The Songlines
Chatwin, Bruce
THE SONGLINES Bruce Chatwin/Viking/$18.95 Jennifer Howard s long as there has been an England there have been Englishmen who felt compelled to leave it, abandoning the busy streets and turning...
...Plausible, perhaps...
...Different waterworks...
...His best-known work, In Patagonia (1977), has been called "thatmost perfect and most famous of recent travel books...
...Lenin faced it even before he took power, in that Russia didn't fit the developmental schedule and therefore had no proletarian base to carry the Party to power...
...Intrigued by the idea of the Song-lines, Chatwin travels to Australia to track them himself...
...Occasionally a satisfying description comes along: " . . . the country changed from the yellow-flowering scrub to a rolling, open parkland of bleached grass and rounded eucalyptus trees—blue-green, the colour of olives with their leaves turning white in the wind...
...It's a series of excuses for the rulers to do what they want to do...
...This is a pity, considering Chatwin's considerable stylistic talents...
...Chatwin tags along with him, and the first part of the book is more or less what one expects from a travelogue: anecdotes of the whites and their settlements, snapshots of life among the Aborigines, conversations recorded along the way...
...And it is good to read a book founded on an enduring faith in human nature...
...He couples the thoughts of this gallery of worthies with his own observations and with nomadic proverbs, in a section supposedly drawn from those same moleskin notebooks...
...From nomadism it is for Chatwin an easy journey backward to the origin of man...
...In the early pages of The Songlines, he recounts days spent with his Aunt Ruth in Stratford, reading poems from "an anthology of verse especially chosen for travellers, called The Open Road...
...The son of Russian emigres, Arkady lives in the Center, with no possessions other than a harpsichord and his favorite books...
...the state is always the creation and instrument of class interests and can never have the kind of autonomy implied by the concept of totalitarianism...
...One school, led by Raymond Dart, holds that man descends from bloodthirsty ancestors who delighted in bashing each other over the head...
...My impression is that they don't...
...Chatwin's enthusiasm for the exotic goes back to his childhood...
...However cogent the Mensheviki may have been, they didn't last long enough to make their criticism stick...
...Made differently," he said at last...
...But it's almost too easy...
...so intimately that he has been hired by a railway company to survey the Songlines and to advise the railway how to lay track in order not to disturb any Dreamings...
...Chatwin explains the songlines thus: The Aborigines believed that the world was created, in a distant time called the Dreamtime, by Ancestors who sang it into existence...
...he has read a great many books and read them thoughtfully, enlisting in his argument the likes of Darwin, Rimbaud, Pascal, Wordsworth, Kierkegaard, and even the Buddha...
...If, on the other hand, America is in a recession, then "these programs are needed today more than ever . . . this is no time to shred the safety net," etc...
...In Chatwin's mind, the whole Locke vs...
...Most of the white Australians come across as boors and racists, as in the following exchange between Arkady and a policeman in a bar in Glen Armond:"So why do you bother with them...
...The quotes provide documentation for the Chatwinian theory that the nomad is the quintessential man, or, as Dostoevsky wrote, that man is a "wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world...
...The Songlines begins a journey into nomadism that loses itself in intriguing but aleatoric philosophizing...
...The policeman concludes that what holds for "waterworks" also holds for brain power...
...The more I read, the more convinced I became that nomads had been the crankhandle of history, if for no other reason than that the great monotheisms had, all of them, surfaced from the pastoral milieu...
...T n My Dear Alex, Dinesh D'Souza 1 and Gregory Fossedal indulge the rude common sense that Professor Smith carefully reins in...
...It's funny to see a furriner using a native idiom to manipulate native herds, especially those Americans who like to think of themselves as pre-eminently autonomous and unpredictable...
...put down The Songlines feeling as though it had offered a vicarious walk among the Australian nomads...
...Scientifically...
...er throw rice at weddings...
...But though he tells good stories, he relies too much on other writers to lay out the bones of the argument without himself providing any connecting tissue...
...When dealing with liberals, it is necessary to use farce...
...This is one of the few recent works of satire to bear an introduction by Richard M. Nixon...
...Well, it's no accident, comrades...
...WOO* Zip THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 45 viable group of men, men who banded together not to save them from themselves but from the nasty things lurking just outside the circle of firelight...
...That was the Menshevik objection to the Bolsheviki, as you'll recall...
...10-day money-back guarantee...
...No matter...
