My friend Jack Jacobs, who is currently writing his PhD on Orwell, Weil, and Gandhi at Oxford, wrote a moving, quietly angry piece about the booing. Reading it, I was reminded of this one, which I wrote for Spook Magazine upon the centenary of the Gallipoli landings back in 2015. Unfortunately, Spook went bust a long time ago and vanished from the web. The piece, along with the magazine’s archive, vanished with it. I republished it on Medium in 2018. Jack, when he read it, said I should publish it here, too.

A couple of years ago, after a brief stint in Israel and the West Bank, I met my parents in Istanbul, where I had lived a few months earlier, and set about showing them the sights. My father was keen to visit Gallipoli, which my mother was not—“I’ve seen my share of war cemeteries,” she said, in reference to a previous visit to the Western Front—and I volunteered to accompany him in her stead.

I didn’t especially want to go, either, having long been critical of the manner in which, as Paul Keating once put it, “we still go on as though the nation was born again or even was redeemed there”. Nor was I keen to spend the day with the Southern Cross-tattooed backpackers I assumed would comprise the majority of our travelling companions. But I hadn’t been outside the city before and considered the journey, if not the destination, worthy of my time and effort.

As it happened, the destination turned out to be worth them, too. Indeed, by the time we left the peninsula late that afternoon, I found that I had come to disagree with Keating’s blanket refusal to ever visit it. But then, that’s probably because it was August, not April, with nary an Australian flag or—to give our fellow travellers their due—Southern Cross tattoo in sight. Divorced from the unthinking jingoism, thinly-veiled militarism and nationalistic self-mythologising that so characterise discussions about ANZAC and Gallipoli in Australia’s public discourse—what Jeff Sparrow once memorably called the anti-politics of ANZAC—the most important lessons the campaign has to teach could properly make themselves felt.

These lessons have less to do with the usual abstractions—courage, nation, duty, sacrifice—than they do with recognising imperial folly for what it was a hundred years ago and remains still today. They are lessons written, as though in block letters, on the landscape itself. The Dardanelles look great on a map, a strategic collector’s item for anyone wishing to control access from the Aegean to the Bosporous and the Black Sea, but only so long as the map in question doesn’t include any topographical information. On the ground, whether on the beach looking up or the bluffs looking down, they look exactly like what they turned out to be: a series of craggy, too-vertical death-traps.

Indeed, while bad intelligence and worse charts are often blamed for the bloody imbroglio that followed the landings, from atop the hills, serene today, one sees few places along the coast where the defenders wouldn’t have had the advantage or the morning its terrible, crimson hue. We should never have been there.

It’s remarkable that the Allies got as far as they eventually did, and one may be forgiven for noting the stirring of a certain something in one’s chest when one considers that point. But it is the outrage of the internationalist more than the pride of the patriot that is ultimately stirred most deeply here. Every rocky cliff face, every impossible climb, every headstone in every cemetery—Ottoman as well as Allied—speaks silently to the point that every soldier on the ground, whether ordered over the top or, in the case of the Ottoman 57th Infantry Regiment, ordered, explicitly, to die, was ultimately seen by his respective empire as expendable.

This is something you don’t necessarily pick up in the dim light of a dawn service and something you don’t pick up at all in the dimmer light still of a public conversation designed, not merely to elevate Gallipoli above politics and debate, but to render war and national security untouchable as well. It is less ironic than inevitable that the Gallipoli campaign should have been hijacked over the past two decades by militarists and monarchists. The true lessons of the campaign are entirely at odds with those that such people wish to impart—let alone with the adventures they wish to take us on still—and it is thus necessary for them to employ rhetorical strategies that distract from what should be plain. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, while those who rewrite it merely doom others to.

We moved on from the ANZAC cemeteries, the most affecting of which was at Ari Burnu, the promontory at the north end of ANZAC Cove, which is home to the monument that immortalises Atatürk’s famous 1934 speech to the first Australians, New Zealanders and British to return to the battlefields after the war.

“There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours,” he said. “After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”

From there we headed to the Ottoman memorial where the aforementioned 57th Infantry Regiment is honoured, every member of it either killed or wounded, the number fifty-seven later retired out of respect. The site is as inherently moving as any other on the peninsula, or at least it is for anyone with even the slightest capacity for empathy. Nationalism tends to preclude all but the most flippant recognition that an Australian grunt is no better or worse than an Ottoman grunt—the latter’s graves on a slight incline towards Mecca—while internationalism demands that we see past the false dichotomy to the fact that the two ultimately have more in common with each other than they do with the men ordering them to fire.

This was certainly true for the men of the 57th. If any of the countries involved in the conflagration has a right to trot out the baptism-by-fire, birth-of-a-nation-type stuff, Turkey obviously has a greater claim than Australia ever will. In addition to losing more soldiers on the peninsula than any other country involved—between 56,000 and 68,000 dead—it also kick-started the meteoric career of the founder of its modern, secular incarnation in the process. Never mind that Atatürk, however eloquent his later speech, was also the one who ordered the regiment’s members—Mehmet or otherwise—not to fight, but to die. No side in the war had a monopoly on suffering, and none of the countries that suffered a monopoly on myths.

We took the bus back to Istanbul in relative silence, having felt that we experienced the peninsula more fully for having seen it at a time when the fog of war nostalgia was at its thinnest and the landscape better able as a result to declare itself for what it was: not a baptismal font, just another of those countless places in the world where old men once threw young men at each other to die in the service of empires that had little regard for them. The city appeared to us as a glow on the horizon long before we could actually see it. Lest we forget? Sometimes it feels like we’ve already forgotten.

As you know, I dislike cannibalising my archives. I’d rather you get to read something new, like my forthcoming piece about the Jaipur Literature Festival. Hence, when I stoop, I stoop low enough to grab two. I published ‘Poppies for the forgotten: Armistice Day, imperialism, and the war that never ended’, which turns out to be rather relevant giving yesterday’s grotesque heckling, on Medium in November 2018.

Well, that went quickly, didn’t it? Today, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day and all that, we marked a hundred years since the guns fell silent on the battlefields of WWI. This year, for obvious reasons, the commemorations took on an especially resonant tone.

They did so for some less obvious reasons as well. In the lead-up to today’s events, one group, British Future, spearheaded the ‘Remember Together’ project, which aimed to increase awareness of the role that people of different backgrounds played in the Allied war effort. “The armies of 1914-18 looked more like the Britain of 2018 than that of its day,” the initiative’s website reads. “British troops fought alongside soldiers of different colours and creeds from across the Commonwealth, including over a million Indian soldiers, 400,000 of them Muslims from present-day Pakistan.” This latter group included Khudadad Khan, a Muslim who was the first Indian soldier to be awarded the Victoria Cross.

As the director of British Future, Sunder Katwala, told The Guardian last month: “We have seen extremists, both Anjem Choudary [who was convicted in 2016 for encouraging his followers to support ISIS] and Britain First, try to turn our cherished symbols of Remembrance into ammunition in their culture war. Both rely on an ignorance of our shared history when they tell Muslims and other minorities that they have no place in Britain.” In a separate initiative, the Royal British Legion produced 40,000 “khadi” poppies, made from the same linen worn by Gandhi, to honour the 74,000 Indian soldiers who lost their lives in the conflict.

Initiatives like these were welcomed by war-buffs, historians, and civil and religious leaders, both in India and in the UK. But it remains true that any proper accounting of the Allied war effort must also take into account the discrimination faced by many of the Commonwealth troops.

Members of Delhi’s Raqs Media Collective are currently in Colchester, where they have launched a new piece, ‘Not Yet at Ease’, to mark the centenary of the war’s end. In September, they made headlines in Britain after telling the Observer that they had uncovered evidence of systemic racism towards Indian soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Our discoveries were made in the archives of the India Office Records, which are currently housed in the British Library, and in some archival material in the Imperial War Museum and in a sound archive in the Humboldt Museum in Berlin,” Raqs’ Shuddhabrata Senguta told me by email. He said the documents proved that the British deliberately and consistently neglected to treat psychological problems among Indian soldiers. He went one further, too, and added that there was a class element to this discrimination, in addition to a racial one.

“The British Officer classes had a form of class-hatred towards working-class British soldiers that needs to be reflected upon as much as their clear sense of racial superiority vis-à-vis the Indian soldiers, whom they continued to treat as alien and infantile, and refused to take into account as grown men with actual feelings and intelligence,” Senguta said. “The fact that Indian soldiers were suffering from undiagnosed shell shock is as significant as the fact that ordinary British soldiers were also undiagnosed.”

He described ‘Together Again’ as “too little, too late,” and noted that, in India, WWI remains a point of contention. “Although [the Indian troops] were not conscripts, like all soldiers in virtually every war they were compelled, cajoled, and coerced to fight to defend the interests of ruling powers that had nothing to do with their own well-being,” he said. “The memory of WWI and Armistice Day in India falls between the cracks of the empire’s amnesia about the people from the Indian subcontinent who fought in the war, and Indian nationalism’s unwillingness to take seriously the hundreds of thousands of people who experienced a reality that it cannot process.” According to the Indian historian Mridula Mukherjee, who spoke to the online publication Dawn four years ago: “You can’t call it sacrifice. It was surely not patriotism that made [the Indian soldiers] fight. It was mostly them looking for employment.” (Mukherjee didn’t get back to me when I emailed her.)

All of this is to say nothing of WWII, during which Churchill essentially engineered the 1943 Bengal famine, diverting food from India to the European theatre.

“I hate Indians,” Churchill told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, at the time. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Contacted by Delhi about the unfolding crisis, Churchill responded by asking why Gandhi wasn’t dead yet. (Recall why, in The Crown, Churchill—perfectly portrayed, against odds, by John Lithgow, his performance relying more on the vibe than on strict imitation or caricature—distrusts Matt Smith’s Doctor Who: because Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, Philip’s uncle, is “the man who gave away India”. Like he had a choice at that point.) Roughly three million “beastly people” died in the famine.

The Australian context is slightly different, though we continue to speak about WWI as though it made us who we are. (Curtin telling Churchill to go jump, with WWII in full and bloody swing in Asia, strikes me as much more relevant to the myths we’ve made up about our national character.) It isn’t only that Churchill’s Dardanelles campaign wasn’t worth the paper it was planned on, as any non-chest-beating visit to Gallipoli attests. It isn’t only that the campaign in question should be considered less a baptism of fire than a sobering reminder that we follow our imperial patrons into places like Turkey, Vietnam, and Iraq, at our peril. It is the fact that there hasn’t been a proper reckoning of the discrimination meted out by our own army a century ago.

In 1916, Australian officers in charge of enlistment were told that “Aboriginals, half-castes, or men with Asiatic blood are not to be enlisted”. (In 1917, as white recruits became harder to come by, these restrictions were partially lifted. “Half-castes may be enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force provided that the examining Medical Officers are satisfied that one of the parents is of European origin,” a new set of orders read.) Roughly a thousand Indigenous Australians wound wind up serving in the war. According to the Australian War Memorial website—it must be acknowledged that there has been at least some attempt to recognise these veterans at the official level—“upon their return to civilian life [the Aboriginal soldiers] were treated with the same prejudice and discrimination as before.” Well, blow me over with a feather.

Obviously, we have a civil duty to remember that the war was fought in large part by Britain’s imperial and colonial subjects. There’s something nice and inclusive about it, especially given our current obsession with identity politics. (That Senguta felt the need to bring up class in our email conversation struck me as refreshingly old-fashioned.) But there are other important reasons to do so, too. By remembering the imperial make-up of the Allied side, we are also forced to remember, despite ourselves, that the war was fought for imperialism’s sake.

This realisation forces us in turn to zoom out from the European theatre—to pan sideways and take in the world at large—and recall the effects of the war elsewhere, and indeed those of the Armistice that followed it. Because whatever I may have said in my opening sentence, the guns never really fell silent at all. The Great War, the War to End All Wars, never properly ended anything. The most salient result of the Armistice, and of the uneasy “peace” that attended it, was ultimately more violence. Think of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the legacy of which we are dealing with throughout the Middle East today, or of the effects of WWII, which was a direct and predictable consequence of Versailles. Think of the Cold War, which followed the second cataclysm, not only along the Iron Curtain, but in Southeast Asia, in India, and in Africa. Most if not all of the conflicts that continue to trouble policy-makers today have their roots, directly or indirectly, in an almost-botched assassination on the streets of Sarajevo in 1914. Senguta described ‘Not Yet at Ease’ like this: “It’s an immersion installation that uses wall murals, architecture, sound and video, and interpreted archival material, to create conditions for thinking about the fact that, in our view, WWI never ended”

Well, quite. The aforementioned assassination not only gave birth to the greatest open-plan slaughterhouse mankind had ever seen, but also resulted in the Russian Revolution, the carving up of the Middle East, the later collapse, in the aftermath of WWII, of the European colonial project (a good thing, though not without its own repercussions), and everything that followed. Even September 11, 2001, which some commentators like to consider the proper end of last century, had its roots in Sykes-Picot, the rise of the Soviet Union, and other post-Versailles realities. We are still living in a post-Versailles world.

You can wear a poppy if you like—I love wearing poppies!—including the khadi one, if you can get your hands on it. But without a serious discussion of how the war continues to plague us, and the reasons we fought it in the first place, we will be forever condemned to keep making the same mistakes. Reckoning with how we treated our own side seems to me like a good place to start.

In 2015, a motley group of former war correspondents returned, in dwindling numbers, to Ho Chi Minh City, where I was then living and pretending to work. These self-described Old Hacks were in town to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, an event that a good number of them had covered. I pitched a story about the reunion to The Australian, which the paper agreed to publish, and went along.

As I have written before, I was really only there for Tim Page, to my mind the best and most fearless of the lot. But before Page rocked up with his partner, Marianne, I met with the man who had ensured I was on the guest list: former AP photo editor Carl Robinson, founder of the Old Hacks, organiser of the event, and, more recently, one of the driving forces behind Bảo Nguyễn’s 2025 Netflix documentary, The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo.

I caught up with Robinson on ANZAC Day at the Hương Sen Hotel on Đồng Khởi in District 1. Born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, he was raised by missionary parents in the Belgian Congo before arriving in South Vietnam in 1964. He worked for USAID for several years, before resigning in opposition to the war in the wake of the 1968 Tết Offensive. It was then that turned his hand to journalism. He would have been seventy, or perhaps a little older, when I met him.

While we sat in the lobby and waited for Page, Robinson spoke about stuff that made little to no sense to me: he was obsessed with journalistic politics that predated my birth by more than a decade. Only one thing made any real impression: at one point, leaning in close over his drink, Robinson told me that Huỳnh Công “Nick” Út had not taken ‘The Terror of War’—the photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc at Trảng Bàng more famously known as ‘Napalm Girl’—in 1972. This was an open secret, he said. Everyone knew the truth. Before I had a chance to wrap my head around this, or ask him anything about it, Page materialised out of a cloud of pot smoke, red-eyed and with a face like Droopy Dog’s. (Both these traits belied the fact that he was still heart about nineteen years old.) We went out and found a bar on the street, where we sat on plastic kindergarten chairs and drank cheap beer with great cubes of ice in it. Page and Robinson discussed people I didn’t know, mostly because those people were dead. I can’t recall whether Út came up again that evening or not.

If Page materialised out of a cloud of smoke, The Stringer tells a story doubly, if not triply, cloaked: not only in the fog of war, but also in the mists of memory and the noxious gas of personal myth. Everyone knows by now what it’s about and what it argues—that Út could not possibly have taken the photo and that it was a freelancer, Nguyễn Thành Nghệ, who actually did so—not least because the documentary’s arrival was accompanied, especially in the US press and various specialist photography publications, by a great deal of acrimonious commentary, at times bordering on mutually-assured character assassination.

The film is an impressive piece of investigative journalism, anchored by the British photojournalist Gary Knight, who runs the VII Foundation. Knight admits at the outset of the film that he’s troubled about rewriting the history of one of history’s most famous and important images, though, by the end, his reluctance has given way to steadfast conviction. I won’t detail the entire investigation here, primarily because it has many moving parts, suffice it to say that the means by which Knight, Robinson, independent Vietnamese journalist Lê Văn, and others track down Nghệ and his family involve the kind of delicate balance between ingenuity and dumb luck that characterise all great films about shoe-leather reporting, from All the President’s Men to Spotlight.

In the eyes of this amateur—while I regularly took my own photographs on the road, I was only ever paid for them once and never considered myself an actual photojournalist—the most fascinating and convincing passage of the film comes towards its end, and is less about finding Nghệ than it is about piecing together the moments immediately leading up to and following that at which the photograph was taken. Using a trove of visual artefacts from the day—most notably footage shot by a British ITN television crew—a Paris-based investigative NGO, INDEX, creates a 3D reconstruction of the scene. Based on other AP photos credited to Út that day, and on his appearances in both the footage and in the photographs of others, INDEX concludes that that, in order to have taken the ‘Napalm Girl’ photo and his other photos and appear when and where he does in the rest of the material, Út would have needed to run about 170 metres down the road from his first recorded position, gotten the shot, run 75 metres back up the road to his second, turned around, and started walking back to his third, all in a matter of thirty seconds or so and all while wearing heavy military garb and carrying four cameras. This, it says, appears “an extremely implausible scenario”.

Matt Growcoot at PetaPixel has questioned the validity of the INDEX reconstruction, noting that the ITN footage contains a cut of indeterminate length, which renders it unreliable as a measure of how much time Út had to do much of anything:

The children, who are all in shock, are zig-zagging around and stopping when they encounter people. It is therefore difficult to know the exact timing of their walk out of Trang Bang and impossible to know the media’s movements—including Nick Ut’s.

This is pretty weak tea. In the face of what the ITN crew were witnessing, it seems pretty unlikely that they would have cut for more than a second or two. Indeed, the importance of what was unfolding around them is what makes Út’s supposed actions so inexplicable. Even if he did make that first Olympian dash down the road, and did somehow manage to take the photo, why on earth would he then abandon the story—let alone the children he later claimed to have taken to hospital—and return halfway to his initial position? (“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough,” said Robert Capa, not, “If you’ve taken the picture of the century, retreat.”) Growcoot is happy to admit that it’s strange that the photo was taken on a Pentax. (Út, who did not use a Pentax, claimed to have taken the photo on a Leica, until changing his story following an internal AP investigation.) What really seems to incense him is that Robinson would wait for the AP’s Saigon photo editor, Horst Faas, to die before airing his grievances in public.

It is the attack on Faas, more than that on Út, that appears to have rankled many of those who have in turn attacked both the film and Robinson. Faas was a genuine legend of the trade, the author of the famous ‘War is Hell’ image and the longest-serving member of the Vietnam press corps. In the documentary and elsewhere, such as in The Weekend Australian Magazine, Robinson has claimed that it was Faas who told him to credit the photo to Út, even though everyone knew full well that the latter hadn’t taken it. Faas has been dead for the better part of fifteen years and is unable to defend himself against charges of being a company man to the point of Pulitzer theft. Growcoot writes that the film “assassinates [Faas’] character” and describes it as “utterly reprehensible” that Robinson would wait for his death to do so. “At best, it makes you a coward,” he writes, “at worst it’s malevolent.” The AP’s Peter Arnett, who told his former employer that Robinson first told him the story by email in 2012, said that Robinson “did not want to [air the allegations] while Faas was still alive.”

Robinson denies this, claiming to have been airing them privately, including to Arnett, as early as 2009, when Faas was still alive. (Others in the know have told me that he’s been airing them privately for at least thirty years.) His real concern, Robinson says, was that it was impossible to go public with the story without knowing who the stringer actually was.

Út has mostly refused to talk, though he did sue the filmmakers for defamation earlier this month. Other Old Hacks, such David Burnett, have had less of a problem speaking out, leading to an interesting he-said-he-said exchange in the pages of the Washington Post. Mort Rosenblum, one of only two AP reporters in the newsroom at the time of Faas’ decision to run the photo, writes that “For complex reasons, I believe he probably did [purposely attribute someone else’s picture to Út].” (He notes, as Knight did in Rolling Stone, that Faas was particularly loyal to Út, whose brother, Huỳnh Thanh Mỹ, was killed while working as a photographer for AP. Knight also suggests that UP had been “losing the play” to UPI and that it was imperative that a UP staffer’s name be on what was very obviously one of the century’s great photos.)

Rosenblum does not seem thrilled to have had to wade so deep into this particular quagmire. He writes that while the team behind The Stringer “did what it set out to do, positing an open question and then answering it,” he also wishes that “the narrative had stopped there”.

Many of them do. If the film and its conclusions upset people, the various fallings out that have attended its release have upset even more. One friend, who knows or knew all the key players, living and dead alike, asked not to be named in this piece on the grounds that it’s not worth taking sides between old friends. In his Weekend Australian piece, Robinson admits that the community has not been the same since he first started sharing the story in private, and that he had lost a number of friends because of it, even before the film went into production. He intentionally left the story out of his 2020 memoir, The Bite of the Lotus, precisely because he was worried about the legal and personal ramifications of including it. But I have also been told that, during the film’s Sydney premiere, he wept tears of gratitude and relief the whole time.

The stakes of all this vary in their levels of importance. The Stringer makes the argument, which is hard to rebut, that Vietnamese stringers, like local freelancers and fixers everywhere, were often given short shrift by the foreign media companies that profited from their work. It occasionally suggests that it is righting a kind of neo-colonialist wrong, not only as committed against Nghệ, but against all underpaid, uncredited freelancers, up to and including those working in battle zones today. (It is self-consciously dedicated to “the Vietnamese photographers of the American war in Vietnam and the courageous stringers of today’s wars.”) Everyone involved on either side of the argument has claimed—as American journalists, in particular, are wont to do—that they are making a stand for the Truth: “The passage of time may increase the anguish of self-examination, but the search for truth is always worth the cost,” writes Knight. “Of course we as journalists should always honor the truth,” says Burnett. “My entire career has been built on telling the truth,” claims Út in the court documents filed by his lawyers, “often at great personal risk.”

All of this is very good and noble-sounding, but it also comes across as a bit disingenuous. At the same time, I’m not sure that it’s entirely about reputations, either, including Nghệ’s rediscovered one. Robinson’s has always been contingent—Knight notes that he is “something of an outsider among expat reporters who covered the war”—and he had little to gain by going public, besides, perhaps, a clear conscience. Út may be smarting, but I doubt he has much to worry about in the long run, especially in Vietnam, where he remains a national hero. (While the World Press Photo Foundation, which awarded ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo of the Year in 1973, has rescinded Út’s credit following its own investigation, his name was still very much beneath the image when I visited Saigon’s War Remnants Museum for the first time in a decade last month.) Faas and Arnett are both dead.

No, I think something more intimate and personal is at play: a kind of desperate need to own the war, and in owning it to safeguard one’s youth. I have seen this need express itself in other places, at other times, in very different contexts: in Pamplona, say, where old-timers argue over the location of a long-shuttered tapas bar or the name of a Basque folk singer who’s been dead forty years, or in Sydney pubs where blokes debate which takeaway place did the best rotisserie chook back in 1987. I have seen it in Saigon, where one night, not long after the Old Hacks’ reunion, two guys nearly came to blows over the name of a Buddhist temple in Bangkok and how you were supposed to spell it. (I eventually defused the situation by noting that, as they were not spelling it in Thai, but transliterating it, they were both wrong.) The question of the photo’s authorship is obviously more important than any of these, but I do think that the same base need undergirds them all.

What we are seeing, then—not in the film itself, but rather in the debate around it—is a need for people to have their memories of the war confirmed, even as it is abundantly clear that almost all of their memories of it are in conflict with one another. It is a battle, not over the truth, exactly, or even over the authorship of the photograph, but over each man’s version or vision of Vietnam: that of Robinson and other “local hires,” with their desk jobs and Vietnamese wives and families, those of the war junkies and would-be Dennis Hoppers, and those of the hard-nosed newspaper and television men, who, to quote Irwin Shaw on Capa, were always willing to go to the next bar or the next war, no matter how late the hour or unattractive the war. Mostly, though, it is a battle over what they were doing there, or what they thought and told themselves they were, and how they each individually went about it. According to messages in the Old Hacks Google group, which Knight quotes in his Rolling Stone article, Arnett told Robinson in 2009 that

You must be aware that the AP with all its resources, and Horst and his many friends, along with Nick Út himself and his Vietnamese associates, and all those AP staffers who take pride in their Vietnam service, will do everything possible to discredit you and your assertions, and challenge all of what you say.

Putting aside the fact that this confirms Robinson’s claims that he told Arnett and others about the story prior to Faas’ death in 2012, and disproves Arnett’s comments to AP that he first heard about it that same year, I think the key line here is about the “AP staffers who take pride in their Vietnam service”. This is about wounded pride. It is wrong to question Faas’ journalistic ethics, or the way Út has dined out on ‘Napalm Girl,’ rightly or wrongly, for fifty years, because to do so is to question the entire mythology of the Vietnam press corps and its role in the war. If Horst Faas denied a stringer his credit, were we really any better than the bastards who ran the Five O’clock Follies at the Rex? How can we claim to have been speaking truth to power if we were also stealing people’s photos in order to win Pulitzers and beat UPI?

In Việt Thanh Nguyễn’s Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Sympathizer quotes Milan Kundera:

The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy it or repaint it. We want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.

The sad irony of all this is that the conversation around The Stringer, if not necessarily the film itself, again frames the American war in Vietnam as something that happened to Americans and other Westerners, with Út and Nghệ alike both pawns in a game that is ultimately being played by outsiders. “All wars are fought twice,” writes Nguyễn at the beginning of the book, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” This particular war, though, is entirely about Western memories, not Vietnamese ones—not even those of the Vietnamese men at its centre—a symptom of the ongoing falsity that the war belonged, and still belongs, to anyone but the Vietnamese themselves.

On the evening of April 30, 2015, I returned to the Hương Sen for the reunion. There were about thirty veteran reporters there, down from the eighty who attended the first reunion back in 1995. The rest, former Newsweek reporter Tony Clifton told me, were off drinking at “the big FCC in the sky”.

The correspondents had been busy with events over the past few days. It was the first time the Old Hacks’ reunion had been sponsored by Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the ministry had organised tours to the city’s War Remnants’ Museum—for which Page and Faas curated the excellent ‘Requiem’ exhibition, dedicated to the Western and Vietnamese photojournalists who lost their lives during both the French and American conflicts—the Việt Cộng tunnel system at Củ Chi, and a number of local universities. Earlier in the day, at the conclusion of the Reunification Day parade—a classic Communist-kitsch affair, all military might and tinny music—James Pringle, who covered the Vietnam and Cambodian wars for Reuters, Newsweek, and the London Times, followed then Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng into his Reunification Palace office in order to get in an few unscheduled questions about Vietnam’s relationship with China.

I sat with Page and Marianne at a table off to the left of the dining room. Robinson was with us as well. Út was there, but I didn’t get to meet him: he was too busy being interviewed by a Vietnamese television crew. When he entered the room and started looking for a table, Robinson went very quiet. He refused to look in Út’s direction. Marianne shot Page a glance.

Út did not come over.

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I have seen a number of very good films since returning to Australia in February: Benny Safdie’s Augie-esque Marty Supreme, Mona Fastvold’s feverishly strange The Testament of Ann Lee. I had an unexpected soft spot for Bradley Cooper’s quietly charming Is this Thing On?

But nothing I have seen since my return has hit as hard, or lingered quite as unsettlingly, as Albert Serra’s grisly and gripping Afternoons of Solitude.

The film follows the exploits of the Peruvian matador Andrés Roca Rey, who many consider the best currently working. (I have seen Rey perform on numerous occasions, but always in Pamplona during fiesta, which is not as conducive a setting as Madrid or Seville for his more classical style of toreo. He has never impressed me as much in real life as he has here on the screen.) Shot over the course of several years at various bullrings in Spain and France, and edited over the course of several more until all sense of time and place had been obliterated, the film eschews anything that might ground the viewer—interviews, title cards, narration, even wide shots—in favour of a singularly hypnotic vision that, without passing judgement or offering commentary, says only: Come and see.

If you don’t know much about bullfighting—about the fight’s three-act structure, the various passes, the ancient lineage of the fighting stock—Afternoons of Solitude isn’t going to teach you much. It won’t even teach you much about Rey. This is not The Last Dance but with bullfighting, even if it’s certainly the last dance for each of the bulls he fights.

