Nicholas Hasluck
'Writing Ouselves: History and Creative Imagination'
Many creative writers have used historical material in their work. Nicholas Hasluck reflects on his own use of such material and on issues which this has raised. How important is historical accuracy to the creative process?
Plays and novels can be
used to open up those aspects of the past which are often left out of academic
or official works. In a piece published in Harper's Magazine towards
the end of last year, the American writer Jonathan Dee observed that imaginative
re-creations of the pastworks he calls ‘anti-histories’are by their nature
acts of political opposition. The insights they contain can challenge the basic
assumptions of right or left; for, unlike historians, who are often reduced
to quibbling about details, creators of anti-histories are free to concentrate
upon the mood and ‘meaning’ of the story. Let me illustrate my thesis by referring
to various literary works including my own recently-published novel Our Man
K (Penguin).
The appropriation of historical
figurespeople who actually livedas characters in fiction is a mode that
readers of contemporary novels have come to take entirely for granted. This
may be in response to what Philip Roth sees as the growing challenge for the
novelist in simply keeping pace with the shenanigans constantly manufactured
by real life at the end of the twentieth century. Parliaments are wrapped
in plastic, sheep are cloned, astronauts take golf clubs to the moon, the U.S. Senate
picks up the cleaning bill for Monica Lewinsky’s seminal role in the nation’s
history. The novelist is eclipsed by actuality. Contemporary culture throws
up figures almost daily that loom larger than a wordsmith’s wildest dreams.
The re-creation of historical
figures in fiction goes back to Shakespeare. Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Richard
IIIthey were all reinvented by the bard without too many voices being raised
in protest. In recent years, there has been an upsurge of ‘anti-histories’:
one thinks of Solzhenitsyn’s Lenin in Zurich, Thomas Pynchon's Mason
and Dixon, Jay Parini's Walter Benjamin and Don de Lillo's Libra
in which real figures associated with the Kennedy assassination are portrayed.
The sardonic Gore Vidal, in his sequence of political novels beginning with
Burr and concluding with Washington DC, debunks the rhetoric of
American politics, revealing the way in which political conduct in a democracy
has always fallen far short of the ideals generally associated with revered
figures in the history books. By implication, he seeks to persuade us that protestations
by present-day ‘statesmen’ should be taken with a grain of salt. (As Carolyn
Sandford puts it in Gore Vidal’s Empire: ‘The theory of a man's body
and the fact of it must be as unlike as the theory of American government with
all its airy platitudes and the sleazy, disagreeable democratic practice’.)
If there is one thing the
novel offers that no other form can approach, it is the opportunity to know
the apparently larger-than-life figures of history completely, through the fiction
writer's omniscient familiarity with his characters' inner lives. As E.M. Forster
noted in Aspects of the Novel: ‘We never understand each other, neither
complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists. We know each other approximately,
by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even
for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader,
if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.
And this is why they often seem more definite than characters in history, or
even our own friends; we have been told all about them that can be told; even
if they are imperfect or unreal they do not contain any secrets, whereas our
friends do, and must, mutual secrecy being one of the conditions of life upon
this globe.’
It seems to follow, then,
that persuasive reasons exist for viewing historical figures through
the prism of fiction. It is a way of re-imagining, and thus more
fully understanding, the vagaries of the past, albeit at the cost
of some distortion. This brings me to the central character in my own novel,
Egon Erwin Kisch.
Kisch was born in Prague
towards the end of the nineteenth century . He won renown as a correspondent
after the Great War, pioneering the genre known as ‘reportage’. He was also
a friend and confidant of Franz Kafka, that astute critic of the legal system
whose allegorical work, The Trial, suggests that the law is an impenetrable
labyrinth, a shadowy realm where half-shut doors occasionally afford a glimpse
of justice, but more by chance, it seems, than by design.
Known as "the rampaging
reporter" Kisch came to Australia in 1934 at the invitation of the World Committee
Against War and Fascism. Refused permission to land at Fremantle, he bypassed
the ban by leaping ashore at Melbourne, a well-publicised jump that left him
on crutches, with a leg in plaster, and hobbled by various Kafkaesque legal
proceedings that took him all the way to the High Court. When Justice Evatt
threw out the plea against Kisch of ‘subversive activities’, the visitor was
subjected to a dictation test of the kind used to enforce the White Australia
Policyin this case a test in Scottish Gaelic as a way around the unwanted
visitor's formidable skills as a linguist fluent in 11 languages. Having failed
this rather bizarre test, Kisch was then declared a prohibited immigrant.