...Hobbes, nomad vs...
...Drunk on the white man's liquor, haggling with American tourists over artwork, the Abos appear in The Songlines to be drunkards, connivers, or naive innocents: stick figures, hardly human, not the blissful songsters of Chatwin's promises...
...as evidence of our innate barbarity...
...As commentary, My Dear Alex is right on target...
...Or, more pleasantly, that we are born to wander...
...Smith is interested in the ideology as a legitimating device for individual Communist states...
...Chatwin hints at the "incandescent sky," the scrubby brush and ragged outcrops that make up the Central Australian landscape...
...Smith makes a point that's almost worth the price of the book: in Marxist theory, Stalin is impossible, because totalitarianism is impossible, because Joseph Sobran is a senior editor of National Review and a nationally syndicated columnist...
...And with that statement Chatwin trades in a traveler's pack for the intellectual baggage of a theorist...
...The reason there was a Stalin is the same reason there's a Castro: what the Commies want is total power...
...Where did the toothWry,: April Fools' Day and Jaelvg-Ltuder- ns A come from...
...Wouldn't you like th know why we cross our hoots, and thumb our noses...
...I felt I had to know the secret of their timeless and irreverent vitality...
...Now and then even a conservative will be useful to the Soviets, but of course conservatives aren't reliable, whereas liberalism seems tailored to fill the bill...
...I like them...
...With The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin, the latest in the long line of Britons abroad, comes up with an answer: philosopher...
...And how does this all relate to the Songlines...
...The other whites who work closely with the "Abos"--those who teach them, broker their paintings to white tourists, run stores and clinics among them—seem to agree...
...But their good feelings toward Abos, as pictured by Chatwin, are curiously paternal, the feelings that a master of hounds might have for his pack: respect alloyed with amused condescension...
...07001 Please send me CURIOUS CUSTOMS by Tad Tuleja as indicated below...
...The policeman jerked his thumb at the Aboriginals...
...THE SONGLINES Bruce Chatwin/Viking/$18.95 Jennifer Howard s long as there has been an England there have been Englishmen who felt compelled to leave it, abandoning the busy streets and turning wheels of home for the greener pastures of the unknown...
...It would be more to the point to consider it as a de-legitimating device for the subversion of all non-Communist regimes, at home and abroad...
...they provide all the arguments the Soviet Union really needs...
...And though Stalin was posthumously denounced, Commie theoreticians haven't exactly worked overtime to devise institutional restraints against strongman rule, even if the Soviets have in practice distributed the power a little more broadly around the top level of the Party...
...Chatwin calls him "the Prince of Darkness in all his sinister magnificence...
...he has insight and recognizes it...
...Their ideology, in all its variations, is just as self-serving as Marx accused bourgeois ideologies of being...
...Instead Chatwin gives us Aborigines with all the depth of paper cutouts and a half-grown theory of human nature...
...Date Signature Name Address City State N.Y...
...Lenin came up with the answer: the Party in Russia would serve as the Revolutionary Vanguard of the workers...
...Jennifer Howard is a writer and editor The book begins encouragingly living in Washington, D.C...
...And / like them," he said...
...There was hardly a rock or creek in the country that could not or had not been sung...
...along the line of the Ancestor's footprints lay a trail of words and musical notes...
...At every turn of events—economic upturn or downturn, election time, Grenada, KAL 007, contra aid, SDI—Vladimir extracts from the lib lexicon the appropriate cliche to steer American opinion in the desired direction...
...The book is a satire, modeled on The Screwtape Letters, in the form of messages from an old KGB hand to a young disinformation specialist stationed in the U.S...
...But what role is left to twentieth-century adventurers now that the motives of past wanderlust have lost their respectability...
...Man, says Chatwin, defying the Beast, "opening his mouth in defiance of the terrors that surrounded him, shouted the opening stanza of the World Song, 'I AM!' " The Songlines are but a continuation of that first song...
...In what way different...
...Interestingly enough, his anecdotes about the Arab nomads he has met are crisper and far more sincere than those about the Aborigines...
...To serve as his guide to Central Australia he locates another peripatetic, a "tireless bushwalker" by the name of Arkady...
...He has enough evident common sense to know better, but academic etiquette forbids him to acknowledge he's dealing with cynics...
...They've got different urinary tracks to the white man...
...residents, add sales tax L do`we blew out candles on birthday cakes tise striped poles to symbolize a barber...