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky once wrote an article about Tony Scott in which he argued that Scott, who trained as a painter at the Royal College of Art, was “not a ‘photographic’ filmmaker” but rather “a painterly filmmaker” whose “late-period method of shooting and editing transform[ed] everything into blotches of color and movement”. (Think of the out-of-control train in Unstoppable, hurtling along as everything in the foreground whips by at such speed that it ceases to look like anything beyond pure motion.) Vishnevetsky wrote:

Cinema is supposed to be a medium of images—and yet the later Scott's images are often impressionistic to the point of abstraction, “unreadable,” arranged in ways that don’t create any sense of a space or a chronology. The big, obvious gestures—causality-based montage, emphasized mise-en-scène, long unbroken camera movements—that are at the center of the most basic theories of classical filmmaking and criticism aren’t central to his best films.

Much the same could be said about Afternoons of Solitude, which, as Alexandra Semenova notes, comparing Serra to Gianfranco Rosi, is “captivated by the confusing image and an atmosphere of estrangement”. Her piece, which is excellent, considers the space of the film on three levels: real space (the actual bullrings, hotel rooms, and vans in which it was shot), imaginary space (a heroic or mythological conceptual space, where man and bull take on symbolic qualities), and pictorial space (the two-dimensional space of the screen, the painterly canvas that so interested Scott). Borrowing heavily from Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Semenova discusses this third space as a “field,” where texture, colour, presence, and—given we’re talking about cinema—movement take precedence.

As impressed as I was by Rey’s performance in the first of these three spaces, I think I was ultimately more impressed by Serra’s on the surface of the third. In 2013, in a theatre column for The Lifted Brow that I extracted here on Substack last year, I wrote:

In his essay on Jennifer Gough-Cooper’s photographs of Rodin’s sculptures, collected in Working the Room, Geoff Dyer outlines the connections between the two art forms, “between the images emerging gradually in the tray of chemicals and the figures’ emergence into form. ‘Stone is so still,’ sighs the statue in Rilke’s song. Still photography is the logical medium for conveying stillness…” This speaks to the relationship between toreo and sculpture—“the figures’ emergence into form” recalls not only Hemingway’s “flash when man and bull form one figure” but Orson Welles’ description of the matador’s art as the “[reduction of] a raging bull to his dimensions”—as well as to the relationship between toreo and still photography. This may seem an odd thing to say about a medium that involves the near-constant movement of a terrifying, dynamic force—the bull—but to the extent that the modern corrida has been marked by a ceaseless, paradoxical movement towards stillness, it does make some degree of sense. Perhaps this is why [José] Tomás does not allow his corridas to be broadcast on television: the essence of his art is stillness, and thus he is better served by the still photographer than by the man with the movie camera.

Serra upends this last assumption entirely. (As an aside, Rey’s only extended conversation in the film happens to be about Tomás.) When not haunting the non-descript hotel rooms in which he prepares for and disrobes after each fight, or sitting quietly, lost in his thoughts, in the van on his way to or from the same, Rey spends the entire running time of the film in the ring, where he and the bull are as often as not shown in extreme close-up, the frame lines dissecting their bodies into pieces. You almost never see the crowd, and the angle of the camera is such that the background is almost always the red of the wall or the bloodied red-yellow of the sand. The camera is often fixed in place, so that the animal’s body, a black blur against the matador’s suit of lights, passes across the screen in one direction, then the other, then again: Scott’s unstoppable train, or a Peter Upward brushstroke in time. Aside from the opening corrida of the film—as well as a few other key moments, such as when Rey is nearly gored against the wooden wall of the ring—which is filmed in medium and medium-wide shots in a way that allows the viewer to get at least some handle on what a bullfight entails, man and bull are very rarely shown in full. Instead, the camera prefers to get as close to them as it can, rendering them first as mythological creatures before getting closer and rendering them even stranger. (“[F]lesh and blood are a very rough, concrete material,” Serra has said, “but in cinema, I don’t know why, but we’re somehow not used to seeing them. They expand, become unreal, an element of fantasy.” I am reminded of Emmanuel Bonin, reviewing the long-awaited translation of Nicole Brenez’s On the Figure in General and the Body in Particular, noting the way that “cinema doesn’t simply depict or reproduce the body, but actively reconfigures it”.) The long lens regularly flattens the image to the point that makes it difficult to tell how much space exists between their bodies, where one of them ends and the other begins, an effect only heightened by the remarkable, and remarkably intimate, sound design, which layers heavy breathing on heavy breathing, with the occasional muttered curse or exhortation to die thrown in for good measure.

This is the exact opposite of how most televised bullfights—like televised sports or dance—are shot. The integrity of time and space mean little here. The integrity of the body means little. Serra aims to discombobulate, perhaps even—though this is wild speculation—to disorient us as the bull is disoriented.

For her part, Semenova argues that the form of the film, rather than its content, is where its true violence lies:

As Deleuze explains, in Bacon “Figures are not depicted as violent—they are violently projected into the field,” and he warns that “the violence of a sensation must not be confused with the violence of a represented scene.” This distinction is crucial—especially when the very subject matter is as charged as bullfighting, a spectacle premised on the ritualised proximity of death. Yet Serra’s film stages violence not so much through the subject itself, but through cinematic sensation: in the structure of repetition, the fragmentation, the anticlimax, the prolonged anticipation, the isolated figures, and the abundance of close-ups. This is where the suffering resides—in the form, not merely in the content.

In reality, it resides in both. It is true that Serra does not explicitly pass judgement on the corrida as a spectacle. But it is also true that, when he’s not using his close-ups to paint the screen with “blotches of color and movement,” he’s using them to observe details that, no matter how close you’re sitting at a corrida, you’re unlikely to ever see except here. What he chooses to look at is telling: the flickering of the animal’s eyes as the light goes out of them, the way a cloven hoof, suspended in air now, trembles with a stubborn electricity before the puntilla severs the animal’s spinal cord. We watch each bull dragged out of frame at the conclusion of each fight, often painting the sand red behind them as they go, and Serra always allows these shots to linger a moment or two longer than is always comfortable. I don’t think this counts as commentary, exactly, but I don’t think it doesn’t, either. The only things emptier than these shots are Rey’s eyes, his thousand-yard stare, as he sits in the van, surrounded by others, entirely alone, thinking all that cannot be filmed.

In 2006, the National Gallery of Victoria brought ‘Picasso: Love & War 1935-1945’ to Melbourne as part of its annual Winter Masterpieces series. I was always a little suspicious of these overpriced, overstuffed tent-pole exhibitions, of their artistic paucity relative to their blockbuster size and the exorbitant prices of their catalogues, but found this one particularly disappointing. Unable to source much good Picasso from the period, Europe unwilling or unable to part with the highlights of its own collections, or at least to send them to the other side of the world, the gallery was reduced to displaying a handful of weeping women in one corner and a bunch of faded newspapers the old man had chanced to doodle upon on over breakfast in another. Most galling of all was the manner in which it deigned to tackle the elephant that wasn’t, and for reasons no doubt related to insurance premiums. could never have been, in the room: it set up a digital projector and cast a ghostly, intangible ‘Guernica’ onto one of the gallery walls.

As I wandered around in mute disappointment, I happened upon some similarly monochrome images playing silently on a screen in a corner. No one was paying much attention to them, but I was captivated. They showed Picasso, Dora Maar, and others—Man Ray, I believe, was wielding the camera—gallivanting around the poolside at a villa somewhere in the south of France. They were smiling and laughing and drinking cocktails, their faces flickering in the manner of old home movies, silent but somehow vital across the years. Picasso had his shirt off, naturally. It was an incidental exhibit—filler, really—a bit of biographical colour thrown in to beef up the show, to make it seem as though there was more there than there was, not entirely dissimilar to Marr’s famous photographs of Picasso painting ‘Guernica’ in Paris, which adorned the wall by the ghastly projection. But the curatorial, contextual note accompanying the footage transformed it for me, imbuing it with instant melancholy: this, it said, was the last time these people spent time together before the war, and none of them ever saw one another again.

In Kudos, the final book of Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, one of the narrator’s countless interlocutors complains over canapes of her adult-aged children: “Theirs is a world without war [...] but it is also a world without memory. They forgive so easily, it is almost as if nothing matters. They are kind to their own children […] kinder than our generation ever was, yet their lives seem to me to be without beauty.” Sitting on the black banquette, watching Picasso, his lover, and their friends, by now on a loop, I was struck by a similar notion. It was not perhaps beauty that glued me to their last hurrah, though there was a certain undeniable glamour about them. It was rather a sense of the intensity of their moment, a sense, which I was feeling keenly at the time, at the unripe, unthinking age of twenty, that the life I was living, that my generation was living, was somehow without stakes.

It was not that I was unaware of Afghanistan or Iraq, or of Australia’s detention regime, or of the racial inequality that, after Hurricane Katrina a year earlier, had been thrown into sharp relief in the US. It was not that I wasn’t incensed by these things. But to the extent that everything was happening elsewhere, in my name but not in my direct line of vision, my world, like that of the interlocutor’s children, was for all intents and purposes “without war.” This all very deliberate and organised, this sense of being in peacetime in wartime. But nevertheless, I couldn’t help but feel that there was a lack of intensity of feeling and vitality like that which radiated from the screen.

To her credit, and rather unlike my naïve self, Cusk’s interlocutor catches herself and qualifies her statements at the last minute:

I wonder, she said, whether we haven’t done them a great disservice in sparing them this pain, which might somehow have brought them to life, at the same time as knowing this couldn’t possibly be true, and that it is only my belief in the value of suffering that makes me think it.

There is something unavoidably perverse about this belief, which the interlocutor acknowledges while still somehow managing to hold it, as there was in my reaction to the footage, which is to say to the curatorial note accompanying it. There is no question that the note transformed and coloured the footage, which, in any other context, would have been entirely innocuous, even boring. Much as the home videos archived in Capturing the Friedmans is transformed by the knowledge that Arnold and Jesse Friedman were awaiting trial on child molestation charges, so too was that at the villa transformed by the knowledge imparted by that small slip of card. The perversity is tied inextricably to that knowledge: my reaction, my fascination, was perverse precisely because I was aware what came next, and felt that frisson because, not in spite, of it.

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It was a perversity that was to last the better part of a decade, stupid and romantic and entirely symptomatic of the tendency towards extended adolescence that has unfortunately become the norm. It was also a perversity that seemed to naturally point me in the direction of journalism. A few years after the Picasso exhibition, now based in Sydney and working for Australia’s largest newspaper, I happened upon Alan Moorehead’s A Late Education in a secondhand bookstore on Glebe Point Road. Writing at the tail-end of his days—the book was compiled from notes after his death—the peripatetic Australian scribbler nevertheless managed to capture in prose the tone and timbre of his ink-stained youth.

“I was nagged by the feeling that I should have arrived in Europe at least five years earlier,” Moorehead wrote,

and that now there was not much time left, that war was bound to come or that revolutions would break out or some other catastrophe would intervene and shut me off from these strange and famous places before I had had a chance to know them.

One could imagine the figures in the Picasso footage speaking, or thinking, along similar lines.

I was itching to follow in Moorehead’s footsteps. Romanticism died hard in this one. I dutifully went down the rabbit hole: I read Hemingway’s journalism, Gellhorn’s dispatches, Hitchens’ jeremiads. Waugh’s Scoop was to be emulated as much as laughed with. Eventually, I struck out on the road, masking my baser reasons for doing so in the language used by journalists everywhere to justify their ambulance-chasing. I called my belief in the value of suffering—always others’, of course—a belief in the value of bearing witness. Gellhorn once said that her work was “the only thing I know absolutely and irrevocably to be good in itself, no matter what the result.” It’s a nice line, and she may well have meant it, but for all that I borrowed it, justifying my work to myself and others, my going to Chechnya and Palestine, Kashmir and Iraq, southern Thailand and the Rohingya refugee camps, owed rather more to Irwin Shaw’s inimitable line about Robert Capa: “Remaining debonair means that one must always be ready to go to the next bar or the next war, no matter how late the hour or how unattractive the war.” (I learned the hard way that there is nothing debonair about going to the next bar.) The first line of Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer lays bare the perversity of both the idealist and the cynic, and remains the most effective riposte to both: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” Like certain members of the Australian media class, who have made it their shtick to criticise their peers, Malcolm, given the litany of controversies surrounding her own reporting, should know.

It only slowly dawned on me that I was not cut out for this particular racket. For one thing, I was never really the newshound I probably should have been. I wasn’t one for breaking stories or scooping my opponents. For another, I began to feel uneasy about the ease with which I could parachute in and leave at will, relying on local journalists and fixers on the ground, and grilling locals for quotes and stories, before leaving them to fend for themselves while I received my byline and payday. I remember sitting in the bar of a hotel in Iraqi Kurdistan, hobnobbing with a group of CNN reporters and crew, and listening as they complained about having to fly coach between Libya and Egypt a few years earlier. The Arab Spring was three years old at this point, and I asked one of them—a well-known correspondent—what it was like to cover so many conflicts back-to-back. “They all tend to blur together a bit,” he said. “You tend not to think about the last one very much.” I kept my disgust at these comments to myself, which is more than I can say for the woman I met in Sydney later that year, at the birthday party of one of my editors, who straight up told me, when I told her what I did, that I was a disaster tourist. I insisted that I wasn’t: I trotted out the usual lines. I was, I said, entirely critical of disaster tourism and had written as much on countless occasions. I realise now that I was protesting too much, that those articles were a form of pre-emptive self-defence and self-justification. I was coming to the realisation that others’ suffering was just that: suffering. I have never met anyone—not even local reporters who have found themselves stringing for news organisations for whom they could never have imagined working—who has found anything especially vital or romantic about living on the anvil of history. The only value in suffering was that it revealed to me that I was placing too much value in it, and personally benefiting too much from it. I had been critical of the CNN reporter, but wasn’t I sitting there with him, at the next bar, at the next war? I would have to be stupid or full of myself to think otherwise.

I am writing this under my partner’s veranda in south-west Sydney in the dawning days of a new decade. [Very much my ex, unfortunately. – Ed.] The clever hopes of the low dishonest last one, to borrow from Auden, expired about a week ago. The brief burst of new hope at the tail end of last year—inspired in part by Joe Biden’s victory in November and the green-lighting of various COVID-19 vaccines on both sides of the pond, not to mention by the deluded but charming fallacy that a new year truly represents a new start—today seem decidedly less clever than they did a fortnight ago, not to mention more likely to expire sooner. As I write, Donald Trump supporters are storming the US Capitol and taking selfies with the police. (The events of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America have by now been so outdone by reality that the book reads less like an alt-historical warning than it does a best-case scenario for the future.) The global vaccine roll-out has been decidedly sluggish. Brexit has gone ahead, in a self-defeating victory for those who would close Britain’s borders to others, even as Britain has been forced to close its internal borders to itself. We were forced to miss Christmas with my family in South Australia due to Sydney’s Northern Beaches outbreak and I will have to self-quarantine for two weeks when I return to Canberra in a couple of days. Yesterday, having avoided doing so for almost a year, I wore a face mask in a supermarket for the first time. (I got away with going mask-less for so long because I live where I do, which all in all has had a very good run pandemic-wise, as indeed has Australia more generally.) A minor inconvenience, all things considered, though a grim enough milestone all the same.

I was reminded again of the Picasso footage as I was milling about in the produce section. Around me, faceless shoppers floated about at the duly prescribed distance from one another, their grey eyes darting between one another, wary. Their distrust of their neighbour seemed more pressing in the moment that the ripeness of this or that avocado. I was cast back to the days before this was the norm and tried to imagine what their faces might look like. All last year, people were having the same experience that I did at the NGV fifteen years ago, watching movies or television shows in which people could be seen hugging, eating at restaurants, leaving the house, going on holiday. That nostalgia has been one of the banes of the past decade is undeniable—the ache of homesickness for worlds that are long gone and probably never existed anyway, at least not for everyone, has given us Trump and Brexit and the rest of it—but this manifestation seems relatively understandable and benign. The pandemic has altered the way we read even the most banal depictions of human society, depictions that, not long ago, could be said to be at least moderately accurate representations of the world. Obviously, there’s no way Rachel and Monica could have afforded that gargantuan apartment, but at least sitting around in cafés was a thing people could do without fear of contagion. Airport scenes have become similarly discombobulating: the beginning of Love Actually plays like cruelly mocking science fiction. We watch When Harry Met Sally’s famous fake orgasm scene and declare loudly, on Twitter, that we’ll have what they’re having. If only that were possible, allowed. It was the last time any of them saw one another.

I was also cast unnervingly into a future best described by that already-clichéd coinage “the new normal”. In a recent episode of the Slate Political Gabfest, Emily Bazelon, who is about as far from a fear-monger as American pundits get, worried aloud that the US government might prove slow to roll back mask-wearing mandates even in the face of scientific advice that it’s finally safe to do so. What a delay might look like here is anyone’s guess, given the US hasn’t exactly shared Australia’s overabundance of caution to this point. My partner is convinced that most people will dispose of their masks in relief, if not necessarily gratitude, the moment they’re told they no longer have to wear them. I would be surprised if we’re ever rid of them completely. I expect people to distrust one another enough long enough that they’ll prove willing to fog up their glasses for some time. Of course, our disagreement remains academic at this point: this is a question of when the order comes down from on high. Australians, for all we like to tell ourselves that we’re a knockabout, larrikin, anti-authoritarian people, have in reality never loved anything more than to follow orders—anyone’s orders—even as we thanked them for stamping on our face, forever. Which is why my partner and I are wholly in agreement when it comes to the more nefarious stuff that constitutes “the new normal”: the slippery slope represented by the ubiquity of QR code check-ins, the fact that everyone seems to agree that constitutional provisions for freedom of movement aren’t absolute or in any case shouldn’t be. I am hardly of the conspiratorial opinion that these are stepping stones on the road towards fascism. But I am aware enough of mission creep, and of the law of unintended consequences as it relates to hastily-implemented policy—remember the pink batts?—to fear the long tail.

That the West, or in any event the Anglosphere, was not ready or equipped to handle the pandemic now seems more than obvious. The sclerotic reaction of the Trump administration, the bumbling reaction of Johnson’s, our own particular trauma and tribalism in the face of it at home—has the Sydney-Melbourne rivalry, once limited to such superficial concerns as beaches and laneways and the relative merits of football codes, ever seemed more spiteful or laced with schadenfreude?—speak loudly to this unpreparedness. Cusk’s interlocutor might say that this is an inevitable consequence of us having lived too long in a world without war, with war an apt enough metaphor given the rhetoric that has been used by our leaders over the past year. Or is it a consequence of having watched so much go wrong elsewhere—elsewhere having fared quite well under the circumstances—while naively convincing ourselves that it couldn’t happen here? What Cusk’s interlocutor doesn’t seem to realise is that much of what we tell ourselves about the apparently character-building nature of suffering is more or less bunk. Writing in The Guardian a whopping nine months ago, before COVID-19 had even really hit its stride, historian Richard Overy put paid to the myth of the so-called “blitz spirit,” that central, load-bearing tenet of the British narrative about WWII. The government sent a team of psychiatrists and psychologists to interview the residents of Hull, the better to understand their reaction—panic, in short—to the German raids. “These case studies,” Overy writes, which were outlined in a report entitled The Mental Stability of Hull, “showed that people developed serious psychosomatic conditions, including involuntary soiling and wetting, persistent crying, uncontrollable shaking, headaches and chronic dizziness,” he wrote.

Nevertheless, the conclusion from Hull was that its mental stability was nothing to worry about. The government papered over the evidence of the physical and psychological effects of being bombed and focused instead on the stories of British resolve.

Keeping calm and carrying on, in other words, was the exception that propagandists made the rule, and only after the fact. There is nothing unnatural about feeling fear, unfounded or otherwise, in the face of the pandemic, or depression, or anxiety. There isn’t even anything unnatural about anger, however destructive, dangerous, or misguided it may be. In any case, it is certainly not unnatural to feel no swooning sense that we are living through history, as though we’re not doing so all our lives, as though its quieter, less exhausting moments don’t count. For years after I saw the Picasso footage, discovered Moorehead and started working as a journalist—until I wrote as much in an article and Alison Corggon rightly corrected me in the comments section—I thought that “May you live in interesting times” was a blessing rather than an ironic curse. It seems remarkable to me now that this was the case.

While I sit here mindlessly refreshing the website of The New York Times, engaging in a Twitter conversation with a journalist friend who still feels the old reptilian stirrings of both horror and excitement in the face of imminent societal collapse, my partner is downstairs, preparing to start medical school. She is turning thirty-seven in February, and it remains to be seen whether I will be able to make back to Sydney to celebrate. (Thirty-seven is nothing in the grand scheme of things. We recently read about an Indian man in his sixties who’s just started studying to become a doctor as well.) [He graduated at seventy. (– Ed.] With all that is going on in the world, there is no question in my mind that this, to re-purpose Gellhorn, is absolutely and irrevocably good in itself. Despite everything, I remain proud of my work, and am glad that I did it and had the experiences I had. But I don’t delude myself for even a moment into thinking that it changed anything or saved any lives or alleviated anyone’s suffering. It is a lie we journalists tell ourselves: that it’s enough to tell people’s stories on their behalf, as though that could ever really be enough.

“History,” Cusk’s interlocutor says at one point, getting at least one thing right, “goes over the top like a steamroller […] crushing everything in its path.” When I think of the Picasso footage now, so many years after I encountered it for the first and only time, it is not perverse excitement at the oncoming steamroller that captivates me anymore—the promise or threat of blood and muck and farewells unvarnished by the mellifluous tones of Vera Lynn promising to meet us again, which is to say promising the impossible—but rather the idea that, not too long after the footage was shot, those it depicts must have felt something similar to that which so many people are feeling today: a simple, human, entirely forgivable nostalgia, not for some imagined past or lost greatness, but rather for the respite of normalcy.

Like every other walk in the Parvati Valley, the one from Kasol to the village of Chalal takes longer than the maps would suggest. Even the few metres from Kasol’s main road to the Chalal bridge take longer than they should. They are rocky and muddy. They slope dangerously downwards. On the far side, until one reaches the first smattering of stalls and would-be cafés, one navigates a one-lane road of unpaved sand that gives way on one side onto the rocks of the shoreline several dozen feet below. At night, from Kasol’s riverfront restaurants, you can make out people walking to Chalal in the darkness, picking them out by the flashlights on their phones, which blink on and off, or at least appear to, as the walkers swing their arms and thus momentarily block the phones with their bodies.

After visiting Chalal the evening prior, and finding the Cosmic Kasol rave at Pirates of Parvati, or PoP, to be a bit of a bust, the idea of going back for New Year’s Eve did not strike me as very appealing. But having spent four thousand rupees, or sixty-five dollars, on a multi-day pass, and once again knowing that at least one chapter of my novel was riding on my attendance, I grit my teeth and set out.

The Parvati Valley is home to a thriving psytrance culture, a high-altitude offshoot of the Goa trance scene, which was spearheaded by figures like Goa Gil and Raja Ram in the 1980s. I would tell you what makes psytrance music unique, and how it differs from Goa trance in its particulars, except that I don’t know and don’t care. All I know is that, over the decades that followed, the music travelled with Western tourists on the Hippie trail, and with battalions of post-discharge IDF soldiers on the Hummus one, from the beaches of the former Portuguese colony into the mountains of Himachal Pradesh.

Some, like those who would later turn Kheerganga into a trekking hotspot, were keen to get away from the rapidly commercialising Goa scene. Others, summering in the hills and wintering on the coasts, much like the British colonisers before them, only with rattier dreads, toggled back and forth with the seasons. But it would be silly to pretend that clement weather and mountain views were the main drawcards for our twenty-four-hour party people. The ready availability of mind-altering drugs, especially the hashish known as Malana cream, was every bit as integral to the Parvati’s growing countercultural cache.

It was certainly all the Chennai boys seemed to care about. I had met them the previous evening, when Cosmic Kasol had been empty and sad, and was unsurprised to meet them again now, scarfing hash brownies at a juice stand on the edge on the trees where the Chalal trek really gets going. The shack was a simple affair of wooden planks and corrugated plastic, its walls decorated with Nirvana posters and psychedelic ones that looked as though they’d been torn from a Magic Eye book. The Chennai boys were sitting around a fire out the front.

There were three of them: Jithu, a slight young man, made to look bulkier by virtue of his layers of winter clothing, with a carefully groomed shadow of beard and a small smile that became more expansive only with drugs, and Mari, whose name I thought was “Marty” the whole time I knew him, who struck me as entirely non-verbal and who, right now, was staring into the flames, pondering. Their self-styled leader, Dhalha, was larger than the other two, in all senses of the word: taller, stockier, and much, much louder. He had spent most of the evening prior asking me what drugs I liked to take, and promising me he could get me whatever I wanted. None of this was true, of course, because Dhalha was a bullshit artist.

He was now haggling with a young Himachali man over the cost of a cake of Malana cream. This was the shape and colour of a hockey puck, or perhaps an undersized pat of cow dung. Famously high in THC, the stuff comes from the village that gives it its name, an hour’s trek away from Chalal. The residents of Malana believe that they are the direct descendants of soldiers left behind by Alexander the Great. You can visit the village, but you cannot stay there. Nor can you enter any of its buildings, and touching its residents is similarly verboten.

Dhalha wanted the Himachali to go and make a brownie with the entirety of the puck. The Himachali, who was wrapped in a large blanket, said the brownies took a little longer to make, and that using an entire cake of the cream would doubtless send Dhalha and his friends half-insane. When he told the Chennai boys the cost of the cake, they balked but promised to call him later.

We set off. It was about half past five and dusk had fallen, mist drifting in off the river through wall-less cafés and restaurants, delineated only by hanging carpets depicting dreamcatchers, hemp leaves, and pulsating Krishnas.

More than six hours until midnight, I thought.

At least we weren’t making good time. From almost the moment we stood up, it had been clear that Marty was completely munted. No sooner had we left the juice stand than he stopped dead in the middle of the road and looked down staring at his feet. He looked like the guy at the end of The Blair Witch Project. This was apparently cause for much merriment, but, once he had been convinced to start walking again, he needed constant attention, on the grounds that he could apparently only walk straight forward and was incapable of looking up from his feet. Dhalha, meanwhile, was high as well, in a different way, and kept stopping to tell people about the drugs he could get them, or else, when they were darker in colour and potentially from the south, to ask them where in Tamil Nadu they were from. (None of them were from Tamil Nadu.) We stopped near a turn in the road so that he could conduct one of these interminable and uninvited dialogues and, when we looked up, we noticed that Marty was still walking, had left the path, and was halfway across a clearing towards a cliff.

Once everyone was moving again, this time in the right direction, Dhalha thought it might be funny to tell Marty that the party was straight up a near-vertical mound of scree in the trees. Marty didn’t hesitate. He started scrambling up the side of the hill while Dhalha, laughing, filmed him on his phone.

“He’s going to hurt himself,” I said, albeit without much conviction.

Jithu called for Marty to come down.

“It’s getting dark,” I said, “and the path only gets worse. You have to take care of him.”

“He’s never done drugs before,” said Jithu.

“What?” I asked. “Ever?”

“No.”

“And he’s been smoking has all day?”

Jithu nodded in the Indian manner.

“Did he eat the brownie?”

Same response.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “He’s fucked.”

As late as last year, the Himachal Pradesh government was getting really quite pissy about tourists and their drugs. Raids started happening around 2012. Last year, noting that raves cannot be organised “without [the] shelter of bigwigs and political patronage,” the state government, fulminating loudly, did what I believe is called nothing.

The path to Chalal gets steeper and narrower the closer you get to the village. Eventually, it can only be walked, and only with some very sharp intakes of gut can it be traversed both ways at once. In the dark, it’s a hairy operation. Nevertheless, Marty somehow made it there without incident, and ahead of the rest of us. I got the impression that he simply wanted it to be over, and so, keeping his head down, iron-manned it.

There was a band playing Indian rock songs at PoP, which doubles as a hostel, and we sat for a while before heading down to the rave. Down-valley, other hostels, hosting their own parties, had searchlights out, sweeping the skies, while off to our left, on the other side of the river, a constant stream of buses, trucks, cars, and motorcycles could be seen making their way back to Bhuntar, on the road between Kullu and Chandigarh, in the dark. It was still only half past six.

But Dhalha wanted to get down to the rave. We roused Marty from his catatonia and bundled him out into the darkness.

At the bottom of the hill, close to the river’s edge, it was clear that the night was going to be busier than the last. Already there was a queue to get in, hundreds of people, almost exclusively men, forming a characteristically unruly bottleneck at the ticket desk and security check. A sign informed the revellers that drugs and guns were not allowed. Only fifty per cent of this, I assumed, was to be taken seriously.

