The crusade against beauty.(Literature)(Christopher Koch's speech)(Reprint)

I HAVE BEEN LEARNING to write for something like forty-five years. I say "learning to write' because writers never cease to learn their craft, and with each small extra discovery, even at my advanced age, the excitement of one's first fatal step is rekindled. And should the excitement ever die it will be time to quit writing. Rainer Maria Rilke put it more beautifully than I can:

 
   Ah! But verses amount to so little 
   when one begins to write them young. 
   One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness a 
   whole life long, and a long life if possible, and 
   then, quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to 
   write ten good lines. 

Most of us, of course, are driven by our demons to produce a good many more lines than that. And in a world run more and more by teams--even in the arts-the work of the novelist remains totally isolated, and with very little response from the world outside until the book's publication. Even then response can be minireal--and the one reward you have is a good review or the sort of reader who tells you they understood you, and that your work meant something to them. This makes an award such as the Miles Franklin of enormous importance.

It's an occasion of great pleasure for me--as it would be for any Australian writer fortunate enough to receive our most highly regarded prize for fiction. I intend to enjoy it, as far as I'm allowed to do--but it's impossible to ignore the atmosphere that surrounds the award this year--and certainly the press have not let me do so.

We're all aware of the reasons for this: but it seems to me extraordinary that when a new award is being made the occasion should be marked by yet another post mortem on the previous one--and the question of the award's future value. I have no intention of commenting on this now or on the qualities of last year's Miles Franklin winner [Helen Demidenko for The Hand that Signed the Paper]. That would be in the worst possible taste. I've already been questioned about it by journalists--as have all other writers short-listed--and I have nothing to add to what I said except this: The affair of last year's winner has had a very good run, and I'd like to be excused from joining in a push to start the hue and cry again.

What I do want to say, though, is that this phenomenon seems to be symptomatic of larger forces in our national life--and that I find these forces disturbing. We seem to have growth in this country of professional anger, hostility and malice--and an endless formation of lobby groups and factions. These things are eating away pleasure in achievement, the harmony that nurtures creativity, and pleasure in our culture itself. And I believe that they are symptoms of a larger malaise in Australia--a malaise of envy and petty power-seeking which runs through every area of the community. Pick up any newspaper. In a country once a byword for good humour and fair play, strange and discordant cries are now going up: "I don't like the rules of the game; change the rules; kill the umpire; move the goalposts." "Excellence interferes with my rights; down with excellence." "Majority rule offends me and my friends; down with majority rule. My friends and I will take care of you: trust us."

I think Australians who care about this country ought to resist this cancer with all their strength. I think we deserve better--and we are producing talent and achievement in every field that proves we deserve better. And I wonder if, where literature is concerned, this mean-spiritedness has something to do with the way the subject's being taught in our schools and universities.