Peter Carey  Peter Carey is Australia's most celebrated living writer. He has received both the Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize and has received every major Australian literary prize at least twice. More than any other Australian writer, Carey is interested in creating viable Australian origin myths. His most famous novel, Oscar and Lucinda, is a complex symbolic tale of the arrival of Christianity into Australia. And though his most recent, Jack Maggs, is a play on a British novel, it is at heart a character study of the first Australians: those English convicts banished to what was then a penal colony.
Given his clear preoccupation with his home country, it surprised many when
Carey emigrated to New York City in the late eighties. In the following
conversation, it therefore seemed logical not only to discuss what Jack Maggs reveals about the Australian national character, but also what insight Carey
has gained about his adopted country. - Boswell
Boswell: Why did you want to create a book around an altered version of Magwitch from Great Expectations? Peter Carey: Well, it's a long story. I was in Jamaica, in what had once been a Playboy club, but was now one of those resorts where exhausted parents take their children and hope they'll be able to read a book. And the book that I took was a book by Edward Said called Culture and Imperialism. I knew that it was a slightly weird book to be reading by a swimming pool in Jamaica, so I remember I did remove the dust jacket. He wrote about the character of Magwitch in Great Expectations and the notion of this person cast out, unable to come home. An Englishman who can be an Englishman as long as he does not return to England, which had been home. And I had always been interested in our lot, in Australia's convict history. I think it has really shaped us to an extraordinary degree — far more than we acknowledge — and in all sorts of good ways. I can think of a lot of things that I really like about Australia that come from that, but perhaps there are some things that I like a little bit less, as well. It still feels to me a little bit unknown. Perhaps a little bit denied, in some ways. So I would have loved to have written about it. And suddenly I thought, well maybe this is a way that I can engage with this. So when I was back in New York, I read Great Expectations. It's true, to my shame I guess, that I had not read Dickens. Of course, even if you are Australian, when you read Great Expectations you inhabit it from the English point of view. When you come across Magwitch, he is to you what he is to Pip and to Dickens — this sort of dark other. And I think, "Hang on. This guy really is my ancestor." So my first inclination was to be mad at Dickens for giving him such a bad rap, and to want to somehow fix that up, to act as his advocate, to give to Magwitch some of the tender sympathy that Pip got. I mean, he can be imagined in that way, too. And that was not an uninteresting thing. Indeed, the character called Tobias really does come from that moment, because I began to imagine that there had been — you know, this is rubbish — but that there had been a real Magwitch that Dickens had known, and had not told the real story. And so I began to construct this notion of a writer who knows the truth and doesn't tell it. But also I started to think about what Magwitch was doing, which informed what Jack Maggs later does. It seemed to me: here's this guy; he's cast out from his mother country; he presumably suffers terribly in the place that he's sent; he makes money there; he's a free man; he has a conditional pardon so he can live there forever in comfort — but what does he want to do? He wants to go home to England and live with this replica, this English gentleman that he has somehow manufactured — a new member of the class that's abused him in the first place. I thought that that was a really Australian story. And I wasn't mad at Dickens about that at all. I thought that seemed like us, in all sorts of ways. Boswell: Let's talk more about how Australia's convict history has shaped its character. Carey: Well, we're the only country on earth, as far as I know, that has its beginnings in a concentration camp, a penal colony. And a genocide, too. That affected us forever. Even though the years of the convict colony were relatively short — and certainly by the time of the gold rush in the 1850s it was well and truly over — it affected the country forever. Let me give you some evidence. You can look at all sorts of good things and bad things. We had very early and very strong trade union movements, for instance. The whole thing with working conditions and all that sort of thing you can see coming out of this. The fact that you can end up with an Australian prime minister who was a former union leader — who doesn't believe in God! — I think is not disconnected to that. There are little examples and big ones. For example, something that used to be very common in the fifties and sixties, though you hardly ever see it now: you would see two men hail a taxi to a stop and one man would sit in the front next to the driver, and the other would sit in the back. Boswell: Because they don't want to be seen together? Carey: No, because they don't want the driver to feel badly about serving someone. And you'd see a husband and wife — in which case you get in to sexual politics too — and the woman would sit in the back and the man would sit in the front. And every now and then someone from the United States would arrive at the airport and get in the back seat in the taxi. And driving into the city the driver would say, "What's the matter, do I smell?" [laughs] There are millions of small examples of that sort of thing. There's a really common thing called a tall poppy syndrome, which is something that happens in many countries in different ways. Basically, the tall poppy syndrome is that if you have a field of poppies and one poppy gets taller than the rest, the head gets chopped off. And that's how we generally celebrate success in