It was similarly busy inside. When I went to get a drink, the man at the counter, to whom I had complained about the turnout twenty-four hours earlier, grinned at me.

“Are you happier with this evening?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “not happier.”

In a few places, mostly behind the food stalls, people had little fires going, but there were no sources of heating for anyone else. Over the course of the evening, as even the service staff ran out of things to burn, these fires, too, went out. I wasn’t entirely sure how I would make it to midnight without dancing. Dancing, I thought, might warm me. A drone took off a little ahead of us and, making the whirring sound of off-the-shelf drones everywhere, flew over the crowd towards the stage.

This was a genuinely impressive affair, a cross between DJ booth, pagan iconostasis, and ship’s bow. Cartoon sharks flanked a crowning Jolly Roger, while a hole, gaping at the edifice’s centre, sat black and empty where the performers were to appear. Occasionally, flames would shoot from the skull’s head, and always green lasers, fired out from the booth, drew patterns across and over the crowd.

It was difficult not to notice that there were very few women about. But there were two sitting very nearby to where we were, and Jithu elbowed me.

“Pretty girls,” he said.

“Are they? I can’t see their faces in the dark.”

A few more sat with their partners at the reserved tables off to our left. At one point, one of these, a short woman in a pink puffer jacket and even pinker earmuffs, stood up angrily and stormed off towards the dancing. Her partner was on her within seconds and, to the consternation of no one but me, took her violently by the wrist. They exchanged a few words and then he whispered something in her ear. She allowed herself to be led back to the table. He was still gripping her wrist.

“In Australia,” said Jithu, “it is legal for you to marry for sister-in-law, yes?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I said.

On the second to last day of the year, Manu Joseph, author of Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us, wrote a characteristically dark piece about NYE on his Substack:

For most young men in the country, the night of the last year is one of the most torturous nights, only marginally saved by reality-altering substances. At the heart of the chaos they create on the roads—the sudden wildness of their bikes and their readiness to molest—is their unhappy certainty that others of their age are having a very good time. Every year on this night, foreign tourists, who venture into the streets confusing the male laments for the youthful commotion they have seen in better worlds, are assaulted.

There was indeed something pretty grim in the air. I could only rest assured that no foreigners were likely to be assaulted. I was the only foreigner there. Every person I saw, in the five hours I spent at the rave, was Indian. This took me rather more by surprise than the general lack of women. I had been expecting a lot more Jews.

In September, Masha Hassan wrote a good if rather scattershot piece for Brown History about Zionism, Hindutva, and psytrance culture. She quoted the Indian lawyer and researcher Arun Saldanha, who once described the historical whiteness of Goa trance as “viscous,” which is to say “sufficiently porous for all white newcomers to join, [but] solid enough to make it incredibly hard for Indians to penetrate”. In recent years, however, Hassan argued, it has become increasingly Indian-friendly as the Israeli and Indian governments, animated by Zionism, Hindutva, and a shared hatred of Muslims, have become depressingly closer. She further noted that these “fanatical nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms are alarmingly seeping into the spirit of psytrance” itself.

I don’t know enough about the music or its spirit to be able to comment on that claim. But I will agree that there’s no question that Indians are now very much into, and have been allowed access to, psytrance. As for Israelis, though, on both of my visits to the valley, they were pretty much nowhere to be found. The only indication of their frequent patronage was in the cafés of Kasol and Pulga, especially the former’s excellent Evergreen—try the shakshuka—where stickers commemorating October 7, and venerating the IDF, could be seen festooned behind the counter. Across the street, behind a very high fence, was an unlikely but unsurprising outpost of Chabad House. Posters proclaiming the current Lubavitcher leader, Menachem Schneerson, the “Messiah” decorated the fence. I largely kept my big mouth shut, but this was largely because there was no one to whom I might open it.

Saldanha, again quoted by Hassan in her piece, wrote in the Jerusalem Post last year, that

the ongoing conflict in Israel has cast a long shadow over this vibrant cultural exchange, leaving Kasol and its residents in a state of yearning and anticipation, unsure of when they will once again hear Hebrew spoken in the cafes and see familiar faces returning to their cherished retreats in the Parvati valley. […] The residents of Kasol and Dharamkot yearn for the return of their Israeli friends, whose presence has become an integral part of their lives. The cultural symbiosis that flourished in these villages is a testament to the enduring friendship between India and Israel.

I must admit that this rang rather false to me, and not only because Saldanha’s op-ed didn’t actually quote any actually-existing Himachlis. (It could be noted, I suppose, that he is very pro-Israeli, though I think the purple hue of his prose pretty much makes that plain.) I simply assumed that the Israelis were avoiding the cold. Goa has New Year’s Eve parties, too. I later saw plenty of yarmulkes in Pushkar.

Dhalha, having convinced himself that he had convinced me to take Marty home at midnight, which he hadn’t, had been missing for a while. Jithu, happily proclaiming himself to be “so fucking high,” now went off to dance. Marty, who was sitting on a rock on the ground with his head between his legs, kept sitting on a rock on the ground with his head between his legs. I have no idea whether the first act, Belik Boom—an Israeli artist from Jerusalem—had started playing or not, though it wouldn’t have meant much to me either way. I didn’t and don’t understand psytrance music and, for me, there was no discernable difference between the recorded stuff that had been playing when we arrived and the live stuff that started sometime after we had done so. I didn’t hate what I was hearing—bass-forward, very fast, loud but ultimately inoffensive—but its quality as psytrance was beyond me.

It was at this point that I remembered that I had my Kindle on me, which is how I came to spend the next couple of hours minding Marty, sipping vodka and soda water, and reading William Dalrymple’s 1998 book of travel essays, The Age of Kali, as I waited for the year to end.

“As I was told again and again on my travels around the subcontinent,” Dalrymple writes in his introduction:

India is now in the throes of the Kali Yug, the Age of Kali, the lowest possible throw, an epoch of strife, corruption, darkness and disintegration. In the Age of Kali the great gods Vishnu and Shiva are asleep and do not hear the prayers of their devotees. In such an age, normal conventions fall apart: anything is possible.

He proceeds to quote the seventh-century Vishnu Purana:

The kings of the Kali Yug will be addicted to corruption and will seize the property of their subjects, but will, for the most part, be of limited power, rising and falling rapidly. Then property and wealth alone will confer rank; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation. Corruption will be the universal means of subsistence. At the end, unable to support their avaricious kings, the people of the Kali Age will take refuge in the chasms between mountains, they will wear ragged garments, and they will have too many children. Thus in the Kali Age shall strife and decay constantly proceed, until the human race approaches annihilation.

Perhaps I was simply cold and surly, but it all rang pretty true to me. We tend to think of decades as ten-year blocks that share a common digit in the tens column, but it occurred to me then, as I was reading the above, that 2025 was the final year of a ten-year period that began in 2016 with Brexit and the first election of Donald Trump. (Everything, as at least one wag has noted online, started going to shit pretty much as soon as Bowie died.) It has been, as Auden famously put it, a low, dishonest decade, indeed.

People kept streaming in all the while. Nine o’clock, which was when the lock-in started—no one would be allowed back in until three now, if they chose, as I wished to, to leave—and it was getting colder. It wouldn’t snow in Kasol until the following evening, but it was still absolutely frigid. I decided to eat something to warm myself. Assuming that Marty, who hadn’t moved in two hours, would be fine where he was, I wandered over to the street food stall, where all was pandemonium. I had a brief but traumatic Osho flashback when I realised that business was being conducted with vouchers. I paid for mine, elbowed my way into the throng around the stall, and thrust my ticket at a man with a spatula, who threw the former into a small puddle of vegetable oil with about twenty others, where it was quickly soaked through to the point of unreadability.

I spent the next forty minutes waiting for him, or for someone, to make a very basic plate of chicken noodles. I bore the man himself no ill will. He was doing all he could to stay on top of things. I’m sure it can’t have helped to have had the guy next to me shouting at him, over the roar of the waiting customers and the constant doof-doof-doof of the music, what he was making at any given moment.

“Is that fried rice?”

“It’s chow mein.”

“Very nice. And what is that?”

“It is also chow mein.”

“Ah! You are a magician!”

I occasionally elbowed him, harder than was polite, and pretended it was an accident.

By the time I finally got my meal, they had run out of disposable cutlery, and I ate the lukewarm noodles with a napkin, half of which I probably also ate.

Jithu was waiting for me when I got back. Marty was nowhere to be seen. I had a momentary pang of something—guilt, perhaps, or at least of derelict duty—before Jithu smiled and told me that Marty was up again and dancing.

“You must come dancing, too!” he said.

But this isn’t one of those stories, reader. It doesn’t end with me losing myself, or my inhibitions, and suddenly becoming one with the beat. The beat is not, as a rule, something with which I tend to become one. No one was really dancing anyway, except at the very front of the crowd. It was a kind of strange, non-rave version of a rave, with no one in attendance entirely clear what a rave actually entailed. I also didn’t feel like it, and not only because I never feel like it. The simple fact of the matter was that this was a supposedly fun thing I hadn’t even wanted to do the first time, let alone twice in as many nights. It was no more appealing to me than the ashram in Pune, which was basically a rave with a dress code. If anything, the ashram had been more appealing, because it, while sinister, had also been very silly. I don’t know why clubs or raves have never been of interest to me. I don’t know why they have been actively off-putting. You can read writers like Geoff Dyer and McKenzie Wark on rave culture and almost feel, not that missing out on it is some kind of moral failure—that it is morally wrong not to experience new ways of being in your body, in a collective, in the universe—but at least that you’re missing out on a lot of fun. But I always wind up, while pursuing this fun, feeling that fun is something I have elsewhere, doing other things, like reading. Perhaps it’s just a certain antsiness I get when I’m unable to hear myself talk, or think, or when I’m conscious that I have a long walk home along slippery riverside rocks before I can have a hot shower and get into bed. I had wanted to see it, hear it, take some notes, and go home. I was only here, now that those notes had been taken while looking after Marty, because I had nowhere else to be. There was no one to celebrate with on the other side of the river. Even if there had been, there was no longer enough time to get back to them to do so. It was the only time I felt lonely in India and the anonymity of dancing to psytrance—let alone of pretending to like dancing to psytrance—was only going to exacerbate, not ameliorate, that fact. It was already being exacerbated by the date. It had been a bad year for me, too, in the main. I wanted it to be over already.

At a quarter to midnight, I wandered into crowd, sticking to its fringes, moving in and out, a flying fish. By now, I think the second headliner, the Russian artist KinDzaDza, had started. Whoever it was, his sample choices skewed Geriatric Millennial. He spent a full six minutes reworking ‘Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)’, which is a song that, even accounting for nostalgia, doesn’t need that much attention. He moved on to a Bollywood number before switching, with only a minute or so to go, to a high-octane version of the Shiv Tandava Stotram, a devotional hymn dedicated to Lord Shiva in his Tandava aspect. This is the Shiva, my favourite of the Hindu deities, who performs the dance that ends creation in order that it might begin anew. It seemed a fitting choice for the moment, especially given that—ten, nine—we were about to relegate—six, five—the year we had just endured—two, one—to the pyre.

The fireworks went off startlingly close, directly above us, shooting skywards from the death’s-mask stage. In some cases, bits of burning carboard tubing hit the ground near the shirtless dancers closest to the front, causing them to startle like colts. I found that I was finally smiling, especially as I had my wristband removed and made my way out into the cold of the night and the first fledgling moments of this already terrible new year.

A little over a week later, having spent most of my time in the interim in Udaipur, that Rajasthani Venice to the south, I found myself back in Pushkar, my last stop on the way to Jaipur and the literature festival there. In that time, Trump had kidnapped Maduro, Albanese had initiated an entirely ludicrous Royal Commission into antisemitism, and the pro-Israel lobby had successfully caused the board of Adelaide Writers’ Week to cancel the appearance of Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah, leading more than one hundred and eighty writers, by the time everything was over, to cancel their own in protest. (It’s perhaps worth going back and rereading my piece about Australian cultural programming relative to that of Ubud and Jaipur.)

After being forced to take yet another private car, on the grounds that, as I put it on Instagram, absolutely nothing in India works as it should, I received a characteristically defensive message from someone I’ve never met, accusing me of only ever focusing on India’s negatives. I agree wholeheartedly with the narrator of Hillary Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, who says that “I’m not one of those people who think that when you go to a foreign country you must leave your judgment at home,” and I told my random interlocutor to get back to me when he’s fixed Delhi’s air. But his point was probably valid, to a point. Because of my journalistic career, I tend to home in on the negative or appalling at the expensive of the amusing or delightful.

That was difficult in Pushkar, where I was amused and delighted much of the time. I stayed in the same haveli I have always stayed in, a rundown old place without reliable hot water, where, the moment I walked in, I was greeted with a rousing: “Mr Matthew! I see your name on the booking and I say, ‘He’s back! My best customer!’” (I’m sure he says that to all the girls.) On the Sunday before the festival began, after a few brief voice memos, I also caught up with Suresh, the cameleer I met in February last year. Suresh had some chores he needed to do and wanted to know whether I’d like to do them with him.

We didn’t take the camel this time. Instead, Suresh picked me up on his motorcycle and we spent the day riding around the Ajmeri countryside, picking up camel feed and ingredients for folk remedies.

We began, though, with a visit to the Aloo Baba, a godman from Varanasi who has been living at a Shaivite temple on the edge of Pushkar, subsisting on aloo, or potatoes, for the past thirty years. The temple itself is a small cave above the Baba’s dwelling, where a modest lingam sits at the centre of a circle consisting of Nandi, Ganesh, Brahma, and Parvati. At the back of the cave, painted the customary orange, a secondary shrine to Hanuman, here in blob form, has been erected in a natural recess. But the Baba is the main attraction. A sprightly, bearded, mischievous-eyed eighty-two-year-old with surprisingly good English, he told me why a diet of potatoes is perfect for a holy man such as himself.

“One eating, one focus,” he said. “One eating, one focus, because much different, different eating, mind different, different, different going. Control. My life God, my life control. Much food, much problem.”

We only spent a little time with him, Suresh touching his feet in supplication, me filming and asking him questions like a jerk, before heading off with our to-do list. We had to see a man about a camel.

The camel trader’s place was in Nooriyawas, about twenty-five kilometres out of town. He was a chubby little man with a full Rajput moustache and jewelled earrings in his large puffy lobes, sitting on a metal charpoy chain-smoking cheroots. I have written about animal welfare in Pushkar before, particularly as it relates to camel tourism, and I can’t say that the man’s back yard filled me with a great deal of confidence. While Suresh inspected a handsome camel with a Krishna trident painted in henna on its back right haunch, I gave my attention, instead, to a white horse with a bag of feed tied over its muzzle, which it seemed to me it wanted to remove but couldn’t. Every time the bag failed to come loose with a shake, the horse continued to eat, a four-legged foie gras goose, doubtless under the misapprehension that if, it finished the bag’s contents, the bag itself may suddenly disappear from its face. The man was asking ₹40,000, a little over $650, for the camel, which Suresh said was more than he could afford. (I later sent him ₹10,000, or about $160, to buy a different, cheaper animal, which is a roundabout way of admitting that I am now the world’s most unlikely owner of half a camel.)

I was struck, as I always am in India, by how poor things get outside of the big towns, and by how quickly they do so. I was also struck, as again I always am, by how foreign they become. We passed a young man riding a buffalo, and a young girl fording an algae-green stream with a stick nearly twice her height, and as we entered Picholiya, a little nearer to town, I was struck by the sight of a woman in the ghoonghat shoveling gravel on a worksite with men.

We had come to Picholiya to buy camel feed, and also to pick up half a dozen eggs. Suresh’s father had recently broken his arm, and the family had been told that, were he to drink five raw eggs mixed with milk and yoghurt, this would do much to aid the healing process. I nodded dumbly.

The elderly woman from whom we were buying these products was in the process of drying out turmeric roots on three large mats she had draped over charpoys. Between making us chai and chasing the goats away with a stick, she mostly spent her time flirting with me.

“I once brought a British woman here on a camel tour,” said Suresh, “and the woman took a nap for an hour. She,” he nodded at the squat, lascivious little lady sitting opposite me, “says that, if you want to lie down, she would be happy to lie with you.”

I must have registered some surprise at this, because the woman erupted in laughter. Later, she asked me whether I was married and, when I said I was divorced, erupted in laughter again and muttered something unseemly.

“What was that?” I asked.

Suresh laughed.

“She says that is perfect,” he said.

While the fields of the area were all neatly cultivated, saris hanging on poles at regular intervals in the Rajasthani approximation of scarecrows, the roads were uniformly terrible. In some places, they consisted of little more than deep sand. Last year, I watched all four of the McGregor-Boorman Long Way shows. It was an experience that taught me, firstly, how easy it is to go down in such conditions, even without me weighing down the backend of your bike, and, secondly, how much I think I’d dislike McGregor were I to meet him. (For example, in the second season, he completely discards Boorman in order to ride through large tracts of Africa with his then-wife, then never mentions his first family again after Mary Elizabeth Winstead comes along. It all sat very awkwardly with me, though I suspect that binging my way straight through might have had something to do with the sense of whiplash.) The first of these lessons was more pertinent here, but at no point did I think it strange that neither Suresh or myself were wearing helmets. No one else we saw riding bikes were, either, and it all seemed perfectly natural not to. What didn’t seem perfectly natural, if the looks we were getting were anything to go by, was me, and I was reminded, the way I have been in parts of Gujarat and Bihar in the past, that the most foreign thing about the experience was me. But not once did I nod at someone—some turbaned old man or young buck on a Royal Enfield—and not receive a respectful, if confused, nod in return.

I met some of Suresh’s family last year, though his older daughters had been at school that day and we’d missed them. This time, when we arrived with fresh chicken to cook up for lunch—my shout—it was a Sunday afternoon, and everyone was there. Suresh’s father sat in dirty white pyjamas and a bright blue plaster cast on the charpoy perpendicular to my own, white-bearded and impossibly old-looking. It turned out he was fifty-five. This shouldn’t have surprised me—Suresh is two years younger than me and looks about ten years older—but once again I found I was surprised. The kids, the youngest of whom had shot up in the eleven months since I’d last seen them, played around us. The two boys had come up with an ingenious game in which they tied their shoes to pieces of string, which they attempted to throw over the washing line. The younger one was incapable of this and took instead to swinging his sandal around over his head, hitting everyone, including himself, in the face.

I was continuously fed throughout the cooking process so that, by the time the meal was actually ready, I had already eaten quite a sizable amount of chicken. I had been expecting this, as it happened last time as well, and I insisted that the children be fed first. When the girls declined to eat before me, I insisted again.

“Tell them,” I said, “that rules are made to be broken.”

I have no idea whether Suresh actually said this, but the girls blushed and did, flabbergasted, eat with us, and even posed for photos with the rest of the kids at the end of the meal.

In the Rajasthan section of The Age of Kali, Dalrymple paints a picture of a deeply conservative rural population, of a type that often says one thing to outsiders before continuing on its ancient, some would say backwards, ways in private. In particular, he writes about an infamous case of sati, or widow self-immolation, that took place a little north of Jaipur in the early 1990s. I wasn’t going to ask about that, not least because the case is nearly forty years old and the book more than twenty-five, but I was interested to know what the future held in store for Suresh’s daughters. Would they go to university? I asked.

“Yes, I hope so, very much,” said Suresh.

And marriage? Would that be arranged for them?

“Yes.”

It didn’t seem worthy of asking why, or whether that was the best idea. Even as we were riding back into town, I imagined Suresh’s father, sitting up on his charpoy, reluctantly glugging down a concoction that the family believed would heal his broken bone.

We walked back to Sunset Point together, taking our shoes off at one end of Ram Bridge and putting them back on at the other, and when we got to the place where he picked me up that morning, on the shore on Pushkar Lake, we embraced.

I can see, as I read the above back to myself, that I have once again failed to refrain from the negative, that I have again failed to leave my judgement at home.

But I can also see, in a way I hope you can, too, the love and urge to understand that keeps me going back to India, and that always, now, renders me unwilling to leave. I had a little less than two weeks left in the country on the day I spent doing chores with Suresh, most of which I spent at the festival. I didn’t want that time to end, and I didn’t want to get on the plane when it did, even if absolutely nothing works there as I believe it should.

“When you are here next, they will be even older,” Suresh said, nodding at the boys as they accidentally hit one another in the head with their shoes.

It meant more to me than I knew how to tell him that he never so much as questioned my return.

I arrived back in the mountains on Saturday, fully packed and prepared for a white Christmas. Unfortunately, snow seems very unlikely. Himachal Pradesh, it turns out, is recording one of its driest Decembers on record, with large tracts of the state receiving no measurable rain or snowfall at all. On the day I arrived, Shimla, the one-time summer capital of the British Raj, was a balmy nineteen degrees. By the time I had walked out to the former Viceregal Lodge, I was sweating almost must as much as I had been after trekking to Kheerganga a month ago.

Getting to Shimla was something of a nightmare. I was once again reminded why, in the main, planning anything here is pointless. After a wonderful final evening in Delhi with Sam Dalrymple and some of his friends—an eclectic line-up of writers, filmmakers, and other gadabouts—I arrived at the railway station at six in the morning, only to learn that my train to Kalka had been delayed by several hours. I had been hoping to take the famed Himalayan Queen from Kalka into the hills, and in order to make my connection there ordered an expensive inter-city Uber. We arrived fifteen minutes too late. As a result, I hired another car to take me the remainder of the way, only to get lost, several times, in the winding roads leading into the city, a system that to my mind suggested five or six rollercoasters built haphazardly on top of one another. I went to bed almost as soon as I checked in.

Getting to Shimla has never been easy. In his short story ‘The Other Man’, collected in Plain Tales from the Hills, Rudyard Kipling describes a particularly miserable journey:

Sitting back on the back seat, very square and firm, with one hand on the awning stanchion and the wet pouring off his hat and moustache, was the Other Man—dead. The sixty-mile uphill jolt had been too much for his valve, I suppose. The tonga driver said, “This Sahib died two stages out of Solon. Therefore, I tied him with a rope, lest he should fall out by the way, and so came to Simla. Will the Sahib give me bukshish? It,” pointing to the Other Man, “should have given one rupee.”

I paid several thousand times more than that, but at least I made it up here alive.

Shimla has historically been a walker’s city. In Kipling’s day, military men and their wives, or someone else’s, would promenade along The Ridge each evening, strolling down to Scandal Point, from which the Maharaja of Patiala, Bhupinder Singh, is said to have eloped with the daughter of a British Viceroy, giving the spot its name. Even today, Mall Road remains packed, especially at the moment, in the lead up to the city’s Winter Carnival, which begins this evening. The Ridge, which sits at the top of town, has been in a state of furious preparation since my arrival, with food stalls and a central bandstand going up opposite the creamy-yellow Christ Church, which, in the evenings, has glittered with Christmas fairy lights.

Of course, it’s only a walker’s city to a point. It long ago burst its Raj-era levees and began cascading down the slopes into the valley. Even in the old days, you really needed a horse to get around. Now, you need to stay near one of the town’s lifts, or else a road that isn’t closed to traffic, if you wish to go anywhere that requires even the slightest change in your overall elevation. (The Jakhu Ropeway, which takes you to the temple at the top of Jakhu Hill, is an enjoyable alternative to these options, though the temple is lousy with Rhesus macaques and hulking great Hanuman langurs, neither of which know fear and thus, in me, have a tendency to inspire it.) The alternative is to trek up and down the city’s slopes, some gentle, others vertiginous. If you make the same mistake that I did, and wind up in a hotel that’s unreachable except by means of a flight of near-vertical stone steps, you’d better have strong calf and thigh muscles. I have neither.

I was nevertheless glad that I walked out to the Viceregal Lodge, today known as the Rashtrapati Niwas and home to the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, on my first morning in town. Perched atop Observatory Hill, an hour’s walk from The Ridge, the building is a grand, self-consciously imperial affair, built of grey stone in the Jacobethan style, the sort of pompous and imposing thing one erects to imply that one’s rule is forever. The interior, with its impressive wooden panelling and pilasters, hewn from teak, cedar, and walnut, is equally grave.

But what really brings one here is the history: the Lodge was the site of both the 1945 Simla Conference, which Lord Wavell convened “to ease the present political situation and to advance India towards her goal of full self-government,” and the 1946 Cabinet Mission conference, which sought to do much the same thing. Neither conference was a success, all but ensuring the horrors of Partition. Besides the remarkable photographic history of that time, which lines the walls today—photos of a prim, very serious-looking Nehru, the towering figure of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the clean-shaven, cigar-puffing Jinnah in his perfectly-tailored suits, and Gandhi, who was in town for the 1945 conference but not a participant in it—what really takes your breath away is to be told that it was at this small, round, entirely unprepossessing table that British India was, in the end, torn asunder.

Delhi is even less of a pedestrian city than Shimla, though that didn’t stop me, stupidly, from treating it like one, especially when I arrived in India in November.

It’s not that there aren’t parts of Delhi—a city I still don’t know very well, but that I am at least beginning to get a minor handle on—that can’t be walked in something like comfort. The Lodhi Gardens are a stroller’s paradise. The alleyways of Old Delhi have been made to be explored on foot. Chandni Chowk is literally a pedestrian street for twelve hours a day and Khan Market is a small bubble of money around which one can do laps to get one’s steps in. The problem is getting between these places, traversing the liminal and non-spaces of the city, which, being an idiot, I also largely did on foot. I have spent a lot of time lurking around beneath underpasses.

It’s not as though the locals don’t do it. While I don’t go as far as those who jump bollards on the Grand Trunk Road—mad props to the Muslim women in full veil I saw pulling that off a couple of weeks ago—I have joined the huddled masses trying to cross it at more sensible places.

I learned how to cross Asian roads in Saigon, where the rule is to look straight ahead and let the traffic swarm around you. That will get you killed in Delhi. In Delhi, you really need to be a cow—it would be a major faux pas for a driver to hit you—or at least to have the panoramic vision of one. There is a trick to determining, within a split second or so, which wall of bikes and autos and trucks and buses is your most immediate threat, and another to walking into and navigating that threat while fleetingly checking other oncoming walls.

The real problem, though, and the real physical risk to one’s health as a pedestrian in Delhi, is the air. A fifteen-kilometre walk through Delhi, which is not an uncommon undertaking for me, is akin to a two-pack-a-day habit at the moment. Over the past two months, Delhi’s Air Quality Index (AQI) repeatedly deteriorated into the “very poor” to “severe” range. Next to nothing has been done about it—except, for example, to ban coal- and wood-fired tandoors, as though the city’s chicken and roti consumption were to blame—and in general the approach to the problem has been to downplay or deny the extent of it. Earlier this month, the government said that the World Health Organisation’s air quality guidelines weren’t binding, and claimed that its own are sufficient, which they aren’t. A few days later, it claimed there was no data proving a direct correlation between AQI levels and lung-related illnesses or deaths. (In fact, according to the Air Quality Life Index at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, air pollution is shortening the life expectancy of Delhi residents by about twelve years. Another study, by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, found that one in seven deaths in Delhi in 2023 was linked to air pollution.) A planned debate on the crisis in parliament, which had been scheduled to take place before it wrapped up its winter session on Friday, was scrapped because of the “bad atmosphere” between the parties.

The bad atmosphere, you say? You couldn’t make it up.

One morning a couple of weeks ago, I went out to the ruins of the former Tughlaq citadel, the Feroz Shah Kotla, which was built around 1354. The visibility on the roads was nil: everyone was relying exclusively on their horns and on the brake lights of the vehicle in front of them. I wasn’t wearing a mask and should have been. You could have cut the atmosphere like cake.

Unlike some other sights I have visited on this trip, addressing a number of long-standing blindspots—the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, Tughlaqabad Fort, Nizamuddin, and others—the citadel was completely deserted but for a few young couples, shying away from prying eyes. The dead, I thought, felt very close, however properly ruined these ruins were.

I rather suspect that the air had something to do with it. It certainly added to the ghostliness of the place. Aside from the clandestine lovers, the only figures I could make out amongst the centuries-old granite belonged to women whom, I assume because it’s an easy way of generating employment for people, walked about the lawns, not raking them, but sweeping them with brooms. They did so in utter silence. The citadel’s mosque, which was apparently the model for one that Timur later had built in Samarkand, is in ruins, too, but despite this remains in use today—a little sign beside the mihrab advertised the daily prayer times—nearly seven hundred years after it was built and six hundred after the Tughlaqs fell.

