Problems with the truth.(Ryan)

DO YOU REMEMBER the old promotional slogan: "Bananas Are Cheap and Plentiful"? Just now there is a glut, not of nourishing bananas, but of The Truth; there seems to be a lot of it going around, like flu. This we can safely attribute to the imminence of an election, in the way that a wet season tends to produce an especially lush growth of Paterson's curse.

Parties and candidates are all busy laying out for inspection their own carefully harvested stocks of The Truth, hoping to make a sale. What a shame that our clear view of all this virtue on parade should be obscured by pries of various inferior species of this season's Truth crop, including Half-Truth, Part-Truth, Untruth and Outrageous Deception. But that's democracy, and even if what we get in the end should bear small resemblance to the samples we were shown, at least we will enjoy the excitement of having been offered a choice.

One of W.H. Auden's most engaging poems is "Tell Me the Truth About Love". I wish he had written one called "Tell Me the Truth About Truth". From millennia before the time of Pontius Pilate, and for centuries after Francis Bacon, cultivated persons have made a great hoo-ha of "What Is Truth?" The first of Bacon's essays is titled "Of Truth", and a right old mouthful he makes of it. Not for nothing did William Blake call this terse little book "Good advice for Satan's kingdom". Thoughtful, ordinary folk do not need a philosopher to tell them what The Truth is. Al Smith, mayor of New York, said it: "The people may not be able to think, but they can smell."

Seventy years ago, A.E. Housman was asked how to recognise the presence of true poetry. Such discernment, Housman replied, lay in a region fax deeper than the mind--maybe the pit of the stomach; but did it matter? He confessed that he could no more define poetry than a terrier could define a rat, but neither he nor the terrier had the slightest difficulty in knowing their quarry when they found it.

At elections, when our minds are fuddled by fudged facts and slanted statistics, we ordinary mugs need merely study the smooth political faces on the television--and sniff.

LET ME RETURN to questions I raised in an article about John Wren (Quadrant, July-August).

Is it a disreputable national trait of us Australians to mangle and distort the characters of the dead? To twist them recklessly in any way which current ideology or particular literary purpose needs? My own answer is "Yes".