Australia. You know, it's fine for a minute and then — boom. Boswell: How is it different here? Carey: This culture is totally a success culture. It's not like people here aren't jealous or envious, or don't do that sort of thing. But Australians really believe in failure. Everything we celebrate has to do with failure. And everything here — in popular culture, not in literary culture — has to do with success. We're really distrustful of success. A lot of this stuff really meshes in with Irish things too — and if you understand a little bit about Ireland you know a lot about Australia — because the Irish have many of these sorts of character traits from their particular history. Of course, if you go to Australia now, it's really ethnic and it's amazingly mixed. But still these things persist. Growing up in Australia, even though we knew that it started as a penal colony, we were in total denial that there were any consequences of that. Also, growing up we really thought of ourselves generally as being British, or English. My grandfather, who had been born in Australia, called England home. Boswell: That seems really bizarre. What did he mean by that? Carey: Well, they thought they were English, they were part of the empire. People would not say that now, but it was not so long ago. And when Australians went into Asia, they acted as if they were members of the British empire, with all the imperialistic and righteous trappings that went with that. That's how we acted in Asia, and now Australians are desperately running around saying, "We're part of Asia, we're part of Asia." It's very complicated. Here's a really good example, a very recent one. We had a bicentennial in 1988. Two hundred years. And Aussies are really good at parties, so Sydney had a really great party. And there were fantastic fireworks. There were also these tall white ships with big white sails. And the next day the morning paper had, you know, these big headlines, "What a great party." But you see what those ships represented were ships with human beings in the holds chained together. You know, that wasn't the Mayflower out there. And no one wanted to think about that — so what in the hell's going on? They also didn't want to think about the fact that the arrival of those ships represented a devastating blow to the aboriginals and their 40,000 year old culture. The aboriginal people and their friends were protesting about that. But no one was really protesting about the convicts and what that might mean and what had happened to them — that they had been cast out and tortured and had been sent to the moon. You know what I mean? It was terrifying. They really had been propelled into outer space. And I'm not trying to be sentimental and suggest that they were 'good people.' But they were the people, along with the corrupt military who came to look after them, who made our country. And the amazing thing is, you know, it's not a bad country. It's a pretty damn good country. But we're still so confused about all of this. There are people at this moment in Australia debating passionately whether we might possibly be a republic by the year 2000 and sever our connections with the monarchy — my God! I mean, the Governor General of Australia is still a representative of the queen of England, who can dismiss the elected government — and did in 1975! So you would have to say that there are certain big unresolved issues, and that there is still a fight going on right now as we speak in Australia as to whether we can really be a republic or not. Boswell: There must be a sense of being under a parent. Carey: Yes, but an abusive parent. I mean, if you want to accept my position that we were really shaped by the convict experience, then you have to look at the relationship between the convict and the parent — and that's essentially an abusive relationship. Of course, many of my fellow Australians think that what I'm saying is entirely rubbish and even an embarrassment. But I have an Australian friend, a wonderful, wonderful person — so full of life. And when she arrived in New York for a visit, she rang from the airport. And I hear her voice on the answering machine, and it's like a really Aussie accent, there's a thick part and a sort of flatness of effect. And suddenly it sounds like it's full of grief. And I think, wouldn't that be amazing, if even the way we speak, the air inflections, etc., really did sort of reflect this grief. I don't know. When I heard that and thought that, it felt like a huge insight to me. Of course if someone really wanted to ask, "Is that really true?," well, probably it's not. But it felt like it reflected something. Boswell: You've lived in the United States for several years now. At one point you said, "America makes me nervous, but New York makes me happy." Carey: Oh, America does make me very nervous. I mean America scares me shitless. Boswell: In what way? Carey: Well! Where do you want me to start? Washington, right now, that would do. Things like the right to bear arms. The whole notion of individual liberty in this country, which was at one time a sort of a wonderful thing, but it seems to me totally lunatic in other ways. The notion of individual liberty at the cost of what to the society? "It's my right to do that." I am amazed that there are traffic lights in the United States, because it fucks up someone's right to go through an intersection. People argue about the seatbelt thing as an infringement of their individual liberty. These are things that to me are just totally bizarre. The American constitution doesn't actually guarantee the right to happiness, but it does guarantee the right to pursue it, doesn't it? Australians know we don't have that right. [laughs] There are things that are left out from your beginnings — the Mayflower and the Puritans, which are seen at work in Washington right now — that are entirely terrifying. These go together with a rather salacious, media-consuming society, which feels very unhealthy and really sort of wrong. Hard to get to the bottom of it, I think , for