In City of Djinns, Dalrymple refers to Delhi as “a city whose different ages lay suspended side by side as in aspic,” which is in some cases literally true. Later that morning, I walked from the Feroz Shah Kotla to the Purana Quila, a mere three kilometres down the road but two whole centuries along in the city’s history. For the moment, though, I merely stood in the silence and listened out for ghosts.

One appeared, or for a moment seemed to. But it turned out that the man was alive. He entered the mosque’s courtyard and sat close to the mihrab. I don’t know whether he was praying or merely visiting.

So eerily close, I thought again. So eerily close, the dead.

If treating Delhi as a pedestrian city is physically dangerous in more ways than one, it proved especially dangerous three days after I left in November, when a car bomb went off outside the Red Fort in Old Delhi, a ten-minute walk from where I was staying near Kashmere Gate. At least fifteen people were killed and more than twenty injured.

The bombing was immediately politicised. Within hours, the usual suspects were framing the attack to suit their pre-existing narratives, hurling accusations at one another and opportunistically assigning blame. The attack became less an event to be understood, or even a crime to be solved, than a weapon to be wielded.

This is nothing new in India. In the wake of the 2019 Pulwama attack, which I wrote about in an updated introduction to my 2018 Kashmir series when The Daily Beast republished it in response to events, “[t]he Indian media, up to and including ostensibly liberal journalists like Barkha Dutt, devolved […] into an unthinking, bloodthirsty rabble. Bollywood actors, who have only ever played at war, became all-too-willing mongers for it.” Despite the fact that the attacker was from Indian-administered Kashmir—as was the suspect in November’s car bombing—the Modi government blamed Pakistan for harbouring terrorists and, for the first time since 1971, the two countries engaged in dogfights over the Line of Control. For whatever reason, the government was less willing to directly blame Islamabad in the wake of the November bombing, perhaps because, this time around, there wasn’t an election on the line. In 2019, some members of the BJP actually wondered aloud in the press how many seats their brief war might net them at the ballot box.

The attack in Bondi a little over a week ago killed fifteen people, too, and left more than forty injured. The emotional response, the shock and grief, is more than understandable, not least because Australia isn’t really used to such things. Our last real terror attack was the Lindt Café siege more than a decade ago. Our last mass shooting took place in Port Arthur in 1996, and led to such remarkably successful gun law reforms that, not only did we convince ourselves that something like this could never happen in Australia again, we actively lorded it over the US—correctly—whenever it happened there. There is also a justifiable sense of shame at the idea that, as my friend Jack noted in his heartfelt dispatch from Bondi last weekend, the single largest attack on Jews since October 7 should have taken place on Australian soil.

And not only on Australian soil. Indeed, I suspect the psychic wound is all the deeper for having been inflicted in Bondi, which is as iconic, to many Australians, as the bridge, the Opera House, or the rock. (Not to me, though. I don’t have much time for Bondi, which embodies, in a single suburb, a lot of what is most grotesque about Sydney. But that’s obviously an argument for another day.) Whether iconographic significance was part of the attackers’ plans, or simply unhappy coincidence, I have no idea, but there’s no getting around the fact that the idea of the beach in general, and of this beach in particular, carries a lot of symbolic weight in Australia, both positive and negative. (Let’s not forget that Australia’s most notorious modern race riots were also a seaside affair.) It will be interesting to see how Bondi bounces back, and how long that takes. I have been to Ground Zero, both when it was a crater and since, as well as to Port Arthur, and even now, so many years later, these places have an unsettling quality about them that they seem unlikely to ever fully shake. Eerily close, even now.

The cross-cultural, multi-faith vigils and gatherings that have taken place since the shooting are obviously an argument in favour of hope. Almost everything else that has happened, though, has been an argument against it. What happened in India a month ago has happened, on steroids, back home. The Liberal Party, the political wing of the Murdoch media empire, has taken the shooting as an opportunity to wheel out its immigration policies from a quarter of a century ago. (I thought it telling that, prior to his outing as a Syrian Muslim, the hero of Bondi, Ahmed al-Ahmed, was widely reported as being a Maronite Christian.) The pro-Israel lobby, which never saw a horror it didn’t try to either exploit or erase, depending on the faith of the deceased, has doubled down on its absurd claims that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are one and the same thing. (Some of Australia’s most outspoken anti-Zionists, like my friends Antony Loewenstein, Na’ama Carlin, and Claire Wright are Jewish.) Any attempt to inject context into the debate—such as by observing the ideological character of the Hannukah event that was the target of the shooting, as Guy Rundle has done in daring to breath the word “Chabad”—is to be condemned as antisemitic. (If the Muslim Brotherhood were to hold an iftar event at, say, Bronte, people would lose their goddamned minds.)

The Labor Party, always keen to be squarely framed by the Overton window even as its opponents pull the thing ever further to the right, has unfortunately bought into the most transparently fallacious and silly reading of the shooting: that a man and his son were inspired by peaceful marches in Australian cities, and by university students spouting platitudinous slogans, to join the Islamic State and carry out mass murder. As a result, the government has said it will adopt the draconian, entirely pro-Israel recommendations of the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, which would make it a hate crime for me to write and publish a piece like this one. I was deeply troubled by photos from the day after the shooting, which showed mourners at Bondi draped, not in the Australian flag, but the Israeli one. But it would only be a couple of days before the Labor Party was effectively draping its policies in the same. If the first group needs better symbols, then the second needs stronger backbones.

Unsurprisingly, the one group that seems to have behaved with any decency or decorum, besides that noble segment of the Jewish community that has explicitly asked that its grief not be politicised, is the pro-Palestinian movement, perhaps because it has some familiarity with wanton slaughter and the pain that attends it. While many Zionists decided to sit out sitting shiva in order to get to work ensuring that Australian and Israeli policy be made to have as little sunlight between them as possible, most anti-Zionists of my acquaintance expressed nothing but grief, and then mostly in private, until it became obvious what was coming down the pike at us, at which point defending freedom of speech became something of a necessity, not to mention a matter of self-preservation.

I have attended some of the pro-Palestine marches that have taken place over the past two years. I didn’t cross the bridge, because it was raining and I am lazy, but I can safely say, from my experience of such events, that no one in attendance was there for reasons of Jew-hatred. A lot of them were Jewish themselves. Even more were Aboriginal Australians, perhaps the single greatest example we have on our continent of a group that understands the meaning of the word “solidarity”. The vast majority of Muslim Australians were there with their kids. No one wanted to see Jewish children shot up. They wanted Palestinian children to stop getting shot up. These are the people who are now being accused of inspiring and encouraging terrorism.

Any crackdown against freedom of speech or assembly will almost certainly go ignored. It seems pretty obvious that people are going to keep saying what they’ve been saying since the genocide began—namely, that it should end—and that eventually the government will learn that it cannot imprison or fine everyone who does so. Even if it tries to, which it won’t, what it and the pro-Israel lobby are likely to find is that marches and placards and university students weren’t the problem in the first place. When the next large-scale horror comes, in the absence of these things, which it will, they may be forced to reckon with the idea that the greatest threat to Jews worldwide, and the greatest driver of antisemitic feeling, is not Aboriginal solidarity, or a young Gender Studies student in a keffiyeh, but the actions of the Jewish state.

Since the Bondi shooting on December 14, at least fifteen people have been killed in Gaza, including a baby who was among those murdered when Israeli forces struck a school that was housing displaced people. This brings the number of Palestinian casualties since the ceasefire went into effect in October to somewhere around four hundred.

Five or so years ago, in the wake of a break-up, I started listening to the History of Literature podcast. It was a comfort to me during a difficult time, to hear about Jane Austen and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I think I wound up listening to something like two hundred episodes in a row, in chronological order. It became a little less interesting to me the longer it went on, especially once its format changed, and I nearly gave up entirely when they finally covered an Australian author and it was—Patrick White? Christina Stead? Gerald Murnane? Shirley Hazzard?—no, Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words. As far as literary podcasts go, I spend most of my time with The Secret Life of Books these days. I like the cut of their jib.

But I have taken to adopting one of the former podcast’s traditions: the reading, preferably aloud, of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ on Christmas Eve. (The idea is actually to read a story from Dubliners every day in the lead-up to Christmas Eve, culminating in ‘The Dead’, though I’ve never tried it.)

In a couple of hours, I will be heading off to Wildflower Hall, originally the site of Lord Kitchener’s summer home, to attend a Christmas Eve dinner for which I am paying too much money. But before I do so—as soon as I publish this piece, actually—I will be sitting down with the story again. It is the only tradition I will be keeping this year, so far from home—and it not even snowing—and thinking of my family. A little something to keep me tethered. I suggest you read it, too, or have it read to you, or perhaps even watch John Huston’s film version.

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The grift begins at nine

The Welcome Centre at the Osho International Meditation Resort in Pune is an open-air affair, a series of low wooden benches, arranged in lines as at a bus station, besides a little manmade pond on the edge of which sits a Buddha statue, mute, still, and beatific. When I arrived a little before nine in the morning, only two other men, both Indian, were waiting. The three of us wore civilian garb. It was clear from the outset that the resort is something of an oasis, even in Koregaon Park, which is itself something of an oasis in the broader context of Pune. The word that came to mind, as I looked beyond the pond through the trees at the figures milling about in maroon robes, was lush, or, perhaps, moneyed.

One of my fellow would-be sannyasins made the mistake of taking a photograph of the pond. Moments later, a blonde Dutchwoman, somewhere in her early sixties and dressed entirely in maroon, appeared out of nowhere and asked him, not so politely, to delete it. Then she turned to me.

I was there to do research for the novel. One of my three protagonists, Catherine, comes to Pune after attending a hen’s party in Goa and gets her arm bent into visiting the ashram. But when the woman, Vayu, asked me what I was doing there, I simply said that I wanted a day pass, which was also true. She asked if I had ever meditated before and I said that I hadn’t, but that I had seen some of the Osho meditations online. This was also true, but only in a vague sense. I had seen some of the more confrontational passages from Wolfgang Dobrowolny’s Ashram in Poona, which are excerpted in Maclain and Chapman Way’s Wild, Wild Country, as well as some more genteel stuff on the ashram-turned-resort’s Instagram account.

Vayu, which is obviously not her real or legal name, led me to a computer and began the registration process. My photo was taken the way photos are taken at passport control the world over, and, indeed, I did feel a little, in that moment, as though I were entering a sovereign microstate. Once upon a time, this process included an HIV test. I’m not sure whether this has been discontinued, or whether it’s no longer required for day-tripping rubberneckers like myself on the grounds that there’s probably not enough time, between meditations, for us to get laid. But either way I was not subjected to this. I was coming in with an open mind, so answered as much as I could with as much candour as I could muster. Vayu marked down what I would need in the way of money on a little paper checklist and took it with me across the marble waiting area to the pay counter.

There are no cash transactions inside the resort. One instead purchases vouchers—little grids of fives and tens on cardboard, representing rupees, which are struck off with sharpies whenever one pays for anything—with different vouchers, annoyingly, used to pay for different things. These cards state explicitly that you’ve not actually purchased anything. You have made a “donation.” This rather makes me wonder if the arcane system—which, I learned later, isn’t even strictly followed—is not in fact some kind of tax dodge. The Osho International Foundation is based, you will be unsurprised to learn, in Zurich. I was taken next to buy, or rather redeem, my robes.

The campus is split in two, so we crossed the street and passed through the security checkpoint on the other side. There are bollards on the approach to the resort from either direction, causing autorickshaws to slow and slalom for a bit before heading on their way. The campus is impeccably maintained and I remarked to Vayu that I thought it was very pretty.

“It is the most beautiful place in the world,” she said.

I laughed and said, “I mean, let’s not go nuts,” but then looked at her and realised that she had been serious and that I had committed some grave offence.

She left me at the Osho Galleria and told me to return to the Welcome Centre when I had picked out my threads. I chose my maroon robe for the day and my white one for the evening. Neither was a very flattering fit. I had additionally made a terrible mistake in wearing Blundstone boots and black socks, because neither robe came down past my shins. I looked, I thought, ridiculous. Luckily, most of the time I would be meditating, and wouldn’t be wearing footwear.

In order to rent a locker for the day, I was told that I needed my ID card, which was still being processed back at the Welcome Centre, so I walked across the street in my day robes and immediately got told that I had to remove my jeans. No outside clothing, aside from underwear and footwear, is allowed except in the prescribed colours. I took my card, walked across the street again, went again through the security checkpoint, got my locker, and did as I was told. It wasn’t yet ten and I had already seen the more authoritarian side of the place play out twice. For a cult that preaches individualism above all things, it has a fierce fascist streak.

Flogging a dead horse

I’m not going to give you too much history about Chandra Mohan Jain, the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, Osho. If you haven’t already seen Wild, Wild Country, I suggest you do so. The history of his cult, both in Pune in the 1970s and, disastrously, in Oregon in the 1980s, is explored at length, albeit only at the level of events, without too much critical engagement with its ideas. There is next to no discussion or explanation of the Bhagwan’s actual beliefs—perhaps unsurprising, given he was a grifter who made things up as he went along, meaning it might have been difficult to do so with any great consistency—and nearly nothing at all about the cynical monetisation of his legacy following his death in 1990. (We are told that he has published some six hundred books, almost all of which are versions of his transcribed lectures, cut and pasted into multiple theme-based volumes. There are loony people out there who own all of them.)

A talented if unconventional philosophy lecturer, his critiques of organised religion, socialism, morality, and Gandhi gained him a following among the growing Indian middle-class in the late 1960s. Later, sensing an opportunity in the form of the thousands of Westerners flowing into India on the hippie trail, cashed up and disaffected, he added meditation, tantra, sexual libertinism, and anti-authoritarian social commentary to the mix. The latter of these was pretty hypocritical, given the countless rules his people were expected to follow, but then he was, as I say, inconsistent. I really wished I was wearing my jeans.

In 1974, he established the ashram in Pune, which combined intense encounter-group therapies (in which people were encouraged to strip down and attack one another like dogs), Dynamic Meditation (which involved them jumping around and screaming nonsense at six in the morning), and permissive attitudes toward sex and relationships (which later became so permissive that followers allowed him to arrange marriages between them so that he could commit large-scale immigration fraud). As Jordan Peterson has learned, without ever going quite so far as describing himself as a god, exerting power over unthinking rubes is very lucrative. I suspect it is also a lot of fun. At the beginning of Wild, Wild Country, Ma Anand Sheela, who eventually committed a bioterrorism attack on her enemies in Oregon, rather tellingly admits that meditation was never really her cup of tea. She was just very good at selling it. The acolytes who remain still are, though their interest in taking over the world, or even in changing it, appears to have long since taken a backseat to simply keeping the money coming in.

The Rajneeshpuram experiment in Oregon ended in a series of rolling, self-inflicted disasters, almost all of which were rooted in the deep-seated superiority complex that caused them to think they could get away with literal murder. In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes of his own experiences in Pune, which he visited while filming a 1981 BBC documentary. He says:

They may think they are leaving the realm of despised materialism, but they are still being asked to put their reason to sleep, and to discard their minds along with their sandals. […] I would say that the people of Antelope, Oregon, missed being as famous as Jonestown by a fairly narrow margin.

According to Wild, Wild Country, there was definitely fear of this among certain Rajneeshees themselves. Luckily, Oregon collapsed before the Bhagwan could order the self-slaughter. Unsurprisingly, his own self-preservation came first.

He returned to Pune in 1987 and did the ashram up as a resort, toning down the more violent and rapey elements of his earlier offerings. He rebranded himself as Osho, a term, derived from Japanese Buddhism, meaning a figure deserving of “deep respect and gratitude,” which is kind of like me calling myself “awesome writer” and insisting that you call me that, too. It was only slightly better than “Bhagwan”, which literally means “God” or “Lord,” but not by much. Following his death, control passed to the Osho International Foundation, which oversees his publications, copyrights, and properties, and which has struggled to maintain internal coherence as his people have bickered among themselves over who gets to control the money.

I can’t remember where I was in India when I first encountered the Bhagwan’s work—I assume it was either Varanasi or Rishikesh, most likely in a hostel library—but I remember flipping through it and knowing that he would wind up being part of the novel. The book I countered, The Goose is Out!, the title of which comes from a Zen koan, was precisely the sort of meaningless pap that Westerners get high on over here. After a bit of a meaningless preamble, it begins:

A great philosophical official, Riko, once asked the strange Zen Master, Nansen, to explain to him the old koan of the goose in the bottle.

“If a man puts a gosling into a bottle,” said Riko, “and feeds him until he is full-grown, how can the man get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle?”

Nansen gave a great clap with his hands and shouted, “Riko!”

“Yes, Master,” said the official with a start.

“See,” said Nansen, “the goose is out!”

It is only a question of seeing, it is only a question of becoming alert, awake, it is only a question of waking up. The goose is in the bottle if you are in a dream. The goose has never been in the bottle if you are awake.

In Australia, we sometimes use the word “goose” to refer to an idiot or silly person, and I would thus like to think that, the moment the Bhagwan abandoned his followers to save his own skin, the goose really was out. But it turns out that, in the main, the geese are still very much in. In Wild, Wild Country, the last mayor of Rajneeshpuram, Philip Toelkes, cries whenever he speaks of the Bhagwan. (He is contrasted with Australian Jane Stork, who went to prison for attempted murder in the Bhagwan’s name, who says she felt nothing when he died.) There are plenty of Toelkes still about. You can tell them because they’re not wearing resort-bought robes but fitted, flattering, bespoke affairs, down to and including their footwear. When I first came to Pune in 2018, I noticed some of these people going about. It was only by surreptitiously following them that I realised that there was an ashram around the corner dedicated to the Goose is Out! man.

As with Kheerganga, but with a far greater sense of trepidation and annoyance, I realised I’d eventually have to visit it myself were I to be able to write about it. Interestingly, when I went back over my first draft last week, I realised that I’d gotten a great deal of the vibe right without having ever set a foot inside. I didn’t nail the resort’s landscape, which was understandable, but the creepier stuff was all pretty much accurate. I had leaned hard into the cult side of things.

Freedom is slavery

When I finally sorted everything out with my clothes and locker, I was shown to the Multiversity, which is basically an information centre where you learn even more rules you are expected to follow.

The other two guys from the Welcome Centre were already halfway through their induction when I was shown to a computer of my own. The video started with a really out-of-place Country song about the resort, performed by Americans with southern drawls and very limited musical talents. Then the monetary system was explained. Then the meditations were.

Before I got too far into this, Raj rocked up. Raj is a British-Indian fellow from Bath who was in India to visit his sick mother in Mumbai. He sounds uncannily like Sashi Tharoor, and has the same air of insouciance about him. I liked him immediately. He had listened to the Bhagwan’s lectures before, and rather like some of what they’d had to say, so wanted to see what was what. This is not uncommon. My friend Suraj, who lives in Pune, had told me that he liked the discourses a good deal, too. But it was also clear that Raj was finding the whole thing very silly. Like me, he was keen to at least try to take the day seriously, but neither of us had enjoyed registration very much and both of us were already beginning to have thoughts. It was nice to be able to express them to one another. For his benefit, I rewound the video, though not so far that he’d have to endure the song. (He has since complained to me about this, as though I had denied something else to annoyed about, and for this I can only insist that I am not sorry for a reason.)

We had about forty-five minutes after we were done before the next meditation session was due to begin. There are several spots on-site that serve as both smoking areas and places where you can use your phone. These spaces were naturally packed, both with smokers and, hilariously, people on laptops, replying to work emails. But nobody really spoke to one another, unless they were already together or, like Raj and me, wanted to bitch. There was a buzzsaw going somewhere on the grounds, making sustained contemplation difficult.

We wandered back across the road, where the meditation hall was waiting for us. I said I had to go to my locker, which I would do throughout the day, primarily to take notes in my phone. (Given I couldn’t use it anywhere else, it seemed pointless to carry it around with me.) The hall itself is an amazing pyramidal structure—not entirely unlike the one on US banknotes, with its all-seeing Eye of Providence—that you reach along a thin walkway over another manmade pond. Its colours are all dark, but shade upwards, creating tiers of grey, dark grey, then black. At night, these shades are reflected in a strangely hypnotic way on the water. Say what you will about the resort, and I am, but it’s impeccably designed. We took off our shoes.

I sat in a plastic chair at the back. Depending on where you were in the room, and whether you were standing or taking it in on your back, the pyramid’s internal peak seemed either very high up or almost touchable. It had the texture of, and was painted a bright shade of grey that caused it to resemble, the near side of the moon. The people in front of me, on the vast expanse of the black marble floor, looked to me like survivors of the Titanic, floating at random, and very much alone, on the surface of the North Atlantic. Later in the day, I’d sit out there myself, but I was new to this, and sceptical of it, and didn’t at this point want anyone watching me.

I needn’t have worried, because I can with some certainty say that I’ve never visited a less judgemental place, which is another, rather nicer way of saying a more solipsistic one. I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere that people have shown less interest or curiosity in the people around them. While this would prove conducive to meditation, it would prove somewhat less so, outside the hall, to any sort of meaningful human interaction that wasn’t at its heart about the godhead.

The Osho International Meditation Resort runs a number of daily meditations: the Dynamic Meditation at six, which I obviously didn’t attend because of the Welcome Centre’s opening hours, the Nadabrahma, the Kundalini, and the evening Satsang. The mid-morning meditations, which start at eleven, are once-a-week affairs, rotating through lessons in Dervish-like whirling to others in chakra breathing—all Osho-branded, naturally—the latter of which I was about to experience. This involves an hour of deliberate hyperventilation over the course of four fifteen-minute cycles.

I mean it when I say that I was genuinely trying to take this seriously. My mind was very much open. It would have been a waste of my day not to have taken at least some of it in the spirit with which it was intended. I caused myself to focus on the areas of our bodies we were being asked to focus upon, and I caused myself, in due course, to hyperventilate.

We were about halfway through the second cycle of this when I began to feel it was having some effect. We were breathing in and out at a rapid pace, though I was conscious of not doing it properly. I wasn’t—couldn’t—go one for one, especially as we got faster, to the point that we were not really breathing at all. I was either taking two breaths at a time, or exhaling twice, and the more I concentrated on trying to get the rhythm right the more decisively I couldn’t. I eventually just stopped worrying about it and did as well as I could. I kept my eyes closed for maybe forty-five minutes of the hour and was amazed to find that the hour in question seemed to pass in about fifteen minutes as a result. When I did open my eyes, I found that I felt stupid, because everyone else looked stupid, too. There was a bald guy in front of me who kept rubbing his head and his stomach at the same time, as though playing Simon Says with himself, and a woman who didn’t seem to be doing anything at all, breathing or otherwise. I assumed she was a pro.

As soon as I found myself thinking about these people, rather than about my breath or, preferably, about nothing at all, I would chide myself for not doing it properly and promptly close my eyes again.

This would remain an issue all day—even, by the end, whether my eyes were closed or not—but we’ll come to that a little later.

The loneliest happiest place on earth

I came out feeling fantastic but dizzy. It was a little before midday.

At twelve, there was a dance session in Buddha Grove, a soccer-pitch-sized space on the other side of the road from the meditation hall. As I walked over, I heard ‘Walking on Sunshine’ playing. While I’m sure not everyone in the world associates this tune with Patric Bateman arriving at work, I certainly do. Now, I also associate it with a bunch of very sad-looking people dancing, not with one another, but on their own, in the sun, barefoot, on hot stone. I associate it with fictional and literal psychopaths alike.

Raj was having thoughts as well, based on a conversation he’d had with an Indian woman who, once the soundtrack had switched from American Psycho to Bollywood, declared that she didn’t want to dance anymore. He considered this a kind of Indian snobbishness, which turns its nose up at anything Indian, middle-class and annoying.

“Still,” I said, nodding at the loners, “don’t you think it’s all a little sad?”

There were people not so much strolling the grounds as meandering, seemingly lost, on their own. There was a woman with a thousand-yard stare sitting in a corner nodding at nothing. Only occasionally did you see people together and most of them were young European couples. Every now and then two older sannyasins would encounter each other and wordlessly embrace, not letting go for the better part of five minutes. This wasn’t sad, but it wasn’t normal, either.

The buzzsaw was whirring to high heaven in the background.

“I find it very sterile,” said Raj.

I did, too. I also found that everything that might have alleviated that sterility—such as the anonymity and sense of community implied by the clothes—failed to do so on the grounds that it was all so strictly imposed and policed. It sometimes felt as though we were being watched. I was reminded of The Handmaid’s Tale.

It’s not as though I’m against a good uniform. One of my favourite things to do of a July is attend the festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, where adherents to that particular cult similarly wear identical colours and similarly spend the vast majority of their days attempting to reach some state of altered consciousness, be it through reckless self-endangerment or borderline substance abuse. But no one in Pamplona is telling you that you have to wear red and white, and no one is swooping down on you when you choose to do your own thing. (Indeed, every great argument I’ve ever witnessed at fiesta has, at heart, been rooted in someone trying to impose rules or standards or schedules upon someone else.) The result is a celebration of the individual and community, the fraction and the whole.

It’s difficult not to feel that those who have stuck with the cult, let alone those who have come to it since the events of Oregon, of which it’s difficult to profess ignorance, have done so precisely because of a need, not for enlightenment, but for discipline, structure, and a sense of belonging. There is little that separates the cultist from the novitiate or the military recruit. In Wild, Wild Country, Toelkes says that “after a life of being somewhere where I felt, ‘I don’t belong here’—including [with] my family—I felt like I had come home.” This is exactly the kind of person that US military recruiters, hanging outside of Walmart, are looking for, the kind I found, when working on Australia’s Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicides a couple of years ago—where I initially oversaw the investigation into the recruitment process—who tend to suffer most when the promise of belonging is found to be empty. The most brazen and disgusting thing that happened in Rajneeshpuram, outside of the attempted murders and mass-poisoning, was the bussing in of homeless people from across the US in order to win a vote, then the bussing of them out again when it turned out that they weren’t a good “cultural fit”. But this was only the most extreme version of what seems to me to have been their basic operating model. Jane Stork was lured into the cult by her marriage counsellor.

Raj wasn’t hungry, so I went to eat on my own. Everyone else did, too. They sat alone and spoke to no one and had their cards marked with sharpies and they ate. The name of the restaurant was Zorba the Buddha, the same name the Rajneeshis used when they bought out the coffee shop in Antelope as part of their hostile takeover of the place. I have read elsewhere that the sannyasins go out of their way to pretend that Oregon never really happened, but sly little nods like this, and their naming off an off-limits building on the grounds as Jesus Grove, which was the name of Ma Anand Sheela’s residential compound in Rajneeshpuram, means they’re not really playing it down at all. They’re proud of it, and in many cases miss it. I seriously considered doing a bomb dive into the pool, as unclean as the water appeared, just to get a little action going.

Instead, after I had finished eating, I walked through the Lao Tzu garden—a dense thicket of bamboo and broad-leafed tropical plants whose names I couldn’t check against my phone because I wasn’t allowed to use it—that I assume used to be the place for assignations and trysts. Little stone paths lead off from the main one to two-person stone benches, where, unfortunately, no one was assignating or trysting. I sat alone on one of them and waited for time to pass. The path led to my next stop, the Chuang Tzu Auditorium, where, at two o’clock, there was to be a silent sitting session.

Don’t mention the hypocrisy—I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it

You are not allowed to go into the silent sitting session in your own socks, or in bare feet. The floor of the room is untreated marble, which means that the oils in your skin could damage it. The auditorium is connected to the Bhagwan’s former and final residence. It is holy. Your feet, with their toxins, are by comparison filth.

This is the most knowingly hypocritical building on either side of the street. Firstly, while you’re taking off your shoes and putting on a pair of white, all-sizes socks, you’re sitting next to one of the man’s ninety-three Rolls Royces. (He claimed that his followers wished him to have even more of these. In reality, he simply wanted to break the world record for most Rolls Royces owned by a single individual.) You’re also presented with two quotes, etched in plaques on the wall. I was not in a position to write them down, but I remember them well enough. In one, he insisted that he wasn’t a god and did not wish to be remembered. Despite this having been immortalised on the wall, or perhaps because of it, this seemed to me to have been pretty roundly ignored. The other was a version of this, which comes from one of his books:

Always remember, truth cannot be said. It can be shown. It is a finger pointing to the moon. All words are just fingers pointing to the moon, but don’t accept the fingers as the moon. The moment you start clinging to the fingers—that’s where doctrines, cults, creeds, dogmas, are born—then you have missed the whole point. The fingers were not the point: the point was the moon.