...Every Marxist regime faces the basic problem of justifying itself...
...Paper $8.95 ^ Cloth $15.95 ^ Enclosed is my check/money order...
...From Aunt Ruth he learned that their surname had been corrupted from "Chettewynde," which in Anglo-Saxon means "the winding path...
...Chatwin feels that nomads remain closer to that first, enREAD THE FASCINATING STORIES BEHIND 296 POPULAR AMERICAN RITUALS Why do we...eat hot dogs at ballgames & pop-lit corn at movies...
...By developing superior cranial power, man evolved out of reach of the claws of Dinofelis, but "perhaps it had to be a Pyrrhic victory: has not the whole of history been a search for false monsters...
...Professor Smith (of Tufts University) makes it pretty clear that Communism as a going concern has little to do with whatever Marx may have had in mind...
...In the Commie view, only a Communist state can ever be legitimate, but its legitimacy is beyond question...
...See The Soviet Viewpoint, a book of interviews with Arbatov published a couple of years back...
...I n fact, this first part of The Song- 1 lines serves as little more than a warm-up for the second: a compendium of quotes, anecdotes, and thoughts assembled over the years and recorded by the author in a series of moleskin notebooks (bought specially in a Parisian papeterie...
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...Mao faced an analogous problem with his peasant revolution in unindustrialized China, and Castro also had to paddle in without benefit of a detectible proletarian surge in Cuba...
...It's not an unappealing idea, especially for anyone ever forced to work in a windowless office, and Chatwin's assemblage of quotations makes it even more palatable...
...Carry rabbits' feet and avoid black cats...
...Chatwin delights in caricaturing the whites in Alice Springs ("a grid of scorching streets where men in long white socks were forever getting in and out of Land Cruisers") and the other large towns he passes through...
...He is not new to travel writing...
...To do this, he must travel around the bush with the Aborigines on whose land the tracks will run...
...Every Commie wants to be a Stalin, even if he doesn't abuse the privilege quite as badly as Stalin did...
...M"' Find out in...
...Born in 1940, however, Chat-win travels instead as a reverse sort of missionary, hoping to gather the benefits that the "benighted blacks" can confer on civilization...
...The main weakness of Thinking Like a Communist is that Professor Smith seems to think Communists think likeprofessors...
...This cat may have been our specific predator...
...awake nights wondering whether the labor theory of value really holds water...
...Dart and his followers interpret the seemingly violent fossil record of man's emergence (smashed skulls, etc...
...How do you know...
...Then the next time you cross your heart, thumb your nose, or kiss a scratch to make it better, you'll know why...
...But it would be nice to inking Like a Communist, by Tony Smith, is an intelligent attempt to sketch the permutations of Communist theory since Marx...
...The Pharaohs had vanished," Chat-win writes...
...Castro's ideal social order is one ruled, with minimal friction and opposition, by Fidel Castro...
...After all, the general reality doesn't leave much room-for satire...
...Consider poverty programs, for example...
...Communist rulers have always proved nimble in adjusting theory to opportunity, and they have the added advantage of being able to silence anyone who finds non sequiturs in their theories...
...Only rarely does it become the entity that the natives constantly sing into being...
...Color eggs for Easter and carve pumpkins for Halloween...
...He makes it difficult to imagine anything other than elusive, fuzzy-haired figures with some strange affinity for song, intriguing but never revealed...
...And these gents aren't going to revise their ideology to foreclose the fulfillment of their own ambitions...
...Had he been born in the last century, Chatwin might have hired himself out to the Royal Geographic Society to explore the vastnesses of Africa, hoping, as Alan Moorehead wrote of the Victorians, to see what "benefits civilization could confer on the benighted blacks...
...the state debate springs from these two views ofhuman nature: man as killer or man as prey...
...1 enough as an autobiographical acTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1987 count of Chatwin's foray into the "pastoral milieu" and what he found there, its setting Central Australia, its main characters the nomadic Aborigines of the area...
...And even socialist fraternity has its limits: Smith mentions a Maoist broadside with the revealing title On Khrushchev's Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World...
...Vladimir is funny when he's in action, scrambling to make the best of a real situation, but when he merely reflects, without the stimulus of concrete occasion, the book lapses into mere accuracy...
...For the Gentleman who bowed out gracefully —and left us with the weapon in our hand...