anybody to figure their way through all the knots of the rights and wrongs of that. But I do really like being here. For God's sake, I've got a son who's an American. And when I talk about New York, I suppose I'm talking about an America that is in its daily practice really — no matter what tensions there are in New York — sort of racially tolerant. People really do work together and accommodate each other. They're not abusive of each other because they know each other more. And that's not to say that they won't fight with each other or that they won't kill each other, but they're existing with each other every day. I like the way people tolerate and are with each other in New York. And that seems like America at its best, though I'm not suggesting that it only happens in New York. I love New Yorkers. There's a sense they have of themselves as part of a community. Mean-while tabloid presses of the world always like to tell stories of New Yorkers as sort of human animals, which always goes back to some story, which wasn't even right back then, in the fifties or sixties, where someone was attacked and cried and cried for help, and no one came out. But my sense of New Yorkers is like the woman who gets on the subway and is going to have a baby and can't get to the hospital. And she's on the subway platform — west fourth street — and they're all around her and she can't even breathe. And when the baby comes, they all applaud. I like how they are. I think they're great. And their communities are communities. I have a greater sense of community in New York than almost anywhere I've ever lived. Really, it's terrific. Boswell: Every New Yorker I know is such a strong, quirky character. Carey: Yes, they always are. There's a little corner place I go for soup. I go there and have this minestrone — a three dollars fifty lunch — almost everyday. And I go there one day, and there's this little guy there. He's sort of like Danny DeVito. There's also this woman there, a party of one. She's a little bit overweight, wearing a sleeveless dress. He starts to do something. He's climbing onto a chair. She starts to look like, "What the fuck is going on here?" Then he kneels on the floor. And he opens this thing and there's a ring. I'm thinking, oh, no. You know what he's about to do, but she doesn't want this. And he kneels on the floor and goes, "So and so, I love you from the bottom of my heart" — the whole restaurant's quiet — "will you marry me?" And she starts to cry and embraces him and the whole restaurant applauds. So their life is theater. There's that I'm-the-center-of-the-universe sort of thing. And I suppose it's really sort of amazing. And so different. I will never be able to do that, even if I want to. Boswell: I remember a statement that Bruce Chatwin once made. Something to the effect that to him Australia seemed like a very ancient place — wise, tired, etc. — and that by the same token, America seemed very young, very adolescent and cruel. Carey: That's one of those things you can say and sound terrific. You see, he's talking about a particular aspect of Australia. What he was concerned about was aboriginal culture. And when he was writing that he was in a place which really does remind you of what an amazing and ancient continent Australia is. And he was dealing with a really old culture when he was writing that. I'm sure you could also find a place to write that from in the United States, where you would find great geologic age and cultural antiquity and so on. When you're writing clever and talking fast, then that may seem like it's the truth, but I don't think it is. I think Australia is totally adolescent, though I think the United States is not all that much more advanced. Thank God we're not a world power. You had a war of independence, which we've never had. That's one very basic growing up thing which we seem to have avoided. And we're therefore still stumbling around in shorts and flip-flops and little stripy shirts. Even the fact that you had a civil war and suffered that particular tragedy probably — possibly — makes you a little wiser in retrospect. But I also think Australia has the capacity to be a really remarkable place. It already is a remarkable place. There are also positive ways that the convict thing affects us. For example, I was at Vassar. A friend of mine was teaching a course on Australian literature and asked me up. He was teaching Patrick White's work. And I must say they were really pretty damn bright students. They really were great. But one was a little bit less bright, less perceptive, and he said one thing he didn't like in Patrick White's work was all these "losers." And I said, "In our culture, we don't call them losers. We call them battlers." A battler is someone who struggles forever and will never, ever, really get anywhere. And in Australia that's a really honorable position. The whole concept of a loser is one that when I was growing up we didn't have, though probably we have it now. And I think that comes out in the culture. It means that we have a more compassionate view of the unfortunate. Basically Australians will identify with the lower class rather than the higher class. Americans call everyone middle class, which is polite. You know, how people who are really very rich will call themselves upper middle class? It's very confusing for Australians, because they call blue collar people middle class, too. I've got a friend who's a very fine playwright, and he is forever criticized by people of my sort of general background and education for writing about the middle class. That is considered a sort of betrayal, because they are not considered real people. The real people you should be writing about are the working class. That's how we see ourselves. And I think that also goes back to our convict beginnings. Whereas you've got Arthur Miller. If he had been an Australian playwright — well, you know, that guy's a salesman, for Christ's sake! I mean — immediately — we would have been down on him from the start. Visit Peter Carey's website here. |