Outside of calling himself Bhagwan, the Bhagwan liked to insist that he was merely a finger. He consistently insisted that he had never asked anyone to follow him. All of which is a great ploy, as far as plausible deniability goes, even while being evidently false. He loved being worshipped. It’s visible on his face in the footage and it’s the underlying message of all his discourses: No one is telling you the truth but me, only meditation as I have defined it can lead you to self-knowledge, rules and laws are illegitimate unless I have established them. He literally asked people to follow him to the United States, where he then insisted they learn to shoot semi-automatic weapons, which they did. But let’s assume for a moment that he meant what he said about being, not the moon, but the finger.

If this is true, then sitting silently in his former residence for thirty minutes, in front of a bust of him and an epitaph, etched in white on a mirrored wall, that claims he was

never born

never died

but merely

Visited This Planet Earth

Between Dec. 11, 1931 – Jan 19, 1990

is, just perhaps, a wild and deliberate misreading of the quotes that welcomed us into the space. Because one is, in such circumstances, definitely worshipping the finger rather than the moon.

Raj accused me later of snoring, but the snorer was well off to my left. I know because his snoring woke me up.

What is most interesting about the silent sitting, aside from the gross oppoulence of the the marble and the giant chandelier overhead, is the route you have to take to get in and out of the chamber. Beyond the sock station, with its quotes, you go through a library of books, encased behind glass, that I do rather suspect that the Bhagwan had, in many cases, read. You can’t really stop on your way to peruse the books, but the glimpses I got were interesting enough. Jung and Freud came as no shock, but I was a little surprised, and possibly even a little impressed, to find Faulkner and Pound—collected criticism, in both cases, not fiction or poetry—on the shelves as well. There was a book called From Gandhi to Guevara: The Polemics of Revolt, edited by C. R. Hensman, which also piqued my interest. He knew exactly what he was doing.

When I next saw Raj, he was with an impossibly beautiful European couple, to whom he was expressing his mild dissatisfaction with the day. It was, he was telling them, not a conducive environment for enlightenment.

“Ah,” the girl said, “but you will be disappointed if you are expecting enlightenment here.”

I was wondering what else one was supposed to expect. The Bagwhan himself did not promise enlightenment so much as the tools to achieve it, like every other self-help guru with a side hustle in corporate retreats. (The Bagwhan once called himself the rich man’s guru, possibly while defending his car collection, and it’s difficult not to feel that he was the perfect grifter to oversee the spiritual transition of Western Boomers from flower children to Reaganite neoliberals. The Multiversity occasionally runs courses in meditation for people with busy jobs.) But we weren’t even getting the tools here, either: we were getting religion stuffed down our throats as though we were the goose in the bottle. The goose wasn’t out. It was being stuffed, full, in preparation for foie gras, and we were the goose in question.

We again made our way across the road to the meditation hall, where, this time, we were to partake in an hour of Nadabrahma meditation. I made it time by a couple of minutes but missed the introduction, which is to say, as per usual, the rules. I looked these up later. Nadabrahma involves thirty minutes of humming with your eyes closed—until, apparently, the humming starts happening without you—followed by a fifteen-minute section in which you wave your arms around a lot. As always, you end with fifteen minutes of silence. I think I got about two or three minutes away from the arm-waving before I was kicked out.

From the moment I took my seat on the tiles, I knew I wouldn’t last the hour. I needed much too badly to cough. In the lobby of the meditation hall, where people remove and leave their shoes, little warnings sit in clear free-standing menu-holders. Again, I can’t quote what these warnings say, because the Osho International Meditation Resort is North Korea, but it’s roughly a version of this:

I ask you not to cough for ten minutes. It appears very inhuman: you feel like coughing and I am preventing you from doing so. It looks like wickedness. You are attending a meeting and I tell you you are not to cough at all, to stop it altogether. But you have no idea... [E]ven such a small decision on your part gives birth to the soul within you. If you decide not to cough for ten minutes, and if you are successful in not coughing, a wave of joy passes throughout your body, you come to know that you can carry through a decision to completion.

Maybe, or maybe you’re trying to control my bodily functions the same way you’re controlling everything else about my experience here. This kind of thing makes me want to cough on purpose.

I wish I had. Instead, I went out, had a fit in the lobby, and quietly came back and retook my place.

Even as I was closing my eyes, I clocked the sannyasin in charge of the meditation on her way towards me. I sat very still and innocent and pretended I was meditating. I hummed, loudly. She leaned over me.

“You’re not allowed back in once you’ve left,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

Beat.

“Do you want me to leave?”

“Yes,” she said.

It struck me that, even though I was still very much at the back, and even though we were speaking in whispers, her walking across the space and speaking to me, and me having to get up and go out again, depositing my meditation chair at the back—which I did loudly—was all probably a bit more distracting to the people humming on the floor than my very quiet exit and entry moments earlier. She accompanied me to the door.

“I’m sorry,” I said again, “I didn’t know. I saw that other guy come and go and thought it was okay.”

She stopped me.

“Who did that?” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Point him out.”

She was asking me—expecting me—to snitch.

I said I didn’t know. I had just noticed someone leave and come back. He was—I waved my hand vaguely at the whole left-hand side of the hall—over there.

She was a short European woman, my age or possibly younger, and was not at all happy with my answer. I shrugged. I felt judged as I left the hall and went down the steps towards the security guard, who looked at me as though I had failed, which I had.

I was determined not to fail again. The last of the daytime meditations, the last for which we would wear our maroons, was the Kundalini meditation. This involves fifteen minutes of shaking wildly, another fifteen of dancing, a further fifteen of sitting silently, followed by a final fifteen lying prostrate on the ground. I wasn’t worried about this one so much, because I knew I could get away with coughing when the music was at its loudest.

This time I wandered a little further into the hall in order to get a better view of the pyramid from below.

I again took what we were told seriously. I shook as though holding a livewire, with genuine intention, and threw myself completely into the dance. I was sweating. As with the chakra breathing earlier in the day, I found that time went by incredibly quickly.

The problem was that I kept opening my eyes, and every time I did so I realised that we were adults behaving exactly like pre-schoolers. Perhaps this was the point: later, at the evening session, we would listen to a recording in which the Bhagwan claimed that everyone is born intelligent but is encouraged, or made, to be stupid over time. It’s arguable that by forcing us to revert to childhood, without inhibitions, the meditation was attempting to regain some of that long-lost wisdom. At the same time, even the structure of the meditation, and its timing in the late afternoon, seemed to belong somehow to kindergarten, as though we were shaking out our excess energy before nap time. Remember, this, which sweet young teachers have been using the world over after lunchtime since forever, is, here, patented IP.

I closed my eyes and danced harder. Then I closed my eyes and sat quietly harder. Then I closed my eyes and lay harder on the cold hard ground. But I kept reopening my fucking eyes. Every time I did so, the vault of the pyramid seemed that little bit closer, almost flattened, shallow, and I began to look for faces and animals in the imperfections of the concrete and plaster the way a child may look for them in the perfection of clouds. I felt nothing.

After my experience in Kheerganga, I wrote about my sense of doing something wrong, by experiencing everything at one remove in order to be able to write about it later. Coincidentally, the other day, while I was halfway through writing this piece, I listened to the final episode of the Longform podcast, which I had previously missed. It was an interview with one of my favourite non-fiction writers, John Jeremiah Sullivan, who expressed almost precisely the same sentiment, or predicament.

JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN: I think it comes mostly from taking mental pictures and taking mental recordings and immediately starting to rehearse them, and dwell on them, and interpret them. [...] By which I think we both mean you’re already writing about it some way, which can be kind of alienating.

INTERVIEWER: In what sense?

JJS: There have been times when I wished I had been more present in a moment and not turning it into language and not thinking about how it could have been described, and I sometimes wonder about the insides of other peoples’ heads who are more like that and if their experience is at times more vibrant.

I think I’m always going to feel this way. I think it’s what writers do. But Joseph Furey’s response to the Kheerganga piece brought me back to the truth of the matter. He wrote:

As writers, I believe we need to be shaping our responses while we’re having them, following leads till we have more idea as to where we’re going than anyone else does. Otherwise, we’re just transcribing our resistance to being conscious artists, and we’re going to end up sounding stuck, adrift or lost.

The point is this: My needing to write about this, and thus thinking about it, is not getting in the way of my experience of it. It is my experience of it. I am writer, and saying so is a form of self-knowledge, too. I would also argue that it’s a lot less oneristic and inward-looking than what we were being asked to do in this room of marble moonstone.

Someone was once again snoring somewhere, but no one was doing anything about it. We got off the floor and dusted ourselves off, even though the meditation hall was devoid of even so much as a mote.

The cult comes out at night

Like myself, Raj had enjoyed the first half hour of the Kundalini, but, like myself, had obviously had too much time to think during the second.

“It has nothing to do with Kundalini yoga,” he said. “I don’t think it had anything much to do with the word ‘Kundalini’ at all.”

I was by this point pretty much in love with him.

He and another of the day-trippers were done for the day. He was coming back in the evening, in his civvies, for the evening events. Only I was going to the evening show in my whites. The sky blushed pink above the overstory of Koregaon Park. I had about an hour to kill.

I walked down to A Lane, the first street I ever knew well in Pune, and bought myself a Diet Coke. I was still wearing my robes. No one so much as bat an eyelid at me, I assume because it’s not uncommon to see a white person dressed like a nutter in these parts, crossing the road and dodging the autos in unbecoming one-pieces. I found that I was happy to be back in India, back in the world, awash in noise and dirt and actually-existing reality. I went back and did my Duolingo for the day in one of the smoking areas. I’m learning Spanish.

After a while, I decided to change into my eveningwear—I had taken to thinking of it, facetiously, as white-tie—and returned to my locker. I wanted to take a shower, but hadn’t brought a towel with me and didn’t especially feel like buying one with what was left on my voucher. Instead, I used my maroon robe, figuring, as counterproductive to being clean as this solution was, that I wouldn’t be needing it again any time soon. I wasn’t yet certain, though I was pretty sure, that I wouldn’t be coming back again in order to experience the early morning scream-a-thon. I donned my whites and was immediately reminded of O, Brother Where Art Thou, both of the scene in which Tim Blake Nelson gets baptised and of the Klan rally.

Both scenes came to mind again as the sannyasins returned to the meditation hall. Now, in the dark of early evening, it was lit in such a way as to highlight the different shades of the masonry, leading as one’s eyes ascended the stairs to the entrance to the hall, that black maw. All of this was reflected in the water, creating the impression of a large, free-floating diamond. People dressed entirely in white, including everyone who had either checked us in or checked our behaviour throughout the day—our keepers—had themselves scanned by security and then ambled in an eerie silence along the walkway and up the stairs. The entire resort was locked from this point onwards: no one was manning it, so no one could come in or leave. Everyone on the grounds was praying. We looked like people boarding a spaceship.

Inside, though, we looked like what we were: cultists come to receive benediction from a man who has been dead thirty-five years. Earlier in the day, when I had sat at the back of the hall waiting to hyperventilate, we had looked like flotsam. Now, taking my place even further into the space than I had yet gone—almost exactly in the middle, where I was most likely to be surrounded—I was reminded of nothing so much as evangelicals at some revival, wading out into the shallows to be saved.

We danced for nearly forty-five minutes, punctuating the meditation every fifteen minutes or so by throwing our hands into the air and shouting the godhead’s name: “Osho!” There was a young blonde woman at the very front of the space, the spitting image of Catherine as I imagine her in my novel, trying, without much success, to whirl like a Dervish.

At the conclusion of this, we shouted it three times: “Osho! Osho! Osho!” We had been told that this exhalation of mere noise was a way of releasing ourselves from something or other. But of course it wasn’t mere noise: it was a word that, in these parts, is loaded with meaning, the entire point of our being here. This is such a transparent lie as to be laughable.

For the next ninety minutes we watched a video of the Bagwhan do his bit (and, given he considered himself a stand-up comedian, in addition to everything else he considered himself, I do mean “bit”.) Before it began, someone read out what sounded to me like a catalogue number for the discourse, but I didn’t catch it. It was, though, a long disquisition on modern morality, and the fact that this was a societal construct, essentially meaningless given that the moralities of the US, India, China, the Soviet Union, and everywhere else, were, at the same historical moment, very different things. It was relativism, in short, and he wasn’t wrong, and I may have even nodded along (or nodded off) with some of it. Except that the, well, moral of the lecture—that the only way out of this morass was through his teachings—was as cheap as any undergraduate lecture in poststructuralism and as insidious as any whataboutist speech by any dictator you could care to name.

It was also weirdly Trumpian, in that, like Trump, the Bagwhan was a naturally extemporaneous speaker, given to wild, conspiracy-laced non sequiturs, and to nonsense. He was, I will allow, better read than Trump, but the takeaway was the same: I alone can fix it. A scientist, José Delgado, had proved that an electrode in the brain could alter the behaviour of a charging bull—with one flick of the switch, the Bagwhan said, the bull was “in a yoga pose,” which made me laugh, but not at all for the reasons everyone else was laughing—and that if we didn’t think that the US, Chinese, and Russians weren’t rushing to implant them in us, too, then we weren’t paying attention. Only the Bagwhan could promise us that he would never implant an electrode in our brains. Only his teachings could ward off the coming of the brain implants.

The teachings at the heart of the grift were always paradoxical, partly as a function of his style, but also deliberately, so that people would keep seeking him out. He promised radical self-knowledge, or at any rate the tools to achieve it, but only at the price of a near-total dissolution of the self and an unquestioning submission to his personal authority. He sold liberation and a stripping-away of social conditioning, but only to those who were willing to be socially-conditioned by him, shedding their identities and wearing his uniforms. Watching the Rajneeshees build Rajneeshpuram from scratch in Wild, Wild Country—a scarily impressive feat—resembles nothing so much as the hive mind in Vince Gilligan’s new series, Pluribus, reopen a supermarket so Carol can go shopping. With the exception of his attack dogs—it is again telling, I think, that Ma Anand Sheela never got into meditation—he didn’t want individuals. He wanted suckers. Unlike Brian of Nazareth, who really did want people to stop following him, the Bagwhan simply heard cash registers going off when they responded to his I’m-not-a-god shtick the same way they did to Brian’s:

I can’t hear the Bagwhan’s voice, or see a photo of him—with what Toelkes describes as his big, beautiful eyes—without thinking of Kaa, the boa constrictor in The Jungle Book, down to and including his tendency to hiss, even on words that lack hissable consonants. “Trust in me,” Kaa sings, tightening her grip.

Just as I thought the lecture was ending, it continued for another half hour, now on the subject of the innate intelligence of children. He didn’t have too much to say, beyond the fact that every intelligent person hates their parents—catnip for the broken, probably not so much for people who were raising their own unfortunate offspring in the cult—so relied primarily on jokes he had written down on cue cards. He was, it turns out, particularly enamoured of sex jokes. I counted one about blow jobs, one about cunnilingus, and one very, very long rape joke. Most of the laughter was on the tape, but there were a few chuckles behind and ahead of me, too, and one very old, very loud voice really letting rip up the front, with liquidated lungs, every time a penis was mentioned. When he called homosexuality a perversion, though? When he said that homosexuality exists because we don’t know how to express sexuality properly, because of the world’s mechanisms of control? Crickets. The guy behind me, hands together, was bowing with his palms pressed together like one of those water-sipping birds. An unreligious religion, you say?

I had to laugh when a young bloke in front of me got up and walked out, presumably, I thought, to cough. His partner kept looking across to make sure he was there, but he wasn’t, and of course he didn’t come back. She didn’t seem to get quite as into it again.

We now proceeded to the two-stage session of Laughter, Gibberish, and Letting-Go. (The last two are meant to go together as per your desire.) No one except the nutter at the front laughed during the long, recorded joke about a guy raping a woman to see what his condom size was. (“I’m only here for a measurement,” the Bagwhan hissed, to much recorded meriment.) But people really got into the latter two stages. It was like Nuremberg in there. I just said the word “rhubarb” over and over until I got bored and pretended I was Scatman John instead. Others, namely young Indian men, screamed bloody murder and thrust their arms at the screen, slapped the ground with their hands, spewed bile. It reminded me of the worst clips in the Dobrowolny’s film about the ashram, only without the descent into violence against the women in the room.

Then we stopped. This was the point of the meditation where we were supposed to go entirely limp and fall immediately to the floor, as though suddenly devoid of bones. It didn’t really play out that way. Most people lowered themselves slowly, with great caution. The floor was marble. I was reminded of a scene in William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns in which he witnesses a Sufi nearly split his skull open after cracking it hard on marble during a trance:

From where I was sitting I could see his eyes; his pupils had disappeared, up into the eyelids, and the eyeballs were pure white. He pointed to the shrine, then sunk to his knees in a position of namaz; after that he lay flat. Then, suddenly he rose again, jumping about, dancing madly, fantastically, and through the music you could hear him crying out: “Allah ... Allah ... Allah ...”

Osho! Osho! Osho!

He began bowing from the waist like a Chinese courtier; only then did he begin to turn. As the music rose to its climax and the crowd clapped, encouraging him on, he turned faster and faster, his skirts flying out, spinning round and around on a single axis screaming loudly: “Ha! Ha! Ha!” Finally, he fell down and curled up into an embryonic ball.

This wasn’t that: it was an earnest, desperate, ultimately pathetic attempt to recreate it. As I lay there with my head against the stone, eyes open, experiencing the world from a strange new angle like Janet Leigh staring dead-eyed across the bloodied tiles in Psycho, I found myself thinking about the would-be Dervish girl, who had not been far enough gone to stop watching where she was putting her feet, not too far enough gone to let herself fall. Every time she had started coming undone, she had caught and righted herself, had started trying to whirl again, head appropriately askance. It struck me that much of what I was seeing around me, even from the floor, existed on a similar plane. It wasn’t performative, because the only person watching other people—aside, I presume, from the in-house ensurers of mandatory joy—was me, but it was without genuine abandon. The whole thing is propped up on need, not on outcomes, and where it is propped up on what people claim are outcomes, I suspect this is self-delusion, or at least wishful thinking. The true believers are lying to themselves in the Bagwhan’s absence, because the fact that they might have followed the sunk-cost fallacy into a wasted life on a pretty little property cut off from the world is obviously a difficult thing to countenance. The truth is that this is a cult that professes love of the world and joy of life but wants nothing to do with either of those things, and certainly doesn’t want to let them past the gates. This is its real and most abiding difference with Pamplona, where the world runs rampant, and occasionally does experience joy. For those for whom the grift works out, like the Bagwhan himself, I suspect there’s a lot of material comfort involved, and not a lot of enforced nap time. Joy is what they’re selling, but it isn’t the point. However true it is that we need to undo the way we have been conditioned by society, in the end, when saying so becomes lucrative, it becomes all too easy, for anyone involved in the selling of that idea, to lean hard into hypocrisy, and to make out like bandits. The world, it turns out, does exist, no matter how hard you try to insist that it doesn’t. Do as I hiss, not as I do. What amazes me is how many people love the squeeze.

Pull my finger

I was, you will be unsurprised to learn, very much ready to leave.

People were changing out of their robes. The poor fellow who had left his girlfriend in the lurch was sitting in front of his locker, seething, wearing jeans and a tank top. He tried to explain what had happened, but she was having none of it. He should never have left, she said.

“I’d have thought you were too into it to care,” he said.

“Not during the movie!” she said, as though she’d have been hoping they might eat popcorn and canoodle while the Bagwhan preached homophobia and hatred of one’s parents.

I eavesdropped on other conversations as I changed.

“It’s a bit of a mixed bag,” someone said. “Sometimes he says things that are no longer politically correct, but we tend to find that he’s still always right.”

I considered leaving, but I still had enough money on my cards to eat dinner, and I wanted to catch Raj, upon his return, before I left. But the loneliness of lunch was even more pronounced at dinner, when everyone was dressed differently. There was, though I’m sure no one there would have admitted it, a level of embarrassment, even of shame, now that everyone looked different. It was as though no one was quite ready to admit how they’d been behaving twenty minutes earlier. When I went to pay for my meal, I learned that I had spent too much: one of the cards I was trying to use was not for food, I was told. (Given I had bought my clothes with it, the fact that there was more money on the card than I had needed was obviously just another rort.)

“What should I do?” I asked the guy. The pay station was closed.

“Just give me cash,” he said.

He took it, gave me a new card, took the card he had just given me from me, struck what I had spent on it off it, and gave it back to me.

It had five rupees left on it. I tore in half and told him to find a bin.

I ran into Raj on my way out. Neither of us recognised the other in the dark, in our actual clothes. He later sent me a message chiding me for not staying on for the evening event, at which, he said, Indian men wildly outnumbered European women. We could have played wingman to one another, he said. I had already decided that the chapter of my novel that had taken me to the resort in the first place would never get that far. Catherine would leave in digust before I did.

I walked up to where guys on the corner were buying robes at a discount and offloaded mine, both the white one and the towel, for about half of what I’d paid for them. I walked back along North Main Road, listening to the autos and cars and motorbikes, breathing in the shit, and revelling in it.

The moon was high in the sky, and full, and I stopped and looked at it properly and loved it. I occasionally have moments, when it’s hanging there in the cold, a silver coin mounted on hardboard, when I think: That’s amazing. It’s amazing we went there. It’s amazing in and of itself. It’s a miracle.

It turns out that you don’t need a finger to point out something so obvious.

Today marks the fourteenth anniversary of Christopher Hitchens’ death. In 2009, ahead of the inaugural Festival of Dangerous Ideas, I interviewed Hitchens for The Punch. In 2014, I wrote something on the anniversary of his death for SBS.

More recently, in 2022, I reviewed Ben Burgis’ Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters for The Monthly. Given that this piece is still behind a paywall, I have reproduced it, with minor cosmetic edits, below. I have also included the transcript of my original 2009 discussion with Hitchens, which only a few friends have ever read in full. We were meant to talk for fifteen minutes. We spoke for ninety. It was nice to read it back again. I was worried I was going to come across as more obsequious than I do, which is not to say that I don’t come across as obsequious at all.

I’m not putting a paywall up on either of these, though I may add one to the transcript later. I was paid for both at the time. I would hope, though, that you look back on some of the other bits and pieces I write and decide that my efforts are worth it.

In 2009, when I interviewed Christopher Hitchens in anticipation of his appearance at the inaugural Festival of Dangerous Ideas, I used our last ten minutes together to ask his opinion of, among other things, Australian journalist John Pilger.

“I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good at the time,” Hitchens said. “I dare say if I went back and read it again, I’d probably still admire quite a lot of it.” He proceeded to describe Pilger as unthinkingly anti-American, but it was the generosity of his preamble that struck me most at the time.

Such generosity has not, as a rule, been extended in kind to Hitchens. For his critics, at least on the left, there is little interest in returning to his work that predated September 11, 2001, and none at all in revisiting that which followed. Though there had been other, earlier disagreements, it was the attack on the Twin Towers and everything it precipitated, especially in Iraq, that came to define the man and his legacy. His unwavering support for the War on Terror was and remains a rupturing apostasy that colours the entirety of his output in either direction.

Ben Burgis’ new book, Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters, presents itself as an attempt to redress this. It is a book in the vein of Hitchens’ own slim volumes on Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa—only, as I’m sure Burgis would concede, not nearly as eloquent. As an attempt to explain, if not to excuse, Hitchens’ position on the war in Iraq and to demonstrate the ways in which he otherwise remained a progressive, if not a socialist, until the end, it is relatively successful. As an argument as to why it still matters that Hitchens held any of these positions it is decidedly less so.

Burgis is a columnist at Jacobin, which has been described as “the closest thing to a flagship publication” of the Democratic Socialists of America, and his commitment to progressive politics and causes is everywhere apparent. This, and the fact that he has clearly done his reading, renders him as good a candidate as any to undertake such a re-examination from the left. Unfortunately, he is also a philosophy professor at Georgia State University, with an abiding interest in the metaphysical. As a result, he dedicates an awful lot of time to the dominant but least interesting strain in Hitchens’ late output, and does so in a way that fails to add much to our understanding of the man. His discussion of Hitchens’ militant atheism, and the writer’s debates with various believers, mostly involves pointing out the arguments that Hitchens could have made but didn’t, or that could have been levelled against him but weren’t. All of this is interesting enough, to the extent that any abstract philosophical argument is interesting, but it is difficult to see how any of it is very pressing today. This is not even stage-setting so much as throat-clearing.

The same is true of Burgis’s brief discussion of Hitchens’ drinking, about which he is, kindly but disingenuously, content to take Hitchens at his word. I suspect that Hitchens was protesting too much in the passages Burgis quotes on this matter. (I once saw Hitchens try to put a tumbler of whisky into his breast pocket, so the notion that he was a high-functioning alcoholic, but not a drunk, doesn’t ring true to me.) But there are, as Burgis also observes, dipsomaniacs on both sides of the political aisle. A person’s capacity for drink, or lack thereof, only ever seems to come up in argument when partisans are not content to argue a point on its merits. In any case, Hitchens’ daily alcohol intake, which he once said could “kill or stun the average mule” (a construction, I would note, that de-escalates in an unsatisfying way that suggests that it was itself dashed off under the influence) no longer seems something worth litigating.

Much more interesting is Burgis’ discussion of Hitchens’ Trotskyism, and of his gradual move away from socialism, if not as an idea worth fighting for, then at least as something that might one day be won using the methods he had previously championed. The centrepiece of the book is a lengthy chapter entitled ‘Hitchens in Nine Debates,’ which examines nine public appearances that Hitchens made between 1986 and 2009. They have by and large been selected to chart this political transformation over time.

And so we see, in 1986, Hitchens sounding “in almost every way like a very orthodox Marxist,” as he argues for a classless society against a couple of hapless acolytes of Ayn Rand. We see, in a 1999 debate on Britain’s membership of the EU, Hitchens supporting the organisation as what Burgis calls “a modest counterweight to the American colossus,” while saying “almost nothing about the organised working class”. At first, it seems that the revolutionary has come to be replaced by the incrementalist liberal. We are soon to learn that this swerve was indicative of something far more destructive than that.

The best chapter in the book—the one that justifies the whole project, but which could just as easily have been published as a standalone article in Jacobin or elsewhere—deals with that subsequent destruction. Burgis begins by carefully and convincingly rebutting the usual reasons leftists give for Hitchens’ support of the war: Islamophobia, opportunism, alcohol-induced brain damage, the all too familiar left–right trajectory of the old and infirm. He reiterates, for those who stopped reading Hitchens at around that time, that the man remained a progressive on virtually every other important issue (most notably Palestine) even as he shilled for war. Burgis’ own analysis is as follows: sometime after the end of the Cold War, “worn down by the political atmosphere of the 1990s, where every talking head in the world took it for granted that the great struggles between visions of how to organise society […] had ended with the fall of the Soviet Union,” Hitchens ceased to see socialism as the most likely outcome of world-historical change, and similarly ceased to see the working class as the most likely agent of that change. Crucially, though, he still thought that some kind of change was necessary, and that it had to be spearheaded by someone. “Lacking any other plausible agent of democratic change in the Middle East,” Burgis writes, “he was willing at last to turn to what he knew damn well was still an empire.”

While I think that this conclusion is accurate—that Hitchens, as I have seen it put elsewhere, was wrong for the right reasons—I have certain quibbles with how Burgis reaches it, which is to say a little too neatly. While he concedes that Hitchens’ revulsion for religion probably did predispose him to anti-Islamic sentiment, his failure to mention some of Hitchens’ more vile and frankly bloodthirsty comments in the wake of September 11 is rather too convenient. Similarly, while he is undoubtedly right that Trotskyism is not always a fast-track to neo-conservatism, I think he is wrong to discount the role that Trotskyism played in Hitchens’ ideas about why and how the war should play out. For while Trotskyism’s socialist end goal is obviously not shared by liberal interventionists, let alone by neo-conservatives, it shares with both these schools of thought similar notions about how history is or ought to be made. This, along with Burgis’ pesky “at last,” warrants at least a little discussion.