The ban proved difficult
to enforce, for the High Court went on to rule that Scottish Gaelic wasn’t a
European language, as required by the Immigration Act. When the Sydney Morning
Herald published the opinions of some indignant Scottish patriot’s, disparaging
the High Court’s ruling, the newspaper was promptly prosecuted for contemptanother set of legal proceedings to fan the controversy. In the meantime,
out on bail pending a further prosecution, Kisch, the ebullient journalist,
bustled about from one anti-war rally to another, waving his crutches in the
air, attracting huge crowds wherever he went, creating mayhem. The imbroglio
was brought to an end eventually when Attorney-General Menzies returned the
visitor’s passport, covered his legal costs, and negotiated a return trip to
Marseilles, glad to be rid of him.
The Kisch case, the Petrov
Affair , the Whitlam dismissalthe ambiguities at the heart
of these great disputes were accompanied by unforgettable images: a
man on crutches, a tearful woman dragged aboard a plane, a deposed
Prime Minister on the steps of Parliament House. Certain stories seem
destined to pass into popular mythology from the outset, and thus,
in reinventing the Kischean shenanigans down-under, in seeking to
add another layer to the Australian legend, I have allowed myself a
degree of poetic licence.
According to Gore Vidalthe acerbic connoisseur of American political skulduggery I mentioned earliera novelist should try to stay within the framework of ‘agreed facts’. One
can explore the motives of the mighty, or elevate real people from historical
obscurity by fleshing out scant details, but it has to be done within the bounds
of plausibility. In Henry & Clara the author Thomas Mallan portrays
the other couple in President Lincoln's box at Fords Theatre the night he was
assassinated. One can speculate about the assassin's motiveswhich, in history,
must always remain shadowy to some extentbut one cannot displace the agreed
fact that a bullet was fired and the President fell. Nonetheless, Gore Vidal
suggests, some truths about a nation's history can only be expressed in a veiled
fashion, by exaggeration, by speculating about what happened, by envisaging
the motives of those involved. I have adopted this approach in Our Man K.
To this day, it is not known
why exactly Kisch was banned. The indications are that although,
outwardly, he came to Australia to address an anti-war congress,
he was in fact working for Stalin's Comintern. Indeed, in Kisch's
own account of his trip, Australian Landfall,
he reveals, perhaps inadvertently, that he was a close friend of the Comintern's principal
agents in Paris, Willi Munzenberg and Otto Katz. The political
passions inflamed by the Kisch affair have long since subsided, but the picaresque
quality of the tale remains relevant to contemporary concerns. According to
Arthur Koestler, who knew all the leading figures on the left in the 1930s,
Egon Kisch was essentially an irrepressible
satirist, and something of this is reflected in the rampaging reporter's
exploits which, at first sight, seem to dispense with the border between fiction
and reality. His misadventures certainly tell us a good deal about the Australian psyche. Fear of the outsider,
resistance to changethese issues are still with us today, rich with satirical
possibilities. To assess these riches, I have, in addition to mentioning his
Marxist leanings, portrayed Kisch in my novel as a writer with long standing
literary connections, not only to his former classmate, Franz Kafka, but also
to a group of hacks and poets who argue
feverishly with each other at the fictional Café Arco.
Centenary celebrations?
An Australian republic? Self-determination? Contemporary themes, or
wild talk at Café Arco? As Kisch himself observed in Australian
Landfall: ‘History repeats itselffirst as tragedy, then as farce.’
Was this because his leap ashore at Melbourne coincided with
the State of Victoria's Centenary Celebrations, a welcome
to the British monarch's son, the Duke of Gloucester, and the arrival
of John Masefield, the reigning poet laureate? All history is
contemporary history, as Gore Vidal has noted, open to reinterpretation
in the light of current concerns. As a prelude, a counterpoint,
perhaps, to this theme, and in order to give an extra dimension to Kisch's
visit to Australia, I found it useful to begin by recalling Kisch's part in
the overthrow of the Habsburg Empire, within whose bosom he had received his
schooling. For my book, which covers the first century of Australian Federation,
is in part a meditation upon the elegiac mood that accompanies the end of an
era. The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there, but what
they do may linger in the mind to haunt us.
One can see immediately
that, by deflecting the light of history through the prism of fiction, the Kisch
case provides a golden opportunity to comment upon various contemporary issuesprotracted litigation, denunciations of the High Court, Centenary celebrations,
the move towards an Australian republic. It is for this reason that I chose
as my fictional narrator the Australian poet Robert Kaub, whose famous poemOne Nationwas supposedly read aloud in Sydney's Centennial Park
on 1 January 1901. In the novel, I wonder whether, a hundred years later in
Australian history, the present-day powers-that-be will permit the reading aloud
of this historic poem at the re-enactment in Centennial Park to mark the centenary
of the Commonwealth of Australia. Or will a poem called One Nation be
thought too controversial? If so, what does this say about the contrast between
Australia in 1901 when the fictional poem first appeared and Australia now?