...Each clan claimed a certain Ancestor and had inherited that Ancestor's Songlines as its birthright and roadmap to a particular section of country...
...Mahmoud and his people had lasted...
...I enclose plus $1.50 (cloth) or $1.00 (paper) postage and handling...
...In singing its birthright, the clan celebrated and re-created the land...
...Chatwin as observer does himself credit...
...and N.J...
...The Soviets have long since classified American libs as "progressive forces," and their agents have camouflaged themselves as libs for generations...
...Every paragraph should make our indigenous pinkos turn crimson...
...all left England thinking that they could do better elsewhere, that they would be richer, holier, or freer people if they explored the world's reaches...
...to the Aboriginals as the 'Footprints of the Ancestors' or the 'Way of the Law...
...in it Chatwin displayed the intrepidity and sensitivity of observation that earned him his reputation as Britain's pre-eminent travel writer...
...That's why they can't hold their booze...
...Lenin, Mao, and Castro may have flirted with democratic ideas now and then, but they consistently resolved their difficulties in their own favor: neither free elections nor voluntary retirement has ever been a feature of the Communist regime...
...What drew Chatwin down under were tales of "the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as 'Dreaming Tracks' or `Song-lines...
...As satire, though, it should have exploited its central conceit more consistently...
...Later, having quit his job as an expert on modern painting, he journeyed to the Sudan where his guide, a nomad named Mahmoud, triggered a fascination for nomads...
...And there's the problem of Stalin...
...But never does he indicate what quality it is that so enthralls the Aborigines...
...Vladimir counsels young Alex to study the writings of Mary McGrory, Anthony Lewis, and Arthur Schlesinger...
...Nor does the land itself emerge from the shadows of the book...
...Shakespeare, not a traveler himself, put his finger on it when he spoke of England as "this little world . . . bound in with the triumphant sea...
...It never functions as an inhibiting conscience...
...The policeman moistened his lips again, and sucked the air between his teeth...
...Checks and balances is yet to be adopted by the Marxist community...
...Once a teacher among the Aborigines, he knows them intimately...
...now at your bookstore, or use coupon to order...
...Pravda quotes Lewis and McGrory all the time, and Georgi Arbatov, who heads Soviet propaganda operations here, talks like the robot that writes New York Times editorials...
...A nostalgia for the Beast we have lost...
...It still does...
...Smith remarks: "How ironic that the best illustration that can be offered of the state's powerful and autonomous role in all of history comes from the experience of communist governments that have remade from top to bottom the socioeconomic structures over which they rule...
...interesting, certainly...
...Add the two together and you see that for the American left, it is always the right time for redistribution...
...When the economy is in good shape, then "it is all the more shameful that some must live in squalor," and the country "must be generous with our less privileged brethren . . . there is no excuse for being stingy now...
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...and if you soft-focused your eyes, you'd think you were in the lit-up Provençal landscape of Van Gogh's Cornfield near Arles...
...But they're different...
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...Because I like them...
...These had been passed down through generations of Aborigines...
...To Chatwin's great relief, however, another anthropologist named Robert Brain rescues man's reputation by reinterpreting the evidence and concluding that the seeming violence, which Dart attributed to the Beast Within, was in fact caused by a Beast Without, a prehistoric cat species named Dinofelis...
...I like to do what's right by them...
...Too often, though, the style shuffles lazily off into sentences such as "It was a bright, moonlit night...
...Vladimir muses: I am completely enthralled by the liberal argument which maintains, in effect, that there is nothing in principle right or wrong with socialism, but somehow it's always the right thing to do at any given time...
...Discussing our break from the apes, he turns his attention to a number of conflicting anthropological opinions on the subject...
...As Chatwin sums it up, "In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score...
...That feeling of being bound in—spiritually, intellectually, and physically—united Plantagenet crusaders, Tudor privateers, and Victorian imperialists...
...It's been proved," said the policeman...
...You'd think men like Gorbachev lie...
...Each Ancestor first created himself and then walked across the land, leaving behind landmarks and creatures whom he had sung into being...
...In Chat-win's mind "the suggestion took root . . . that poetry, my own name, and the road were, all three, mysteriously connected...
...Arkady, however, argues that by white standards many Aborigines, with their ability to memorize, would rank as "linguistic geniuses...
...The key to the old hand's advice is that Soviet interests are best served not by overt boasts and threats but by using the idiom of American liberalism...
Vol. 20 • November 1987 • No. 11