It is now somewhat taken for granted that Hitchens had, as early as the Falklands War, shown a willingness to support the use of imperial power against what he saw as its fascistic equivalent. But it should be noted that there is next to no evidence of Hitchens actually supporting that war in any of his published writing prior to the last decade of his life. While I suppose it is possible that he could have chosen to keep his opinions to himself on that occasion, this would have been wildly uncharacteristic, and indeed it seems far more likely that he rewrote his position, most notably in Hitch-22, when he thought it might serve as a useful precedent. (As with much of what he wrote about Iraq, directly or indirectly, this calls into question his intellectual honesty, which Burgis elsewhere applauds in a lengthy discussion of Hitchens’ attack on Martin Amis’s Koba the Dread.)

Far more relevant is his support of NATO’s intervention in the Balkans, a cause he championed at precisely the same time that he began to show signs of believing that bourgeois-capitalist institutions might have greater revolutionary potential than the masses. Later, no doubt buoyed by the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo (which were, in my opinion, both just and necessary), Hitchens would take to calling the American Revolution, in Burgis’ words, “the only revolution […] realistically available for export.” In fact, he was already praising the American Revolution, if not claiming it was the only game left in town, as far back as 1992. (The earliest instance I am aware of appears in a piece he wrote for The Nation that year, in which, I’m sorry to say, he all but justified the dispossession and genocide of the Native Americans on the grounds that the founding fathers were men of the Enlightenment.) This is important to the extent that, coming as it did three years before the massacre at Srebrenica, it means that his support for NATO intervention may not have been entirely predicated on necessity or a sense of last resort.

The problem was not, as Burgis would have it, that Hitchens had lost the Trotskyist’s ability to recognise and refuse false dichotomies, such as that which existed between the crimes of Saddam Hussein and those that would attend any American invasion. (Hitchens would in any case have argued, and did, that that was the false dichotomy.) It was that he hadn’t lost the Trotskyist’s belief in Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party: the notion that democratic revolution, in the Middle East or elsewhere, required internationalist revolutionary leadership working on behalf of the oppressed (“a disciplined political vanguard”, as the International Bolshevik Tendency put it in a 1998 edition of Trotsky’s work, which is to say, if you squint just so, a coalition of the willing). It is precisely because he no longer believed in the working class as a historical agent, let alone the subject peoples of the Middle East, but still believed in the necessity of revolution, that he made his peace with war and subbed out the proles for the military-industrial complex. That the American Revolution had, from the very beginning, failed to live up to its own lofty rhetoric was neither here nor there. Hitchens had, after all, already spent the better part of his life arguing the Trotskyist line that the Russian Revolution had been betrayed and that its animating principles were still valid. The problem was that he remained a revolutionary and was ready to take revolution where he could get it.

Had this grand bargain ultimately worked out—which, because of the actual aims of the neocons with whom he was now in cahoots, it was never going to—and had the invasion somehow sparked a wave of democratic uprisings in the region, it would have been, as Hitchens might have put it, one of the great historical ironies of which he was so fond. It was precisely this taste for irony that led him to claim that he had supported Margaret Thatcher’s adventurism on the grounds that it would be a blow to Argentinean fascism, and indeed that led him to believe, against all the evidence, that an American court might one day try Henry Kissinger. But the irony was not to be. It was instead as though Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution had mated and spawned Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. That his position was morally and strategically catastrophic is a point on which Burgis and I agree. I just think that it was more of a piece with Hitchens’ past than Burgis is willing to credit.

The chapter on Iraq all but closes the book, and, to the extent that it at least complicates the standard narrative around Hitchens’ last decade as “a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay”, it is a worthy effort. All that remains is to somehow justify that overlong subtitle. But on the matter of why Hitchens still matters, Burgis ultimately has little to say.

It could be argued that Hitchens stills matters on the grounds that the consequences of the wars he championed are still being felt, not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, let alone the wider Middle East, but also in the United States, where the economic, social and political ramifications of those wars include last year’s Trumpist insurrection. It is a political truism that presidencies beget presidencies, and a black first-term senator with a questionable middle name, running on a nebulous message of hope and change, could never have won a general election had it not been for Bush’s disastrous wartime presidency. It is similarly true that white America might not have seen any need to make America great again had it not just spent eight years fulminating at the fact that there was a black man in the White House.

But Hitchens, while certainly a vocal supporter of the War on Terror, was probably less important to it happening than the lie-laundering editorial boards of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and to the extent that those august institutions are still with us, well, they really do still matter. If there are arguments to be made about Hitchens’ explicitly socialist writings prior to the mid 1990s, and how they might teach us something about how to operate as a left-wing commentator in the belly of the beast, Burgis doesn’t bother making them here, not least because the media landscape has changed and there are better and more relevant examples to hand. I have previously suggested that Hitchens’ willingness to directly test his assumptions with lived experience—whether by allowing himself to be waterboarded or by spending time with revolutionaries in the places about which he wrote—remains a valuable lesson to younger journalists, though that probably doesn’t warrant an entire monograph and in any case isn’t the subject of Burgis’.

Instead, he writes that Hitchens was always worth reading, even when you disagreed with him. He writes that the quality of political punditry—in literary terms, at least—has declined since Hitchens’ death. He makes in fact the direct opposite argument to James Marriott in The Times, who marked the tenth anniversary of Hitchens’ passing by blaming him for the pugilistic nature of contemporary public discourse. Both arguments, to borrow from Burgis, are pretty weak tea.

My own position, such as it is, lies somewhere between them. It is a shame that Burgis chooses to write about nine of Hitchens’ debates instead of nine of his essays or articles, not least because there’s nothing quite so boring as reading someone recap a YouTube video. It seems a missed opportunity to judge Hitchens on the terms by which he would have wished to be judged. Yet it also seems somehow fitting. I would wager that anyone who has discovered Hitchens since his death has done so not through his writing but precisely through such videos. For anyone who has read his work from the 1980s and early 1990s, as collected in Prepared for the Worst and For the Sake of Argument, this is a little galling. There is no comparison between the dense and dazzling prose of those collections (not to mention their stridently left-wing politics) and even the most amusing “Hitchslap” of some unfortunate rabbi or bishop online. There is certainly no comparison between those collections and his later novelties for Vanity Fair and the Slate columns, which he dashed off between courses at dinner parties. While his literary criticism for The Atlantic, as well as the Vanity Fair pieces about his cancer collected in Mortality, put paid to the notion that his literary talents were slipping at the end, it might have been useful to have examined the way that his writing either soared or suffered in direct proportion to the quality of his ideas. Even allowing for his infamous piece about women not being funny, his worst writing qua writing, in the last decade of his life, was, without exception, about Iraq.

It wasn’t just the ideas, though. It was sometimes difficult not to feel that, between the television appearances and debates and deadlines, Hitchens was, even before his cancer diagnosis, beginning to spread himself a little thin. It was his editor at Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter, who wrote the most honest appraisal of his friend, recently noting that, although Hitchens was “catnip to television-news bookers,” the junk high he got from those television appearances probably wasn’t good for him. Carter meant good for Hitchens physically, but I think it was also true for him as a writer. (Carter also admits that he is unsure whether Hitchens would be “on the lunatic left-wing fringe or the lunatic right-wing fringe” today. I suspect that the opposite, or some version of the opposite, is true, and that Carter is merely being polite. Hitchens’ hatred of the Clintons may not have been enough to have pushed him into the Trump camp, but it would certainly have been enough to have rendered him a Greenwaldian figure, cantankerous and adrift. He was already one of Fox News’s pet leftists when he died. What reason is there to think this would have changed had he lived?)

But while I return to those early collections regularly, as well as to Love, Poverty, and War and Unacknowledged Legislation, I recently surprised myself by telling a younger reader not to bother with them unless she was specifically interested in the history of US political-literary journalism in the waning days of the twentieth century. The truth is that, unlike Orwell, Hitchens never wrote a great standalone book, and for that reason alone I suspect that, without YouTube on hand to prop him up, he would have already gone the way of many a jobbing hack before him. (Coincidentally, I have also been rereading Orwell’s essays, and, as great as some of them are, I doubt we would still be reading them, either, were it not for the ongoing popularity of Nineteen Eighty-four and Animal Farm.)

The fact is that Burgis’ subtitle is a bit of a false flag. Hitchens still matters because he still matters to Burgis, in the same way that Hitchens still matters to me. He matters to us because we came to him young, because he influenced our writing and the development of our ideas, and, as is so often the case with one’s heroes, because he ultimately disappointed us. He matters because all cautionary tales matter, and Hitchens’ final decade, in so many ways, was nothing if not one of those. I remember thinking that his work on the Reagan years, on Cyprus and Palestine and Kissinger and Wodehouse, was very good at the time. I dare say if I went back and read it again, I’d probably still admire quite a lot of it.

Interview with Christopher Hitchens

23 September 2009

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Hello.

MATTHEW CLAYFIELD: Hello, is that Christopher?

CH: Yes, it is.

MC: Christopher, it’s Matthew Clayfield from The Australian in Sydney. How are you doing?

CH: At your service. I’m sorry, I had a rather late night of it last night.

MC: That’s fine. I’m having a late one now as it happens.

CH: Hold on. Hold on a minute.

[Background noise.]

CH: What book? … Yeah. … She wants it now? … I’ll have to have a look. … I think it’s alright, but I may need it to fact-check with Newsweek. … Don’t promise it today. … Yes. … Shortcut? Yeah.

[Background noise.]

CH: Sorry.

MC: No, no, that’s fine. No, I didn’t know earlier when I was calling. It’s always funny when the time difference is such that no one really knows what the go is. But yes, now we’re in contact and there you go. So, look, I thought I’d start with... I obviously realise that you’re coming over here to talk at the Opera House about religion and about the subject of God Is Not Great, which I actually recently finished…

CH: Oh, good. That’s very flattering. I can’t ask for more than that.

MC: No, well, I mean you were preaching to the converted in this case, I have to say. But I’ve handed it onto people who might find it a bit more confronting, hopefully, with any luck.

CH: Well, that’s why it’s been a success, if I can say it myself. And who else was going to be able to do it? I mean, I wanted it to be a challenge to people who were not of my way of thinking. And the reason it became a bestseller, according to the Wall Street Journal, which did a piece about this, is that the word was put around by Christian bookstores and people like that, that this is the one you have to beat.

MC: Yeah.

CH: And also it’s the “know your enemy” book. As a result, I get invited by religious institutions, not less than about twice a month, to come and talk.

MC: I was going to say, you must be going to an exorbitant number of debates.

CH: Yeah, well, I like doing that. And I’ve also, I mean, I’ve condemned myself. It’s just as well I do like it, because I said at the outset, you know, I wouldn’t refuse any challenge. And you know, compatible with actually staying alive and not collapsing, I have, I think, not yet turned down anyone who’s asked me to come and defend my position.

MC: Well, one of the things you say in Letters to a Young Contrarian is that it’s the one debate you never get sick of, and you always enjoy debates with people of faith.

CH: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I find it is a subject that doesn’t become dull.

MC: Why is that?

CH: Well, I think because it is the essential argument. I mean, all other arguments in a way descend from this one. You either believe in the consolations of religion or the reflections of philosophy, and religion is sort of philosophy with the hard questions left out. You can tell a great deal about someone from whether or not they believe they’re the object of a divine design or not.

MC: I think so as well, yeah.

CH: And it’s not a minor difference of opinion. It’s a fundamental difference. So, religion is to philosophy what astrology is to astronomy, alchemy to chemistry, and so on. It was humanity’s first attempt to make sense of things. I mean, it was the first attempt to have cosmology. It was, in some ways, the first attempt to have health care. And, in a quite important way, it’s also our first attempt at literature. I mean, especially, I think, that’s true of the Christian and Jewish books, and also of the Koran. You know, for centuries it was probably the only book many people had read or, if they couldn’t read, knew some of and could recite.

MC: Yes.

CH: Especially in King James Version, which I know I praise in the book, it is a great work of literature. The difficulty arises when people say it’s not human, that it’s beyond criticism because it’s the word of God and so on. That’s all balls, of course.

MC: Which is also, I mean, it’s such a shameful act of self-denial. I mean, it’s such a great work of human work.

CH: Yes. In the King James Version, which is indeed the only useful book I know of that was written by a committee.

MC: Yes, that’s a good way of putting it.

CH: Well, the American Declaration of Independence, though it’s largely written by Jefferson, was written by a committee of four people, but they were all pretty good. And they knew enough to let him get on with it.

MC: Yeah, have his head.

CH: They didn’t too much editing. And the only editing that I personally know about—I’ve written about Jefferson, also—

MC: Yes.

CH: —the only editing I personally know about is Benjamin Franklin says, “Wouldn’t it be better to say, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident?” And I can’t now remember what Jefferson has originally put. Shit. I should know. Anyway…

MC: I’ll look it up.

CH: Yeah. And “self-evident” is absolutely perfect for the rhythm of the thing.

MC: Yes, the cadence of it’s fantastic.

CH: Though I don’t myself think that there are—well, that’s another question.

MC: No, but I mean you could count them certainly on the fingers of one hand.

CH: [Laughs.]

MC: These, you know, the great committee books of world literature.

CH: Well, there’s really very, very few. I mean, the Koran was not written by committee, but in its finished form it was assembled by a number of people. It’s just that they can’t afford to admit that.

MC: No, of course not.

CH: Which is a shame, because they’ve made a fetish out of this now.

MC: Yeah, they have. Look, I’ll go to just some things that I got written down about Australia and religion. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but not much more than a year ago, the Pope brought over several hundred thousand Catholic young people to Sydney, and I was covering that, this was for World Youth Day…

CH: Yeah.

MC: I saw Mexican teenagers venerating the crucifix and things like that.

CH: Yes.

MC: And, you know, in this ridiculously overblown Passion play, Pontius Pilate washing his hands of Christ on the steps of the Opera House. And now of course you are being brought over to speak in the Opera House. That’s got to be some kind of progress, doesn’t it?

CH: It wouldn’t be for me to say that.

MC: [Laughs.]

CH: I’d be perfectly happy if you thought so. How many people does the Opera House hold, by the way?

MC: You’re, I think, in the Concert Hall, which as far as I’m aware is eight hundred or something…

CH: Right.

MC: I know that it’s selling out pretty quickly.

CH: What’s the main… I mean, I’ve been to it. I’ve been to an opera there. Long time ago. And I can’t remember what the capacity is. I was just interested.

MC: I’m looking it up right now to tell you. What’s your take on this idea of World Youth Day. Because I know, I think, this was the one that the bulldog tried to bribe kids to come with absolution, wasn’t it?

CH: Yes.

MC: Yeah.

CH: Well, I mean, this Pope, who’s an extreme reactionary—

MC: Yeah.

CH: —has proved that, I think, in three ways. One is he wants to return the Mass to Latin. He’s made a few steps in that direction. Second by letting the Lefebvre fascists back in. I’ve just forgotten his name. The Englishman, I think he is, by origin, who was actually living in Argentina… Oh, this is ridiculous. But you know what I mean, the Marcel Lefebvre extreme right, who had been flung out because, well, they just didn’t accept the Second Vatican Council, basically. And also they didn’t want—I think, personally—they particularly did not want to drop the general condemnation of the Jews for the death of Christ.

MC: Yeah.

CH: In other words, they’re sort of Mel Gibson-ists.

MC: Yeah, I was going to say.

CH: To mention a famous Oz type.

MC: I think in this case we’ll give him to New Zealand. [Despite the fact he wasn’t born there. — Ed.]

CH: Anyway, no sooner was this guy restored to the fold, that he, you know, he went on again about how there was no Holocaust and how the Jews are a menace and all this sort of thing. But it matters more to the Pope to have these few back in the fold than it does to make an obvious compromise with, you know, the fascist past of one wing in the Church. That’s another case. And the third is, I think he wants say it again, a bit more affirmatively, that the Catholic Church is not just another Christian church, it is the only one, the one true one. This ecumenicism has gone too far.

MC: Yeah.

CH: And then, actually, I make it four. I mean, what I would call, it’s not exactly the sale of indulgences, but the offer of the remission from future punishment if you do the Church a favour or two.

MC: Which is terribly retrograde.

CH: Well, I think so, I have to say. There may be some other things that show that he wants to go back to pre-Vatican II, but those are the four most salient ones.

MC: I think the thing that really struck me while I was covering it—as I said, I saw, you know, I spoke to kids from South Carolina who were considering vocations and things like that—

CH: Yeah.

MC: —I was really—and I went through Catholic primary school until grade seven, which I think was the best way of deciding that I didn’t believe—but I was struck by what seemed to me to be a preying on the youth. And that is something you write about quite extensively in the book.

CH: Yes. I mean, I think that it’s very questionable whether anyone should be compelled, by family or by school, to attend any religious event. It would be very, very difficult indeed to forbid it, and I don’t think one should probably try, but that doesn’t mean that general social approval of it should be automatic.

MC: No.

CH: I think people should look sort of slightly askance at people who do this to their kids. I mean, for example, when I used to live on Capitol Hill in north-east Washington—I live in a different area now and also in an apartment building, so I don’t get door-to-door salespeople, because I live on the top floor of an apartment building—but when I did live on street-level, it’d be a hot day, and you’d answer the door, and there’d be this beautifully dressed, usually black, family—

MC: Yeah.

CH: —who said, “Can we just come in for a second, the children are very thirsty, and sit down?” It was quite hard to say no, even when you knew what this was. It was a Jehovah’s Witness job. So, what I would do is I’d look directly to the children and say, “You know, you don’t have to do this. Your mummy and daddy shouldn’t really be dressing you up like this on a hot day and dragging you around to other people’s houses.” I’d try to embarrass the parents in front of the kids.

MC: How did that go?

CH: Well, for a lot of people they’d say, “Look, it’s their religion, it’s their right.” Yeah, okay, okay. I can’t stop them. But I can withdraw approval from it. And I think one should take that line with people who say, “Of course we’re sending little Johnny to Saint Ignatius” or whatever it is, or making them go to Sunday school, blah blah. And then I think it should be certainly illegal to perform any operation on the genitals of the child that isn’t mandated by surgical or medical necessity.

MC: Sure.

CH: No non-elective surgery for children, of any sort. I mean, I think that should be straight to jail. As it is if you do it to women, to little girls, in America, but not to little boys. I think it should be across the board. Just as, you know, we say to the Mormons, Utah can remain a state of the Union only if you give up, not just polygamy, but what polygamy’s really a cover for, which is marrying underage girls to filthy old male relatives who can’t get laid. They still do that, but when they get caught they go to prison. As they should. And the same with people who on religious grounds, so-called, you know, won’t take their kids to the doctor or give them a blood transfusion. Straight to jail, children taken away.

MC: At the same time…

CH: I think we need… I think a few more high-profile legal and other moral cases of this kind would do an enormous amount of good because what needs to be challenged is the idea that religious belief confers some sort of moral standing on a person.

MC: Yes. At the same time you do believe, and you’ve written about this, in the importance of young people having some religion in their education, or rather some education of religion.

CH: Oh, yes. And by the way, on that, I believe equally strongly in a way, and I think it’s the sort of thing where one can and should in a sense offer a quid pro quo, because… In America now, because of the so many possibilities of offending people, the schools play it safe. So, if you wanted to have a voluntary Bible class—what was it that I read about the other day?—something perfectly harmless that the school just decided to forbid just to be on the safe side—

MC: Yeah.

CH: —which has the dire effect on children, I mean, growing up who don’t know what’s in the Bible. I mean, my daughter wouldn’t know if it wasn’t for me, and it’s rather absurd for me to be teaching her this stuff.

MC: [Laughs.]

CH: But I mean I think it’s essential that people do know and that it is properly and intelligently and objectively studied.

MC: See, I agree with that entirely. I think my Catholic education was integral to the position that I now hold. And I also just think that… But it’s also important obviously to learn about all the religions and it’s only when you can start to do that that you can draw the similarities and apply logic to it.

CH: By all means, one certainly has to do that. But again I revert to this point about the literary element. If you don’t have some kind of working knowledge of the King James Version—actually, it wouldn’t really be the King James Version, as that was done around the time Shakespeare himself was writing, but let’s say of the Bible in English—there will be references in Shakespeare that you simply won’t get. And Milton, too. And, well, indeed innumerable other writers. So it just has to be part of any educated person’s equipment. I don’t think they teach much Bible study, do they, in Catholic school?

MC: Well, look, I came out with a fairly good working knowledge of—certainly of the New Testament and of certain aspects of the Old Testament. Obviously, they, in primary school, they avoid going through, say, all the books of the Old Testament and what not. But I still came out with a fairly good working knowledge, which, since then, I’ve supplemented.

CH: Oh. Maybe it’s a foul Protestant-[inaudible] rumour that the Catholics don’t really like their children to look at the Bible too much.

MC: Well, I remember when I read Revelation—

CH: Ah, yes.

MC: —the school were kind of disturbed that I would be doing so. I’m not sure what upset them about that so much.

CH: Well, it’s pretty wild stuff, that.

MC: Oh, it’s a rip-roaring ride. We have a Prime Minister here called Kevin Rudd, and before he became Prime Minister he wrote a seven thousand-word essay for a magazine we have here called The Monthly, which was entitled ‘Faith In Politics’. You might actually want to—I believe it’s on the web. In it, he argues quite extensively about the relationship between religious belief and the state, and he turns to the figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whom you write about extensively in your book. And I just want to read you this sentence from—I mean, obviously it’s out of context of the whole essay—but at one point he says: “I argue that a core, continuing principle shaping this engagement (between faith and state) should be that Christianity, consistent with Bonhoeffer’s critique (of the 1930s), must always take the side of the marginalised, the vulnerable and the oppressed. As noted above, this tradition is very much alive in the prophetic literature of the Old Testament.” And I wondered what your response to that would—

CH: Well, I think it’s just… I think it’s simply wish-thinking, that. I mean, Christianity is in Australia because it became the religion of Roman imperialism. That’s the only reason why it had the luck to have spread all over the world in the form that it did. Because of the conversion of Constantine. And it’s always yearned—it’s just as likely to be an ally, and for most of its life has been the ally, of the Establishment, the rich, the forces of law and order, and so forth. And the reason why Dietrich Bonhoeffer is so well-known is that there was a search to find a decent Christian or two in Germany when all this had been going on, and they found about two, and—

MC: Jagerstatter, wasn’t it?

CH: Yes. Well, Jagerstatter’s… It’s very interesting. I don’t know what’s happening about him, but I was actually just about to mention him. I mean, when, you know, the Pope… The Church wasn’t able to find a Holocaust saint or a Final Solution saint until very, very recently. Maximilian Kolbe. Who had actually been—he may or may not have done what they say he did in Auschwitz, but he seems to be quite a brave guy. But unfortunately during the thirties, he’d helped publish a pretty rabidly anti-Jewish magazine in Poland. So he’s far from ideal and he’s the best they could come up with. Because Jagerstatter did refuse constriction, and I think was beheaded, but while he was awaiting execution in prison, the priest all came to him and said, “Look, you don’t have to do this.”

MC: Yeah.

CH: “In fact, you know, if the army calls you, you’re supposed to say you’re going to go.” So, he may have said: “My religion forbids me to do it,” but they kept saying, “No, you’re mistaken about that.” So, it’s purely subjective for Rudd to say that, and it may be something he might wish to be true. But there’s nothing in Christianity that does oblige you to take the side of the poor and the downtrodden. In fact, there are many instructions very strictly to the contrary.

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MC: Let’s move outwards slightly…

CH: Christianity in some ways is anti-Capitalist, you could say, because it’s against the making of money, basically. It’s against the material world.

MC: Yes.

CH: Which is completely futile. It says… It contains many immoral injunctions, such as, you know, “Take no thought for the morrow.” So, any idea of thrift or saving or preparing for children’s sake, that’s all nonsense, because the man uttering these injunctions believed that the world was coming to an end.

MC: Yes, and most likely wished it.

CH: Yeah, well, certainly did, and promised it as if it was a good thing and said that he would be back in the lifetime of those who knew him. Which is what gives rise to that terrible story of the Wandering Jew.

MC: Yes.

CH: Because someone has to stay alive. I don’t know if you know this, but at any rate, I forget if it’s in my book or not.

MC: Yes, yes. No, the Wandering Jew is.

CH: It’s absolutely… I think it’s shit, basically. I mean it’s pure rile, and futile, to try and use Holy Scripture so-called to support any political position, and I deeply distrust anyone who does. But it would certainly… You know, some Muslims believe, or talk as if they believe, that, you know, Islam is the religion of the depressed and the downtrodden. It certainly does have an appeal to some people who are very poor, but I mean look what an Islamic Republic is like.

MC: Of course, and that’s where I was going to go next. The sort of political uses to which Islam in particular has been put. And obviously I don’t want to pick on Islam when I say this. The only reason I’m bring it up in particular is because of current events, and actually a lot of your recent writing has revolved around two sorts of—

CH: Oh, yes.

MC: —important, two very important, points. I’ll mention them to you, both, and then we’ll do them one at a time. The first thing is obviously the Islamic theocracy in Iran and the military coup earlier this year, and the second is the decision by the Yale University Press—

CH: Yeah.

MC: —not to publish the Danish cartoons. We’ll go with that one first, if you don’t mind. I was wondering, what is it, to you, what is it about the mainstream media, and now an academic publishing house, that makes them so willing to concede on a point that seems like a fairly fundamental line in the sand?

CH: There appear to be three things involved in the case at Yale. I mention them in no particular order of importance. One is, it seems, that they had—this something we didn’t know at the time the press made this decision, which we now do know—the university did involve itself. The university expects a very large donation to be coming its way from Saudi Arabia. In fact, this is an undisclosed element in the [inaudible] of quite a lot of universities, I think. Now, it’s not that they’re being offered it in order to shut down a book. It’s not as crude as that. It’s just that one of the things they take into account is endowment. And one of the things that’s very important there is the likelihood that a great deal of money might—or, therefore, indeed might not—come from Saudi Arabia.

MC: Yes.

CH: And that’s… You know, I think that’s important across the board, really. It appears to be involved, in this decision, at least in the background. It was in the minds of some of those concerned, shall we say. Second, I think there is the fear of reprisal, though it’s not quite clear against who the reprisal would come. That was certainly the official reason given, though, as I said in my article, which obviously you see to have been kind enough to read, they got that wrong, too, because they said that publishing the book would instigate violence. Instigating violence means that you hope and believe it will happen and act accordingly.

MC: Yes, this—

CH: So that was— That’s completely different from saying, “We have to weigh the consequences of possible reprisal.” Well, of course, that is indeed the cost of free speech. But to phrase it in that way is to give up the battle over free speech as if there was no such thing.

MC: Yes.

CH: Not as if you’d discussed it in another way. And then the third, I think, which also is quite pervasive now, not just in publishing and in the academy, but elsewhere, is a version of multiculturalism, or multiculturalist etiquette, whereby you pre-emptively don’t offend anyone by not publishing anything that anyone could really disagree with. And again, this has a tremendously depressing effect on the culture.

MC: Oh, I agree entirely.

CH: Those three things, all of them involved—and look, all of them, as you’ll see, very ignoble—

MC: This idea about not offending I find poisonous, to be honest.

CH: No, well, it’s absolutely—the number of groups in a multicultural, multiethnic society who could in theory exert veto is very, now, really quite large, so if you made the concession at all, it’s extremely likely you’ll start making it across the board, and this has in fact happened in Britain. The Sikhs, who we hadn’t heard from for a bit, took against a play written by a Sikh woman that showed some of the less adorable side of Sikh life—I can’t remember exactly what was at issue—anyway, this play got taken off. And so on and so forth. It becomes very, very difficult to refuse it to anybody if you concede it to anyone.

MC: Yeah.

CH: As for the Islamic Republic, I mean, long before he wrote The Satanic Verses, I thought that Salman Rushdie’s book, Shame, about Pakistan, was in some ways his masterpiece. I still think it’s better than Midnight’s Children, actually, because it showed, very calmly and in some ways quite humorously, how the whole idea of an Islamic republic is a ridiculous one. You can’t… Religion cannot define a nationality. And Pakistan—the first state to sort of proclaim itself, “We’re a country because we are a religion”—

MC: Yes.

CH: —is one of the very few countries to have completely fallen apart in that it’s had to massacre its eastern wing—east Bengal, now Bangladesh—so it’s a huge Muslim-on-Muslim butchery—

MC: Yeah.

CH: —and is now, with its other constituents, quite rapidly unravelling, hovering on being both a failed and a rogue state. Partly because it self-blinds itself, if that’s the word I’m looking for. I mean, proclaiming yourself a holy state just forbids certain kinds of self-criticism, and if you don’t have enough self-criticism then you become stagnant and rotten pretty fast. And this is a danger not just for the people of the region, but I mean everywhere, because we now know what happens with failed states is that they become rogue, and they feel their only chance is to export their violence. That’s the lesson of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the last one.