Put shortly, ‘anti-histories’plays and novels in which contemporary orthodoxies are tested by stories drawn
from a realm of ‘agreed facts’are a way of illustrating the vagaries of history,
of illuminating the past. Inevitably, it seems, the boundaries between truth
and fiction are never far apart. The most striking passage of the Starr report,
for example, was President Clinton's complaint to one of his aides: ‘I feel
like a character in a novel. I feel like someone that is surrounded by an oppressive
force that is creating a lie about me and can't get the truth out. I feel like
that character in the novel Darkness at Noon.’
In writing Our Man K
I had no wish to usurp the process of historians. If readers are interested
in the true facts of the matter then they will turn to the texts approved by
scholars for enlightenment. What is of constant fascination to the novelist
is the mystery of character and the way in which haphazard events in the past
resonate in the future. This is a realm into which the historian or biographer
may sometimes decline to enter.
The end of an era.
It isn’t just a phrase. Perhaps, at this point in our history, Australians should
make a special effort to appreciate the drama of such a moment. Let me illustrate
my remarks by referring to a scene early in my novel. It is March 1919 and the
Treaty of Versailles is still being negotiated in the aftermath of the First
World War. A group of Kisch's fictional friends from Café Arco (who have
been following the negotiations) have made a quick trip to Feldkirch on the
Austrian border in order to catch a glimpse of history in the making, a glimpse
that may have a resonance for Australians at the end of the 20th century as
we edge towards a new republican regime. Kisch’s friends in this scene include
the Australian-born poet Robert Kaub, a Swiss artist called Ludwig Aschel, and
a Bohemian poet named Milada Mynkova who was supposedly well-known in Europe
at that time as a clairvoyant with an uncanny power to read the future. I will
come back to Milada Mynkova and the nature of her relationship with our man
Kisch, the investigative reporter, in a moment, but first: the scene at Feldkirch
in the aftermath of the Great War.
Once on the platform,
it struck me instantly that we weren't wasting our time. Milada's
premonition had become a reality. It was evident in the murmuring
around us and in the anxious looks. Yes, the train
from Kopfstettin was undoubtedly expected, it was on its
way, although we who were presently in advance of itthanks
to Miladawould soon have to give up our tiny moment in the
future as the train and its human freight swept onwards into history.
Splashes of purple prose by Milada and our man K couldn't
change that. Don't stint, Kisch had
said, there was no such risk. Agitation was in the air. The porters
under the platform clock, like a swarm of fidgeting grasshoppers,
were pacing too and from, rubbing shoulders, whispering,
moving their trolleys around The police and customs
officers scuttled in and out of their tiny booths, appearing and
disappearing at random intervals, paying scant attention to the
civilians on the platform, eyes fixed on the signal box near the overpass,
and the curve of the incoming track. They were all
consulting their watches; checking the hands of the big station
clock.
" So now it's happening",
Mildada whispered, "We are witnesses. " Serenely,
steadily, even majestically, it seemed, the train drew near.
The first carriage was flying the Union Jack, but further back
I saw suddenly the double-headed eagle of the Habsburg coat
of arms, an image reproduced on the carriage panels. The
train rolled to a halt, slowing down, window by window, until, at
last, one could make out the figures of those within. Something like
a sigh rippled through the crowd on the platform, an uneasy tremor,
a gasp. But no one spoke. Not one word; not even when
the train finally stopped. Milada gripped my hand.
Pointed. What she had foreseen was now being enacted. Behind
the window of the nearest carriage, in full military uniform,
I caught a glimpse of Karl, the last of the Austro-Hungarian Emperors,
and beside him the Empress, Zita. In a few minutes time,
seven hundred years of Habsburg rule would come to an end
as they crossed the border into exile, refugees bent to the
will of the new republic in Vienna.
Someone in the crowd
must have waved, conveyed to the royal couple that some of their
compatriots would be thinking of them, for Karl suddenly
stepped close to the window and leaned forward to acknowledge
the salutation; a small, rather frail man of less than
middle age. He flapped the pair of leather gloves he was holding.
His wifesuch a beautiful face framed by the misted glassplaced one hand on his shoulder protectively, as if she
feared he might lean too far. That was all. The royal pair looked
at the crowd for a moment longer, and the crowd stared back. It
was terrible. No one knew what to do. Sensing the uncertainty,
and as if to spare the feelings of his former subjects, Karl
retreated, his shadowy figure behind the glass melted, and a moment
later both he and his wife had vanished.
