one of the left-culture heroes of the 1960s and 1970s –one of mine, at any rate – was in fact all along engaged in a white-anting of the sacred central tenet that unites leftish beliefs, the notion we are products (constructs is the more fashionable term) of our culture. And its optimistic sequel: we can therefore be changed, or improved. Gender roles are supposedly a construct, IQs are supposedly a construct, the fact that all sprint finalists in the Olympics are black-skinned is even supposed to be a cultural construct.

In the penultimate chapter of his memoir, Bernard Smith describes a meeting of the Sydney Teachers College Art Club, an institution he founded and later transformed into the leftist NSW Teachers Federation Art Society. The group was addressed in 1938 by Julian Ashton, then aged eighty-seven and very much the grand old man of Sydney painting and art education. He spoke at great length on the inadequacy of the NSW Education Department’s art teaching practices. Smith adds that Ashton also ‘told his life story (as old men will)’.

Thomas Shapcott uses as a basis for his novel the fascinating life story of Karoly Pulszky, who left Hungary as the disgraced Director of the National Gallery of Art and who committed suicide after two months in Queensland. Pulszky, a forceful and flamboyant man, followed in the footsteps of his distinguished father in building up Hungary’s art collection. He was married to Emilia Markus, ‘The Blonde Wonder of Budapest, the Greatest Actress in Hungary’. Financial mismanagement enabled his family’s political enemies to bring him down and he left Hungary in shame. Years after his death, one of his two daughters, Romola, married Nijinsky, and she wrote extensively about her own colourful life. Shapcott draws on her writings with considerable skill.

At a time when one is reading of Cabinet decisions to cut many of the remaining constitutional links with Britain (Premiers’ Conference, June), thus moving Australia closer to national sovereignty, it is timely to be reminded of events only just over the contemporary horizon which could be said to have matured this nation into quickening the pace towards that independence of British dominion – no matter how tenuous politically, yet still incipiently present in the Statute Books and by Privy Council.

A Woman of the Future, David Ireland’s sixth novel, is narrated in the first person by a woman, Alethea Hunt. This kind of ‘literary transvestism’ is not new, and in any case is not essentially different from writers who, in third-person narration, inject themselves into the consciousness of a character of the opposite sex. Ireland’s book, however, is remarkable for the way in which a male writer deals obsessively with the sexual thoughts and experiences of a woman. Indeed, it may well incur the ire of feminists that a man should presume, on principle, to understand such experiences. But he handles the role with sensitivity and insight, as he traces a young girl’s awakening sexual consciousness (if it was ever asleep) through to her later contacts with boys and men, most of which are, if not brutalising, at least unsatisfying. Though she claims, even as a small child and much to the satisfaction of her liberated ‘feminist’ parents, that she is without penis envy, she exhibits an extraordinary fascination with the male sexual organ, which is usually described in terms that would make most women want to give up heterosexual intercourse permanently. If these descriptions were meant to be representative of women’s feelings, perhaps one might object, but Alethea Hunt is clearly mad, albeit in the context of a world which is far crazier.