MC: Yes.

CH: So, that’s what I think about that. But I’m encouraged by the way that all the Iranians I know are pretty sure that they’re going to outlive the Islamic Republic.

MC: Yeah, and it’s also, I mean, it’s a pretty interesting week coming up regarding that I guess, what with Ahmadinejad going to New York and—

CH: Yes.

MC: —the non-proliferation Security Council meeting.

CH: No, it’s fascinating.

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MC: Let’s take it out a little further just to some general things. I’m going to throw some names at you. These were names that, in all the articles and books of yours that I have had a look at over the past couple of months—would you believe I only sort of discovered you for myself, I think, in March?—

CH: Yes, I would believe that. [Burn. — Ed.]

MC: —here were the names that I sort of came across that I was hoping you might have an opinion. Some of them you’ll recognise immediately as Australians or expat Australians, and the first of those is John Pilger.

CH: Yes. I used to know him slightly, in London, and I remember thinking that his work from Vietnam was very good, at the time I was reading it.

MC: Yes.

CH: And I dare say if I went back and read it again I’d probably still would admire quite a lot of it, because that’s something I don’t think I’d be ever likely to change my mind about. But there is a word that gets overused, and can be misused—namely, anti-American—but it has to be used about him. There’s something about the United States that means he can’t… He can’t exercise judgement about it.

MC: Yes.

CH: He just doesn’t like America. Doesn’t think it’s a good idea. And according to someone I know who knew him, he was brought up this way. It’s a family thing. So that for me sort of spoils it, so even when I’m inclined to agree I don’t like the tone.

MC: Yes, that’s my big bugbear as well. Even when I agree there’s something shrill that I can’t take.

CH: No, and it reads… It has a sort of robotic feel about it. A bit like, I’m afraid, now, to say, the work of Professor Chomsky has to me.

MC: Right.

CH: It’s lost its… It’s become inelastic. It’s a drone. A drone and a bit of a whine.

MC: I understand entirely.

CH: Yeah.

MC: The next name is someone who you actually reviewed positively either last year or the year before—I forget when the book came out—

CH: Clive.

MC: —and I was pleased to see a positive review of Mr James—

CH: Yeah.

MC: —because a lot of people didn’t like Cultural Amnesia, and, for its flaws, I was nonetheless a big fan. I think it’s an important book.

CH: No, no, it’s a very important book, and I was terrifically impressed, as someone who is, in a small way of business, in the same—I’m in the same racket—but he wrote those pieces not for publication. It’s not a collection of his stuff. These are things he wrote to please and instruct himself. And writing for the bottom drawer—if you have a family and all the rest of it—is very difficult to do. I absolutely need the spur of publication and, indeed, remuneration.

MC: [Laughs.]

CH: I wouldn’t do it for nothing. If I was in jail, of course, I would do it. But to do that level of stuff, I suppose with the eventual hope of publishing it as a book, but, you know, every now and then you’d go off on your own and write a piece about, oh, I don’t know—

MC: Ellington.

CH: Sorry?

MC: Duke Ellington.

CH: [Laughs.] For example, yes. Well, he’s extraordinarily—that’s the second thing to say—he’s an amazingly polymathic guy. And then I also think his latest book of poems, Opal Sunset, contains some absolute gems.

MC: See, it’s very interesting that you say that, because there’s been quite a furore—a minor furore—here, if you like, regarding the decision of a literary review—the one that actually comes out in the paper I work for—to publish Clive James’ poetry. A lot of people consider it—you know, don’t consider him to be a poet at all—so it’s actually very interesting to hear someone as schooled in poetry as yourself—

CH: No, I wouldn’t say he’s—he is—I mean, he is a great—well, let’s just step back a bit about Clive. It’s very difficult to be a comic and be an homme serieux at the same time. Because I think some people used to think he’d done so much clowning on TV that he had lost slightly the reputation that you need if you’re going to be a serious critic. But I think he’s managed to keep the balance really quite well. Though of course, he’s capable of light verse and so forth. It’s bloody good light verse. I’ll give you two examples from Opal Sunset. There’s a wedding anniversary present poem to his wife Prue that’s just terribly sweet and good, and obviously an example of the lighter form. But there’s a poem called Angels Over Ellsinore—it’s about Hamlet—

MC: Yes.

CH: —that’s really, I think, exquisite.

MC: Now, see, it’s very—I think that that was the poem that caused the uproar. [It wasn’t. It was Aldeburgh Dawn, which appeared in the August 2009 edition of the Australian Literary Review. — Ed.]

CH: And I was having dinner the other night with Robert Conquest, who’s one of the greatest living poets in English and also scholars in poetry, and whose good opinion is hard to get and very well worth having, and he just said, “You know, the thing about Clive’s stuff, about Clive’s poems, is that they’re always good in one way or another.” He was surprising—I mean, he doesn’t give compliments very easily, Robert Conquest. His opinion in this case would be more worth printing than mine, but you can say that it was me who told you.

MC: Yeah, second-hand.

CH: So, no, I’m very… I’m pro-Clive. I don’t see much of his—if any, really—of his TV stuff.

MC: No, no, me, either.

CH: Maybe I’m shielded from any other impression. I don’t watch the television.

MC: Next name. Gore Vidal, the man who is on the record as saying that you are disowned as his heir apparent.

CH: Now, he… I saw him sort of slightly take it back, in a really rather jokey way. Someone sent me a tape of him at a meeting in New York. Is that the one you mean or has he done it more?

MC: I’m not sure. I’m not sure. I’ve just seen a… You’re talking to a Gen Y-er. I’ve seen it on YouTube, him saying, “Oh, you know, he was going to be my—”

CH: Yeah.

MC: “—going to be my heir but no longer.” I haven’t seen the recantation.

CH: Right. Well, no, that… I mean, I don’t know if that would have been an actual excommunication. We may well be talking about the same—

MC: Oh, we may be, yeah.

CH: I in any case had stopped using it as a blurb on my book jackets.

MC: Yeah.

CH: After 9/11, I told my publisher not to use it.

MC: Yeah.

CH: He’s still on Unacknowledged Legislation. Because I mean I don’t want to airbrush the past, and I was proud enough of it at the time. But I wouldn’t use it again.

MC: Yes. How long after September 11 was it?

CH: Well, it didn’t take him very long to come out with a sort of Pearl Harbour-ish, pseudo-interpretation. Which I have a feeling he hasn’t reprinted in any of his books. And in his most recent memoir he didn’t go on about it either.

MC: No, no, that’s correct, he didn’t.

CH: He may himself be not that proud of it. But the truth of the matter is—and it’s not as if I haven’t always known this—I mean, Gore is—and you must correct me if I’m being condescending here, but if I said he was a Lindberghian would you know what I’m on about?

MC: Yeah.

CH: I mean, America first, Charles Lindbergh, and that was his first hero. He’s never made any bones of it.

MC: No, no. Well, I mean, he writes about it quite extensively in Palimpsest and—

CH: Yes. He does think Pearl Harbour was a fix. Either that it was collusion by Roosevelt or at least foreknowledge on his part. He doesn’t think the Second World War was worth fighting in. He is in many ways quite a right-wing isolationist.

MC: Yes.

CH: It’s because some people are naïve enough to confuse this with sort of anti-imperialism that they think of him as being rather more to the left than he really is, and there’s an element of I have to say paranoia involved in that, that world outlook, and it keeps popping out. There are times when that can be a curiosity in somebody, but it’s like Pat Buchanan, the extreme-right Catholic writer here—

MC: [Laughs.]

CH: —he’s an America first fan as well.

MC: See, it’s interesting, isn’t it, the way—

CH: But in Buchanan’s case, it’s a bit worse because there’s a sneaking sympathy for fascism in Buchanan. I don’t suspect Gore of that at all.

MC: No.

CH: But it was so dingy to read this tenth-rate little innuendo piece, and I thought, look, 9/11 is one of these things that is, I think quite rightly, thought of as defining—I don’t care how many people think that’s a cliché—and I have no wriggle room on this point at all. And it’s not a difference of emphasis. I mean, it’s, for me, it decides what I think about absolutely everybody.

MC: Yeah.

CH: So, I don’t know… The last time I saw him it was sort of painful. And I have a feeling that probably was our last meeting.

MC: Where was that?

CH: That was at Hay-on-Wye, the literary festival, the year before last. Or do I mean last year? Last year. And he was very… Well, he… It was a rather cold meeting.

MC: Do you regret those—

CH: But I mean I still that his series of novels about the United States—

MC: Yes.

CH: —is a great—really great. Even though one of those does contain the Pearl Harbour bee-in-the-bonnet stuff, still [inaudible] it, that argument is a part of the historical record, no question about it. I think it’s a great series, and I think his book Lincoln within that series is a masterpiece.

MC: Yeah.

CH: I think his novel Julian is one of the great novels about the ancient world.

MC: Lincoln is currently on my pile.

CH: Well, it’s terribly good.

MC: I’ll move it to the top. Next name: Hugo Chávez.

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CH: I’ve met Chávez. I’ve flown around on his plane, during the Venezuelan elections.

MC: I’m sure that was an experience-and-a-half.

[Background noise.]

CH: Well, I can see why people find him charming. He’s very ebullient, as they say. He’s got really quite an engaging manner. His English isn’t much good—it’s better than he lets on—but, you know, he’d read some of my stuff and he cheesed me about Trotsky and this that and the other and—

MC: That’s the next name on the list.

CH: I’ve heard him make a speech, which he has a vice that’s always very well worth noticing because it’s always a bad sign: he doesn’t know when to sit down.

MC: Yeah.

CH: He’s worse than Castro was.

MC: Bloody hell.

CH: He won’t shut up. There was a time he stayed on his own TV show for something like twelve hours—I have a note of it somewhere—without going to the loo.

MC: It’s actually inhuman, I think.

CH: Yeah, and it’s always a bad sign. And then he told me that he didn’t think the United States landed on the moon. He didn’t believe in the existence of Osama bin Laden. He thought all of this was all a put-up job. So, he’s a whacko.

MC: Is he a dangerous whacko?

CH: Yeah. I think so. I mean, the ambassador of a neighbouring country—not Colombia, but I can’t tell you—

MC: No, that’s aright.

CH: —anyway, I mean not a country that’s a right-wing military dictatorship or anything of the sort—

MC: Sure.

CH: —said they’re very, very worried that he’s opened a factory in Venezuela for the manufacture of Kalashnikov weapons in great quantity. There’s no possible— Venezuela doesn’t need them.

MC: Yeah. And of course he’s just bought a bunch of Russian tanks as well.

CH: Yes. He spends a great deal too much money on weaponry he doesn’t need locally. So, the question is: Well, where’s it going? And I mean, I think the Colombian allegations against him have been proven correct: that the FARC does get weaponry and encouragement from Venezuela.

MC: Is there… What is it about the left that refuses to see that this is a danger and that he’s following down a rather too-familiar path?

CH: Well, there are quite a lot of people on the Venezuelan left who have always said that they think he’s very dangerous.

MC: Yes.

CH: And internationally, I mean, again, it’s the Pilger question, and the Chomsky question: If you do think that American imperialism and its globalised, capitalist form and so on is the most dangerous thing in the world, or what they would say is the main enemy, then that’s what you think.

MC: Yeah.

CH: Which means that it wouldn’t be true to say that of the Islamic Republic of Iran, for example, and its alliance with Venezuela. It would mean that North Korea and the Taliban were not as bad as America. So really all these questions are a test of the same question: Do you think the United States is a good idea or don’t you? And again it’s a bit like the religion question. Once you know what someone really thinks about that, you more or less know everything you need to know. Or, well, no, I won’t say that, because nothing explains everything, but— Or, if it does, it doesn’t explain enough, because—

MC: No, but there are certain litmus tests or lines in the sand.

CH: It’s a litmus.

MC: Yeah. Earlier this year, in a conversation with Robert Service, you were asked—you were given a proposition—that history allows every man one sentence, and you were asked that question of Trotsky. And you said you’d have to think about it. I wondered if you’d thought about it at all.

CH: [Laughs.] Very good. Thank you. Well-spotted. Gosh. No, I haven’t.

MC: [Laughs.]

CH: I went off and thought about something else immediately after the show.

MC: [Laughs.]

CH: You’d have to give me some more notice. By the way, I’m not—I’m really not sure that I agree with Peter’s premise there, either. I mean, I couldn’t be certain that I—

MC: —could do it for anyone else?

CH: That I should be able to do it. I wasn’t even sure that I should. I’ll think about that, too.

MC: In your recent piece on The Baader Meinhof Complex…

CH: Yes. Could you hold on one second?

MC: Yeah, no worries.

CH: I just need to check something. Hold on.

[Background noise.]

CH: Yes.

MC: You mentioned in the first paragraph of that piece, which I think was in September’s—I think it was just web-only, actually—

CH: It was.

MC: —you mentioned the romanticisation of the revolutionary.

CH: Yes.

MC: You mentioned Che, Steven Soderbergh’s film, and I wondered if you’d seen it and what your take on it was.

CH: No, I haven’t.

MC: Okay. Well, I look forward to what you have to say when—

CH: I’m told it was pulverisingly dull but that Benicio Del Toro was brilliant.

MC: It’s a very methodically made film.

CH: I didn’t go see The Motorcycle Diaries, either. I did review at some length—I think it was for The New York Review of Books—John Lee Anderson’s biography of Guevara, which I thought was terrific.

MC: I’ll look that up.

CH: It’s very, very good, and very scrupulous, very interesting.

MC: Do you see a lot of films? Because I’ve got another film question.

CH: No, I don’t. It’s almost always a disappointment or insult going to the movies, because the kind of demographic that people are making films for these days I think conspicuously doesn’t include me.

MC: Yeah, that’s sort of what I feel unless there’s a film festival on.

CH: I did quite enjoy Woodstock, though it was about half an hour too long.

MC: See, I haven’t seen that yet. I don’t think it’s actually opened here.

CH: It’s not bad. In fact, it’s actually it’s very—in parts, it’s extremely good. It’s very funny and quite touching, but it could have been cut.

MC: I do know that it’s coming out here. I’m not sure if it’s opened yet.

CH: No, it’s worth it. I didn’t mind that. I forget what else. But generally, I come away thinking, Oh, God. And the Tarantino one that I saw, I was just so disgusted…

MC: Inglourious Basterds?

CH: Yeah. Oh, what a horrible thing. What a piece of shit that is—he is, actually.

MC: What was it about that film that grated with you?

CH: Well, I think a trick I find very vulgar is that of exhibiting a lot of sadism—

MC: Yes.

CH: —as a means of—under the pretence of disapproving of it. I don’t like that at all. This was a horrible surreptitious example of that.

MC: Especially with such a long film?

CH: And some really, really, really bad acting, including by Brad Pitt. Maybe the worst acting performance I’ve ever seen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone act so contemptibly. No, I was enraged. I really… It was like sitting in the dark having a sort of great pot of warm piss emptied very slowly over your head.

MC: I imagine that you found the ending also offensive, gravely offensive?

CH: It was just revolting, cheap, and the sort of applause it got—the sort of people it was getting it from in the dark—laughter in the dark. Very nasty, very nasty experience all round.

MC: Religulous?

CH: Better than I’d been led to expect. People had told me it went for soft targets and sort of easy religious freaks and so on. But in fact, I thought it was more tough-minded than that, as well as quite funny. I thought it was good.

MC: Okay, that’s my list. I understand that I’ve—I realise I’ve taken up quite a lot of your time already.

CH: I am going to have to get on with it in a minute, I’m sorry to say, but I’ve really enjoyed talking.

MC: No, look, that’s alright. I’ll just throw you a couple more.

CH: Yes, please.

MC: I’m halfway through For the Sake of Argument and I think about a month ago, before I read God Is Not Great, I finished Love, Poverty, and War.

CH: Oh, thank you.

MC: How do you think—apart from the obvious, the obvious changes, the sort of changes in target, if you like—

CH: Yeah.

MC: —how do you think you’ve changed as a writer and commentator, if you like? I don’t want to use the world analyst, but essayist, you know.

CH: I’m not sure my own opinion of this is worth having.

MC: This isn’t for the article. This is for me.

CH: Oh, right. I wish I could spend more time writing about literature and less about politics.

MC: Yeah.

CH: But I realise also that what I used to say to people, when I was much more engagé myself, which is that, you know, you can’t be apolitical. It will come and get you. It’s not that you shouldn’t. It’s that, you know, you won’t be able to stay neutral. [Inaudible.] The ruthless dialectics, you know, you may not be interested in them, but they’re interested in you, that sort of thing. Well, anyway, I stopped saying that it quite that way, because that was when I was trying to get people involved in a different way, but I did realise with 9/11 and with a few other things that, you know, I shouldn’t have ever for an instant forgotten my own advice that one must keep up an intelligent interest in the outside political world.

MC: Yes.

CH: And so… But for all that—and I know exactly in that world what I’m supposed to be doing—that is, making sure to help rally the forces of secularism—

MC: It’s interesting that you use the world “rally,” because one of the things that strikes me much more about the pieces in the more recent of the two collections, especially the last section, and also in God Is Not Great, actually, is this sort of hint of the pamphleteer, sort of the person trying to shock people back into coherence and make them think.

CH: Well, if you say that, I feel I haven’t wasted my time.

MC: [Laughs.] You mentioned earlier that you have a, you know, the desire to appear in print and also, obviously, the remuneration for that is a driving force in your work and obviously you would write in prison or whatever. The print media is going through quite a significant upheaval in a lot of ways, and I wonder sort of where you put yourself within that, knowing you write for a lot more magazines, obviously, than newspapers.

CH: Yeah. Well, I mean, look, it’s in my mind all the time, because… I mean, Vanity Fair is unlikely to be done in by the recession. But I know, for example, that The Atlantic, which is also very dear to my heart, I was reading a piece yesterday in the New York Times to the effect that— Just a second.

[Background noise.]

CH: I’m going to have to go in a second.

MC: Yes, no worries.

CH: I think it said something like twenty-five per cent down on advertising over the last year, was it? It was not a negligible thing. And the story was about Andrew Sullivan, who’s a friend of mine, using his blog to tell people to subscribe to the print version, which apparently worked, sort of transferring people from their electronic readership to their paper readership. But it did seem like a strange thing to be doing.

MC: Yeah.

CH: I mean, I’m too old to change now. I’m… I mean, I do write for Slate, and that does get syndicated electronically by the New York Times, as a matter of fact. But you know, for me, I begin to think that the paper newspaper may be going, more gradually. I don’t think that will be true of either the magazine or the book.

MC: Well, hopefully not the book.

CH: No, I don’t think so.

MC: I think that would be unbearable.

CH: I mean, I’ve been hearing about the death of all this all my life, and I don’t believe it’s going to happen. But the newspaper world is going to change, obviously, out of recognition.

MC: Do you have time for two more?

CH: Yes.

MC: Where does one go in New York City and Washington on one’s first visit to those cities?

CH: Oh, gosh.

MC: The reason I ask is because I’m making my first trip over halfway through next month for six weeks. That was a trick question.

CH: Yes.

MC: If you— I give you— I’ll get your e-mail at the end of the conversation. The last one is: What are you reading?

CH: As we speak, I’m reading Taylor Branch’s The Clinton Tapes. Taylor Branch is a biographer of Martin Luther King and he’s an old friend of Clinton’s and it turns out that, during the Clinton administration, he was nearly eighty times—seventy-nine times, to be exact—on the late-night tape conversations with Bill about how things were going, and he’s made a very, very, very interesting book out of them. Which for me has had the odd effect of making Clinton look better.

MC: Wow.

CH: Yes. I mean, just more intelligent and a bit more sympathetic. But I mean Taylor is—represents Clinton’s good side…

MC: Yes.

CH: And he’s done his old friend a real favour. And I’m reviewing it for Newsweek.

MC: Oh, great.

CH: So, I’m immersed in that.

MC: Just so you know, the Opera House… The Concert Hall, which is I believe where you are appearing, has a maximum capacity of two-thousand six hundred and seventy-nine, and the front section of it, which is sort of the space before the stage, has a capacity of 2100. I’m not sure if they’re trying to fill the whole thing or what the go is.

CH: Okay. Alright. Well, got to run.

MC: Yes, no worries. Thank you very much for your time. Do you have an e-mail address I can contact you on?

CH: Yes. It’s [**********@aol.com]. I look forward to seeing what you write.

MC: Yeah, I’ll be in touch.

CH: Okay.

MC: Take care.

CH: Thanks. You, too.

MC: Bye.

When I was twenty-five, I visited Ernest Hemingway’s grave. I was at the tail-end of a six-month trip around the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. I was carrying a small brick of old Grafton paperbacks, which I’d made my way through as I’d made my way around. (You can read my piece about Havana’s cottage Hemingway industry, which was one of my very first pieces of freelance foreign correspondence, here.) As I recounted later, in a piece that was otherwise about Geoff Dyer:

I was reading The Garden of Eden at the time, the best of Hemingway’s posthumously published novels, and brought it along in case I felt the urge to say something. But when I started reading a random passage out loud, it seemed entirely out of place. Here I was, shin-deep in snow, feeling it seep through my inappropriate boat shoes, reading about beautiful people enjoying summer (and experimenting with gender fluidity, as it happened) on the south coast of France.

Luckily, someone had brought a copy of the collected stories and left it on the grave, where it had frozen solid. I picked it up, prised it open, and pulled the pages apart until I found a ‘A Day’s Wait’ from Winner Take Nothing. It is a story about a man with a sick child. The doctor has given the child his temperature in Fahrenheit, but the child only knows Celsius. As a result, he believes his temperature is through the roof and is worried he’s going to die. It was a good story to read, because it’s short and it was cold out. I took a selfie with the headstone and walked back to my hotel.

My interest in Hemingway never faded. I still own a small library of books about the man: Carlos Baker’s 1969 biography, Anthony Burgess’ 1985 appraisal, Lesley Blume’s splendidly gossipy Everybody Behaves Badly, about the writing and publication of The Sun Also Rises. I have been to Pamplona seven times. I know Hemingway’s grandson and great-grandson. I have watched Ken Burns’ six-hour documentary three times. (It’s good, though I still get annoyed by how it was discussed in the media, as though Burns had uncovered some great trove of new information, particularly about Hemingway’s relationship with gender. The documentary, which in the end spends less than five minutes on the topic, doesn’t say anything that anyone who has read The Garden of Eden, or any biography written since Kenneth Lynn’s Hemingway in 1987, didn’t already know. (The best thing about the documentary is Edna O’Brien, who defends Hemingway against charges of misogyny but takes him to task for the “schoolboy writing” of The Old Man and the Sea. The recent documentary about O’Brien, Blue Road, is worth tracking down if you haven’t already seen it.) My point is that I’m pretty well-versed in the man.

As my friend Dave once gently warned me, though: “You should not treat Hemingway or Hitchens as models to be emulated.” (I’d write about Hitchens worship, but Padraig Reidy has already done so.) I did and didn’t take that warning to heart. My vices are, or have been, what they are. But I can’t see myself standing at Hemingway’s grave and earnestly reading aloud to it today. What I did at the age of twenty-five is not what I would do at the age of forty.

There are plenty of others who would, though. Because I’m an idiot, I remain a member of a Facebook group of Hemingway fans. With the exception of one overly obsessive guy from India, who spams the page with old photos of Hemingway two or three times a day—and whom I once met in Pamplona, as it happens—and a woman who claims to be the granddaughter of the Finca Vigía’s Hemingway-era maid, they are almost all American men, usually somewhere north of fifty, in what appears to me to be luxurious early retirement. Based on their dress sense, I would say that the majority of them live in Florida.

My problem with the members of this group—or at least the handful of them that do the vast majority of the posting—is that their love of Hemingway is entirely back-to-front: they idolise the man, not the work. Where they do idolise the work, they idolise all of it, believing Across the River and Into the Trees to be every bit as good as A Farewell to Arms. (Believe me when I say that it isn’t. Across the River and Into the Trees is bad.) In a lot of cases, though, they explicitly prefer the man to the work. Indeed, it sometimes seems as though it would be better if there were no reading involved at all, and I’m sure that in a lot of cases there isn’t. Here’s a recent sample of members explaining why they joined the group:

Hemingway actually used punctuation quite a lot, so I’m not sure what that last guy is getting at. Anyway:

This strikes me as strange. Even I, who flew to Idaho on Thanksgiving when I was already in Los Angeles and about to go home, did so because I’d just spent six months reading everything from A Farewell to Arms to The Garden of Eden. When I began to learn more about the man, I mostly jettisoned him in favour of the books.

This idolisation of the life tends to rest on a very selective reading of it. I’m sure the men in this Facebook group aren’t interested in cycling through wives, alienating friends, pretending to hunt U-boats so they can get shitfaced with their mates, contravening the Geneva Conventions, giving themselves multiple concussions, and shooting themselves at the end of it. If their travel photos are anything to go by—and the group’s page, when it doesn’t consist of memes misattributing quotes to Hemingway, or else of AI-colourised photos of him and Ingrid Bergman, mostly consists of photos of these guys posing with statues in bars—what they’re interested in is travelling, drinking, attempting to hook marlin, pretending to hunt U-boats so they can get shitfaced with their mates, and, much less occasionally, running with bulls. (I suspect that more than one of them has at least tried to kill an African elephant, though they’ve been wise enough to keep those photos to themselves.) A lot of them, it goes without saying, are self-published authors. Their books are almost all about Hemingway, or at least include his name in the title.

Naomi Kanakia recently wrote a piece calling Hemingway the most important and influential American fiction writer of the twentieth century. I don’t think there’s anything controversial about this. Being important and influential is not the same as being the best, though I personally think that Hemingway vies for that title, too. His influence, though, can’t be doubted with any great seriousness. Especially after For Whom the Bell Tolls—the point, coincidentally, that his own batting average began to go down—much American writing was either explicitly in debt to Hemingway or else a shot across his bow. The debt was not always obvious—Joan Didion taught herself to write sentences by copying Hemingway’s—nor was it always stylistic. Michener owed a great deal to Hemingway, even though he wrote a very different kind of prose, and Algren wrote a strangely compelling book, Notes from a Sea Diary: Hemingway All the Way, that to my mind owes more to Henry Miller. Norman Mailer wanted to be Hemingway, or at least to fight him.

What Kanakia doesn’t mention is the importance and influence of Hemingway’s fame. I’m not talking about the influence of that fame on him, which was pretty obviously bad. I’m talking about that way that, from the 1930s onwards, his face could sell magazines, his life could sell products, his travel choices could sell package tours. Prior to Hemingway, Twain was the most famous author that America had known. But Hemingway, as far as I know, was America’s first author-as-lifestyle-brand, and the influence of this, throughout the middle part of the century, cannot be understated. It’s arguably because of Hemingway that Mailer and Vidal could become television stars, or that Didion could become a lifestyle brand of her own. It’s ironic, given how opposed she was to the posthumous publication of Hemingway’s work—let along things like the announcement of “an ‘Ernest Hemingway Collection’ at the International Home Furnishings Market in High Point, North Carolina, offering ‘96 pieces of living, dining and bedroom furniture and accessories’ in four themes, ‘Kenya,’ ‘Key West,’ ‘Havana,’ and ‘Ketchum’”—to note how her diary, and her belongings, have been treated since her own death.

I am not surprised that Hemingway’s work has lasted, especially the short stories and the first two novels. What I find remarkable is that the brand has, too, and that it still in some cases overshadows the work. Hemingway has been dead a long time. A lot of his extracurricular activities, such as killing things, have gone more or less the way of the things he killed.

The Atlantic recently ran a piece about Thomas McGuane that asked what we will lose “when we lose the ‘literary outdoorsman’”. It didn’t answer the question—which rather made me wonder why it had asked it—and generally struck me as a pretty lazy piece of writing. (Calling Hemingway’s prose “undecorated” is either a failure of reading or a wilful misrepresentation.) But its descriptions of McGuane’s characters struck me as broadly relevant to this rant:

In a deeper sense, [Ninety-two in the Shade is] about being a man with no good wars to fight, no great causes to cling to, and no duty that calls him in a culture whose norms and customs are in flux. “Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea,” its memorable opening line reads, “why we are having all this trouble with our republic.”

There was also this, about McGuane’s more recent fiction:

His protagonists are now mostly men stuck in middle age or older, who have realised that purpose has permanently eluded them. Strip malls, dull office jobs, emptied-out prairie towns, and frayed families dominate the foreground. For his characters, fishing and hunting are hobbies, not burning obsessions. These characters often reflect on the past—theirs, their fathers’, their country’s—and feel regret.