Perhaps it was the lack
of ceremony, the unreal quality of this final appearance by the
royal couple, that had upset Milada. She was certainly in
a mood I had never seen before. Tearful, her face drained of colour
she spoke not to us but to the space in front of her, 'When
it comes about . . ." she paused and had to begin again. "When
it actually happens, although everyone has seen it coming, you
can't believe it. Their last look. Their homeland disappearing." Aschel and I exchanged
glances of concern. "Not necessarily." My companion adjusted
his metal-rimmed glasses, trying to say something that might
ease her pain. He hasn't abdicated He agreed to leave, That's
all. Who knows what the future holds?"
This brought Milada's
tears to an end, "How can you a Swiss gadabout, understand
what is happening here ? The Swiss know nothing! My first
song in the classroom was in honour of his family. I once saw
Franz Josef on the great staircase of the Schonbrunn Palace, surrounded
by his generals, receiving the homage of 80,000 school
childrenof which I was one! And now I see a kinsman of
Franz Josef the last Emperor in a long line, thrown out of his
own country. Banished! Exiled! Do you understand? Can you grasp
it?"
In the passage I have quoted,
one immediately notices an interaction between the fictional charactersprincipally
the narrator Robert Kaub and his close friend the clairvoyant Milada Mynkovaand the real figures of history: Karl and Zita, the last Habsburg royal couple.
The novel offers an extra dimension that authentic history cannot approach,
not only by providing opportunities to know the larger-than-life figures of
history through their imagined thoughts and acts but by using fictional characters
to reflect the mood of the times.
So, in closing, let me tell
you something more about this imagined friend of our man Kisch, the Prague-born
poet I have called Milada Mynkova. Her adventures reflect the tumult of the
pre-war and post-war period in middle Europe, a period leading to the rise of
Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. The nature of Milada’s friendship with Egon Kisch
is a mystery central to the novel’s plot and it is therefore not surprising
that early on in the story, the narrator, Robert Kaub, pauses briefly to reflect
upon the life and times of a woman he admires deeply, but finds difficult to
fathom.
There can be few poets
whose lives were so single mindedly devoted to the pursuit
of literature as was the life of Milada Mynkova. Her male admirers,
the women whose friendships she cherished, the aristocratic
protectors she entranced with her stories, the charlatans
she may or may not have slept with, the diverse talents from
Cafe Arco she fostered, the gatherings of gurus and theosophists
she arrangedthese formed a network of intimate relationships
stretching throughout the whole of middle Europe;
but, ultimately in her own mind, her, escapades, all her sorties,
were undertaken in the service of the "muse".
Milada, and her indefatigable
muse. When I think of her lifeanother epic in its own
wayI would prefer to overlook the ornate inscription ‘K’
upon her watch and wind back the timepiece to those golden
summers before the war when our lady was perennially
surrounded by friends and picnic baskets and bright ideas, an
interlude when I didn't know her well enough to worry about
the inconsistencies in her anecdotes, or to notice the occasional
traces of sadness in her wit. But there's the rub. Now
that I know more about her and have a clearer sense of what
should be saved, I am inevitably brought back to certain crucial
questions. Why did she serve the Hapsburg cause? What
was the nature of her debt to Our Man K? When I eventually obtained
access to her papers, I sometimes wondered whether her
work in the Habsburg library had convinced her that for
every letter proving one thing, there was bound to be a diary entry
somewhere else supporting an opinion to the contrary.
And thus, pursuant to the unscientific principle of serendipity,
as the answer one came up with initially was almost certain to
be discarded in due course, it didn't really matter if one's own papers
were left in a mess. The value of the fragments lay in
illustrating the disorder of the past.
At other times, sifting
through the jumble of notes and jottings and little sketches,
it seemed to me that the questions I kept coming back to could
be posed in another way. What portion of her story was a fantasy?
What was undisputed fact? This much is clear: Milada
Mynkova was born in Prague in 1860, close to the heart
of the Hapsburg monarchy, the daughter of a bohemian
diplomat.
W hat next? From there
we must enter a guesswork world centred on the old Austro-Hungarian Empire whose
decay, collapse, attempted resurrection, and aftermath she witnessed. Do not
look for Milada 's empire in the atlas, for it has been swallowed up, and just
as dragons on old maps prefigure alien realms, no one knows what spirit reigns
in its place.
Copyright to:
Nicholas Hasluck , Our Man
K (Penguin,1999)
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