Read in a blinkered, romantic way, Hemingway’s life seems vital and important in a way a lot of our lives now do not. Read in a blinkered, romantic way, it scratches certain itches for the kind of man that McGuane writes about. The impulse to live lives of action and purpose, like Hemingway’s during the 1930s, is understandable, and, to me, familiar. It is also wrongheaded. As many of us learned the hard way during the pandemic, the anvil of history only looks attractive when you’re not actually on it. (You can also become a wingnut in your desperation to experience its face, as Hemingway, whose politics towards the end of his life were what we would today describe as libertarian, might well have done had he not fatally insisted upon exercising his Second Amendment rights. There’s a sad old man in Cullen Hoback’s Q: Into the Storm, whom I think about from time to time, telling his fellow conspiracy theorists that parsing Q’s “drops” is the most important thing of which he has ever been a part. This strikes me as a desperate unmet need for community more than anything, but it’s nevertheless related. John Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson, has himself been a vocal Trumpist since the pandemic.) There is also a strong homosocial aspect to Hemingway’s life and work that I think a lot of heterosexual men find semi-secretly appealing. There remain few places where men, at least of a certain age, can express love and affection towards one another outside of the hunting or playing field, the encierro, the bar, or the front line. I know many of them from Pamplona.

But I think the main reason the personality cult persists, as opposed to or at least alongside mere love of the work, is that Hemingway’s life gives a certain type of man permission to be something in which the rest of the world is, correctly, no longer particularly interested: a boor. This is why they use Facebook: to find likeminded boors, and bores. The great irony is that Hemingway was a deeply competitive man who saw a threat in anyone straying on his turf, literary or otherwise. (I adore A Moveable Feast as much as the next reader, but we’re not doing ourselves any favours by ignoring that a lot of it amounts to literal penis measurement.) Not only was Hemingway not, as Dave warned me, the kind of man you’d want to be, he was also not the kind of man who’d want you around—or whom, I suspect, you’d want around—if you were. (“Until Bill Belichick came along, I can’t think of anybody more disagreeable,” McGuane says in the Atlantic piece.) Ernest Hemingway is not your friend, and not only because he’s dead. He wouldn’t have been your friend had he lived. The fact that he would most likely have loathed you is evidenced by the work.

But then these guys wouldn’t know that, having not read it properly in the first place.

While we’re on the topic of Ken Burns, I recently listened to Ted Danson’s interview with him on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast. His Hemingway press tour may have been misleading, but the one he’s doing for his series about the American Revolution is positively unhinged.

I wrote about Burns’ The Vietnam War when it came out and I think it is a remarkable piece of work. What was striking about that press tour, compared to this one, is that Burns did it with his co-director, Lynn Novick, who mostly kept him from saying anything stupid. I do say “mostly”. While promoting The Vietnam War, Burns continually kept telling interviewers that Novick had to convince him to include Vietnamese voices. “[W]e’re making an American film,” he said. He just didn’t get that Vietnam was a Vietnamese story as much as, or more than, an American one. As Việt Thanh Nguyễn observed in Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, this is not uncommon. But it is a bit loony.

Well, Burns told Danson that he considers the American Revolution the single most important event since the crucifixion of the Christ. I guess loony is what we’re dealing with. I shouldn’t be surprised, because Burns is essentially Norman Rockwell with a movie camera, but I’m always struck, whenever I hear him speak, by how myopic and nationalistic he is. I have to remind myself that he, the man who rightly made the history of baseball a story about racism, insisted on describing the Mỹ Lai massacre as “killing” rather than “murder,” despite his military advisor pushing for the latter.

I can deal with American exceptionalism when it’s coming from the right. I expect those people to be ignorant and insane. It’s when it’s coming from liberals that I am forced to remember that there is a brainworm abroad in the United States, from sea to shining sea.

For the record, I’d say that the most important event since the crucifixion was the invention of the printing press, but that’s because I love a bit of moveable type. We all have our biases.

If American exceptionalism has its insidious liberal forms, then Hindu nationalism, or Hindutva, has only one: an odious superiority complex born of a much more odious inferiority one. Narendra Modi, my bête noire, made headlines last week by declaring war on the long-dead 19th Century colonialist Thomas Macaulay. Modi said that Macaulay’s aim was to create Indians who “are Indians by appearance but British at heart,” leading, he continued, to the deep-seated belief that the Western or foreign was superior to the local. Macaulay destroyed India’s “self-confidence and instilled a sense of inferiority. In one stroke, he discarded thousands of years of India’s knowledge, science, art, culture, and entire way of life.”

It says something about India—either something positive, about the level of public discourse, or more likely something negative, about the fact that the man’s every utterance is worthy of air-time—that this prompted a televised debate featuring William Dalrymple and Amish Trapathi. (I know I’ve been mentioning William a lot, and I am writing a long essay about his early work at the moment, so you can expect at least a little more. To be fair, though, I am in India.)

Macaulay was a racist and isn’t really worthy of defence. But his transformation into an all-purpose bogeyman last week was tendentious in the extreme. Modi’s most transparent bit was claiming that India should spend the next ten years abolishing its sense of so-called “psychological slavery”. What he meant, of course, was that he, or at least the BJP, should remain in power for at least another decade to oversee the process. There is no way to judge the success or failure of such a campaign, so it’s all a bit of a furphy, but then most of Modi’s culture war shtick—when it doesn’t lead to actual war—is a furphy. I had two responses to his comments. The first was to think: You’ve been in power for more than a decade. It is hilarious to think that, eleven years into the BJP’s rule, he hasn’t had the opportunity to change the Indian mindset for the better. Indeed, it’s hilarious to argue that he hasn’t successfully changed it for the worst. From the very beginning, Modi and his Home Minister, Amit Shah—Palpatine to Modi’s Vader, Cheney to his Bush—established a permission structure that enabled and rewarded Hinduism’s worst and most violent instincts, towards enemies foreign and domestic alike. The second thing I thought was that you have to have a lot of gumption to admit that you’ve failed so thoroughly at governing that you have to blame the cold dead hand of Thomas Macaulay and then ask for another decade.

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This is fairly standard stuff. Where Trump blames the Democrats for his policy failures, Modi blames the British Empire. (He also implicitly blames the Indian people, though this tends to go unremarked upon.) This is Hindutva’s entire game plan and always has been: over-correction to the point of silliness. That there is value in Hindu religion and philosophy seems self-evident to me. The idea that Ganesha is proof that Indians invented gene-splicing is, conversely, dumb. I didn’t think much of Trapathi’s arguments about ayurvedic medicine and the rest of it, but even he was saying that learning English seems pretty useful.

I was very impressed by Kalim’s recent piece, which, like Yogendra Yadev’s comments a few months ago, got at something quite important, not only about Modi and Hindutva, but about authoritarians in general. They’re really insecure. They have imposter syndrome. It’s why Modi’s chest needs to be fifty-six inches and why the Statue of Unity needs to be five hundred and ninety-seven feet tall. It’s why Hanuman, the monkey god, needs to have been the first being to have gone into space.

This, far more than English-style schooling, is where the long tail of colonialism is at its most apparent: in the BJP’s sense that it is in fact a silly and ineffectual government, and in its need to insist very loudly that it isn’t, or that, if it is, the British are to blame. I think it explains most reactionary governments, except, perhaps, for Israel’s, which is, whatever else we might say about it, nothing if not murderously effective.

As an aside, India and Israel last week initiated a free-trade deal, with “technology transfer” one of its key points. Read between those lines, if you can stomach it. India is, as Antony Loewenstein has written, already Israel’s largest weapons buyer. He has also written at length about India’s use of Israeli technology in Kashmir and elsewhere. The gradual pull of Modi into Netanyahu’s fatal orbit, to the point that India’s long-standing support of the Palestinians now seems very much a thing of the past, is to be deplored.

I cut my stay in the mountains short a day in order to be able to visit Chandigarh's Capitol Complex. I went after work on Friday.

Nehru commissioned Chandigarh in 1950. After Partition left the historical capital of the Punjab, Lahore, in Pakistani territory, India required a new administrative centre for its own Punjabi state. Nehru, my favourite of the founding fathers after Ambedkar, saw in this necessity an opportunity: Chandigarh would embody the forward-looking ethos he believed essential for a modern India. He insisted on a break with historical styles, selecting Western modernists—first the American planner Albert Mayer, then later Le Corbusier—to design an urban environment guided by rationalism and functionality. At Chandigarh’s inauguration, he described the city as “symbolic of the freedom of India, unfettered by the traditions of the past.”

But the city also revealed the tensions inherent in this vision, especially between materials and climate, technocracy and lived reality, idealism and, if I’m being honest, India. In City of Djinns, Dalrymple describes the commission as “disastrous,” which I think is perhaps laying it on a bit thick. “Chandigarh is now an urban disaster,” he writes, “a monument to stained concrete and discredited modernism.” I think this might have something to do with William’s personal architectural tastes, which don’t tend much towards brutalism, though I must also admit that the place left me cold.

Like Canberra, Chandigarh is a planned city, and I actually got very strong Canberra vibes the whole time I was there. The roundabouts, the lake, the sense of it being, at heart, a company town. It’s one of those cities that you can tell has been designed—come what may on the ground—to be looked at primarily from the air. (It’s designed to look, from the air, like a body, with the complex as the head or brain, the residential and commercial areas as the torso, the green spaces as the lungs.) That said, it works, and is one of the cleanest and seemingly most liveable cities I’ve visited in India outside of the hills.

But the Capitol Complex is still pretty ugly. Its concrete is streaked, almost oozing, with grime. There is much to admire in the High Court building, such as its use of colour and its heat-regulating design. But as in Canberra, where, as I wrote at the end of Terms of Service, the major buildings seem inordinately spread out over the Parliamentary Triangle, like children’s building blocks left out in long grass, the complex is mostly one vast prison yard, with the usual dust and weeds and rutting monkeys and fetid water the colour of the backbench. It was disappointing because I wanted to love it. I was reminded, instead, of Volgograd, or perhaps of Pripyat.

It is in the nature of my travels in India that I always wind up missing something. It is why I wind up returning everywhere I’ve already been, even while adding new places to the list. I had no idea there was a Le Corbusier museum directly opposite my hotel, taking up the building in which the Swiss-French architect designed the city, the only time he ever applied his theories to urban design. Those theories—best summed up by his rather dystopian claim that a house is a machine for living in—were actually the basis for one of the stranger pieces of academic film criticism I ever wrote. It compared Cronenberg’s Shivers to Tati’s Playtime, the former of which is about the resistance of the human body to such buildings, and the latter of which inculcates such resistance in the viewer by teaching her, and her eyes, to wander off-grid, beyond the straight lines, and take in an entire frame, like a Where’s Wally spread, of termitic action. But that’s another story. In reality, these places just get old and become disgusting. I asked the guide if they ever clean the complex. He said they do, once a year, with special high-powered hoses. It isn’t working.

There is a type of audience member who wants so badly for you to know that they get it, that they’re hip, that they intentionally, embarrassingly, turn themselves into a sideshow. They are almost always men.

On Saturday night, a world away and then some from Kheerganga, I went to the National Centre for the Performing Arts with a friend from Pune to attend Mumbai’s International Jazz Festival. The Australian bassist, Nicki Parrott, performed, as did the American guitarist Mike Stern and his band.

It was during Stern’s set—a riotous wall of sound, made strange by the fact that Stern, from a distance, could plausibly pass for Jamie Lee Curtis in an Aimee Mann wig—that people started behaving obnoxiously. In Ubud, during Sam Dalrymple’s session, two women behind me and my friend, Ted, kept trying and failing to finish Sam’s sentences, loudly. Here, Indian guys, who I assume thought they knew something about guitars, did something similar. A middle-aged guy in front of us kept playing air guitar. Three guys behind us—we were at the back of the auditorium—kept telling the sound guy to turn certain instruments up or down. At one point, the air guitar guy turned around in annoyance. Dude, I thought, you are also annoying.

Is it about wanting to be on stage? Is it about wanting people to know that you know things? What does it achieve? I understand involuntarily gasping when something is remarkable, because I involuntarily gasped myself, usually when the Australian saxophonist Blaine Whittaker was playing. The problem is trying to anticipate that remarkability, or, worse, nodding and exclaiming approval once it has happened, as though you are the arbiter, and that you saw it coming.

I give a pass to Parrott, not only because her name is fantastic, but because when I caught a glimpse of her watching Stern, down in the front bopping around like a madwoman, it was clear that she was not performing at all. She was simply into it, too far gone. The bald air guitarist in front of us looked down and thought: I wish I could be so entirely without inhibition, that I didn’t need to make sure that strangers know I know things, that I didn’t have to audibly and visibly judge things out of fear that, if I didn’t, I might myself be judged.

Actually, I have no idea what he was thinking. He probably wasn’t even looking at her. But the difference between his performative enjoyment and her actual enjoyment was something he might have done well to reflect upon. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

I am sitting in my hotel room in the Parvati Valley, a little down the road from the village of Pulga, watching the shadow of the mountains behind me inch down the side of those across the river. If you focus on a single point, such as a green-roofed house or a particularly notable tree, you can actually see the shadow moving, so rapid is the sunrise here. I am waiting for my next meeting to begin and am in the meantime working through my emails. I have just returned from a trek to Kheerganga and my legs, particularly my knees, are on fire. The things we do for our writing.

It has been slow going on the writing front since I arrived in India two weeks ago. I am still getting used to the pre-dawn starts, especially here in the chill of the mountains. While finishing work at lunchtime is a blessing, the impulse is to walk around and explore, not to hole up somewhere with a notebook, even when, as in these parts, there is almost nothing else to do. I am working on several long-form essays, but they are inching along like the shadow on the mountains, only not as quickly.

Part of the problem is that, whether because I’m tired by three or simply out of practice, my observational powers haven’t felt as acute or as fired up as they have been on previous visits. This is almost shameful in context, given the sheer richness and abundance of detail on offer. From the Hebrew-language stickers mourning fallen IDF soldiers, which festoon nearly every café in the valley, to the riot of hues that the mountains assume in the fading light of day, there is always something to notice and write about. The other problem is that the Parvati Valley section of my next novel is the least fleshed-out of the five. Although I have been taking a lot of notes, I hadn’t, until this past weekend, had any real idea where they fit, or how to start turning them into something useful.

Going to Kheerganga, then, proved necessary in more ways than one.

We started at Pulga Dam on Saturday morning. A milky turquoise lake of fabric softener, the reservoir is part of the Parbati-II Hydroelectric Project, which became fully operational in April this year. As I sat waiting for my guide to arrive, groups of girls in maroon school uniforms crossed the dam on their way to Barshaini, a couple of kilometres away down the valley, each tapping the concrete wall I was sitting on and blessing themselves as they went. A guard in a bright orange bandana asked whether I wouldn’t prefer to wait in the sun. It occurred to me that I had forgotten to bring sunscreen.

I had considered trekking to Kheerganga alone, but the owner of my hotel had warned me against it, saying that sections of the Kalgha route had been damaged during the last monsoon. Some of the paths had changed as a result. Besides, he said, it would be nice to have company, someone to talk to, on the way.

It would have been, too, except that Tanish and I didn’t speak one another’s languages. He arrived after about ten minutes and we immediately set out for Kalgha. On a map, this is a three-minute walk, but in the world of topographical reality it’s about a twenty-minute climb up what some websites misleadingly describe as steps. Already, as we made our ascent, Tanish and I began to develop a working vocabulary. It consisted, in the main, of three words: “Good” (him, meaning I was doing well), “Okay” (me, meaning I had things under control), and “Slow” (him, skipping around merrily like a mountain goat, meaning that I needed to be more careful than he was being). Later in the day, I would add “Fuck” and “Shit” to the repertoire, meaning that I wanted to die, but at this point in the proceedings things were fine, except that I had already consumed a full litre of water. He was nineteen and I was forty. He wore tennis shoes and I wore hiking boots. He was thin and full of vim. I was not entirely unconcerned.

Prior to the rise of the hippie trail, Kheerganga was not a tourist destination. The paths of the upper Parvati, like the one Tanish and I took from Kalgha, were used primarily by Gaddi shepherds and by ascetic holy men on pilgrimage. They were, and in parts still remain, strictly functional in nature, not recreational. That began to change in the latter part of last century, when hippies and backpackers seeking ever more authentic experiences began to whisper amongst themselves, blinking through the hash haze of Kasol, about an alpine meadow beyond the last known villages where people could really drop out and get cosmic. It was as though Garland’s The Beach had been transposed from Thailand to Himachal Pradesh. But these were still the early days.

I have known since I began writing it several years ago that my next novel would include a sequence set in the forests between Kalgha and Kheerganga. Whether it would include Kheerganga itself, I didn’t really know, and still don’t. But I didn’t have any doubts about the forests. Whether it’s some hangover of journalism or simply a lack of imagination, I also knew that I’d have to see those forests in order to be able write about them. I wasn’t wrong. For one thing, I had imagined the sort of forest that, even on an incline, is mostly even terrain. I had pictured the understory of pine needles in which Robert Jordan lies waiting at the end of For Whom the Bell Tolls. I had imagined a forest in which it was possible to lie down. Instead, I encountered a mountainside forest, in which you were, to your left, at eye-level with treetops and, to your right, at eye-level with root systems. I hadn’t foreseen the narrowness of the path, the ascent-descent-ascent rhythm of the switchbacks, or the disconcerting down-there-ness of the river, the only thing that made much noise outside of our feet and monosyllabic exchanges. Where stepping stones were not available, we used the vein-like roots of trees. Where these were not large or exposed enough to trust, we risked it on sand and shale. Deodar cedars that had fallen during the rains were now effectively upside down, slashing huge diagonals across the path, the base of their trunks fifty metres above us, their tops fifty metres below, ancient index fingers pointing out just how far there was to fall.

Now and then, though, the landscape would open up. At one point four or five kilometres from Kalgha, we entered a lea out of Gothic horror, or at least out of some Burtonesque vision of the same. Everything deciduous was dead. Rocks were strewn randomly about the place and logs lay rotting in the wood nettle. There were crows. It is the nature of the Kalgha route that you are effectively on the leeward side of the mountain, which means that, even when you’re not in the forest, you’re still very much in the shade. Everything appeared in midtones and the midtones in question were blue. The nearest precipitous edge or cliff face was far off to our left at this point, and for almost the only time on the trek we could have wandered off the path without incident. But the impulse was very much to stay on it. The lea was somehow sinister. But it was also the first of what, as we went on, came to strike me as a series of very distinct sections or micro-climates of the route, each with its own unique character. After a while, a little further up, we encountered a kind of forest within the forest, this one made entirely of boulders covered in an orange blanket of fallen leaves. Later still, when either the sun began to crest the mountain or else find a gap in the outline of a ridge, everything around us decided suddenly to be green again. We could even make out birdsong.

By the turn of the century, the convergence of psytrance culture and post-IDF discharge tourism had turned the Parvati Valley into a hotbed of drugs, sex, and electronica. On the one hand, it was Goa with mountains. On the other, it was Mini Israel. (I will be back in Kasol for New Year’s Eve and plan on writing about this side of the valley then.) Improved roads between Bhuntar and Kasol, and especially between Manikaran and Barshaini, made it easier to get to Pulga and Kalgha. More than a mere whisper, Kheerganga was now a destination, with guesthouses in places like Old Manali, and as far aways as Paharganj in Delhi, advertising the trek as a weekend getaway. In the spring and summer months, hundreds of people would head up-valley every day, some staying on for weeks or months. Permanent cafés and camps went up. All of this was completely unregulated.

The trek was not nearly so busy when we did it. Early on, several kilometres in, we arrived at our first waterfall, where people were having their photos taken on a plank of wood that served as bridge across the stream. With a few exceptions, it was the only time we encountered anyone else in five hours.

Obviously, there were the chaiwallahs, young guys wrapped in layers of blankets inside makeshift shacks of torn tarpaulin. Tashin knew them all by name and might have liked to sit and talk. But every time we stopped for chai, I would almost immediately regret it, the warming effect of the tea doing nothing to counteract the chilling effect of my own sweat. We would leave the chaiwallah to the glow of his bonfire, or to that of his phone, on which he was watching a Bollywood movie, and continue on our way. We would encounter signs of previous trekkers: a table at a shuttered chai stand, covered in plates and half-finished drinks, as though a meal had begun and been suddenly abandoned, or a ten-metre stretch of old mandarin peels. At one point, over the course of about five minutes, we encountered ten or twelve Indian tourists all coming back the other way.

Only twice did we encounter solo travellers, both of whom were Indian. One, coming back from Kheerganga, had a huge pair of headphones hanging around his neck and was dressed exactly like Snoop Dogg.

“How you doin’, bro?” he asked me.

The other, who was carrying nothing but a tiny, empty-seeming backpack, all but jogged past and ahead of us, whistling. He wore a knitted wristband with a cannabis leaf on it. I hated him.

My point is that we were very isolated and that I was very aware of our isolation. At precisely the same time that Kheerganga’s visitor numbers began to explode in the mid-2000s, the number of missing persons did, too. According to reports, 1,078 people went missing in the Parvati Valley between 2003 and 2023, twenty-one foreigners among them. Only four hundred and ninety-eight of those missing have ever been traced or recovered.

Not all of these are Kheerganga- or trek-related—there have been disappearances around Kasol, too, many of which are at least presumed to be drug-related—but a lot of them are. In August 2015, a 24-year-old Pole named Bruno Muschalik disappeared having last been seen in Barshaini. Police arrested two people in connection with the disappearance, though what happened to Muschalik remains unclear. In 2021, a 32-year-old Indian businessman, Dhruv Aggarwal, vanished while trekking to Kheerganga. The following year, 22-year-old Vijay Massari went missing trekking back from it. The most recent person to disappear on the trek, a 28-year-old man from Narkanda, Sahil Sharma, did so this past May.

This is to say nothing of Justin Shetler, but we’ll get to him a little later.

This side of the story is only hinted at during the trek itself. The most explicit example is nailed to a tree on the approach to one of the waterfalls. It is a kind of makeshift memorial for a man named Amihay Cohen, who died on the trek in 1999.

“Here fell and died a dear man and good friend […] who wasn’t careful enough taking this road,” it reads. “Please be aware of shortcuts.”

I had seen photos of this sign before and so wasn’t entirely surprised to encounter it, though it has been vandalised to the point of unreadability since the photos I’d seen had been taken. Tashin took my own at the waterfall and made me take one of him in turn. Someone had built a small cairn of stones on a rock beside the clear-watered stream.

I was beginning to get tired and the trek was getting harder. Evidence of the monsoon landslides was becoming more apparent. At one point, I had to take off my backpack and hold it in front of me while Tashin and I, holding hands, inched our way across a narrow strip of scree that fell away from us as we went. At another, we had to climb over a Soviet constructivist explosion of a tree, which had fallen and seemingly frozen, mid-splinter, across the path in front of us. Whole other sections now consisted exclusively of stones slippery with run-off, mud, or ice. We stopped at the place where the Kalgha route meets with the route from Nakthan on the other side of the river and Tashin advised me, to the extent that he was able, that we only had three kilometres to go.

But three kilometres meant nothing in this context, which is to say that it could have meant anything. Three kilometres can take three hours when they want to, especially when they want to go straight up. We came to a sign that pointed ahead, advising that this was the safer, easier route. Tashin turned to the right instead.

There followed a kind of heated debate in which, eventually, I was made to understand that the safer, easier route had been damaged in the monsoon. Besides, Tashin told me, this way was “quicker”.

The way in question was not “quicker”. It was a brutal, near-vertical assault on a bluff that consisted, not of a path, but of a choose-your-own-adventure series of rock steps that threatened to destroy my knees, engorged tree roots that threatened to twist my ankles, and sudden increases in incline that threatened to explode my heart. I swore at Tashin and threatened to murder him. I told him that I would haunt his children. He said “Good” and “Slow”.

I closed my eyes and told myself that “Slow” was a perfectly reasonable response. I would simply have to do it by inches. I couldn’t break down now, this close, or at least couldn’t break down more than I already had done. I would never come to Kheerganga again and I wouldn’t be able to write the book knowing that I hadn’t made it to Kheerganga.

Kheerganga is a hole. Whatever it was like in its glory days, or happens to be like in the milder months now, it resembled nothing so much on my visit as an abandoned frontier outpost that has been turned into a rubbish dump.

The contours of the old tent city are still there. Low stone walls divide the gently rising meadow into tiers, while others demarcate a central corridor that leads from the edge of the forest, up the stream of steaming spring water that gives the area its name, to the temple at the clearing’s highest point. As far as I am aware, the shacks and tents that remain are illegal, which is why most of the tiers are now vacant but for rocks, which is to say vacant but for rocks, cow dung, broken pieces of plastic furniture, old squat toilets clogged with various grasses, and random bits of twisted metal. It does not strike me as a place to drop out and get cosmic. It strikes me as a place to contract tetanus.

It was always going to end this way. In 2017, at the height of Kheerganga’s popularity, the Himachal High Court ordered the relevant authorities to remove all illegal encroachments from forest land in excess of one acre. This was a state-wide order and not targeted at Kheerganga specifically—there had been concerns about other popular trekking destinations, too—though it must be said that the impact of tourism on Kheerganga in particular had been coming in for criticism for a while. It is difficult to know what exactly it was like back then, though you can find photos online of dormitories resembling Chinese opium dens, Glastonbury-like mud and Dhaka-like density levels, and huge open-air tips festooned with plastic bottles. What no one in the government seems to have understood, however, is that not everyone would take their litter with them when they left.

But then I admit that November is perhaps not the time to expect the Sound of Music in the Himalayas. Whatever the case, before we had even reached Tanish’s camp, fewer than fifty metres away and only one tier up from where we stood, I fell to the ground, rolled onto my back, and, fully aware that I was lying in animal shit, died.

I was later shown to a tent. I napped on and off for ninety minutes, occasionally woken by a cramp in my legs. I came out when the meadow was already in shade and the tops of the mountains opposite turning pink. Tanish was apparently napping, too, so I wandered over to the nearest campsite and asked if they had anything to eat. They didn’t, but we struck up a conversation. They were Indians, but lived abroad, one in Poland and the other, naturally, in Melbourne. He works for Westpac.

Our conversation followed the usual trajectory.

“There are too many Indians in Melbourne,” said the Melbourne-based Indian.

“Don’t you find,” said the Poland-based one, “that every time you go to an Indian restaurant in an English-speaking country it is owned by a Pakistani or Bangladeshi?”

I said I hadn’t noticed that.

“Oh, but you must have,” he said, smiling wolfishly, the tilaka on his forehead boring into me like a third eye. “They use different ingredients. You can tell it is not Indian food.”

I eventually worked them around to cricket, about which I know next to nothing. You can always tell an Indian man’s vintage by his preference for Australian Test captains. These guys were into Ricky Ponting.

“We come here every year,” said Poland when I asked them whether it was their first time in Kheerganga. “This is maybe our tenth time. The people here”—he gestured at the door of the nearest shack—“are basically family now. But it has changed a lot, as you can see.”

“The problem,” said Melbourne, who seemed to have something against Indians, “is that Indian tourists started coming here, too. That’s when things got really out of hand. Westerners used to come here to relax, to get away from the noise and the crowds. But the noise and crowds followed them. They would probably like it a lot more now.”

I looked around. It was a desolate place.

“It’s great for escaping your phone,” said Poland.

“Exactly,” said Melbourne. “No work calls.”

They laughed.

No, they told me, the Westerners had left, at least the truly out-there of them. They had gone somewhere else, somewhere deeper into the valley. They were vibrating at some higher elevation. The word Mantalai was briefly mentioned, and I gave an involuntary shudder, thinking of Shetler, but they didn’t think that Mantalai was it. They knew a guy who took people to Mantalai—“That’s him right there,” they said, pointing at a man standing slightly apart from us with two rather out-of-place-looking landlines sitting on plastic chairs beside him—and he would have told them if that’s where they’d gone. The fact was that no one knew where the Westerners went now, because the Westerners hadn’t told anybody. This time they were going to keep the secret to themselves. The first I heard of the beach was in Bangkok, on the Khao San Road.

I passed the evening in another shack with Tanish and various members of what he called his camp. For the first half hour, we sat in the dark, Tanish listening to music on his phone while I read William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain on my Kindle. It was sheer coincidence, because I’ve been reading the book since before I left Australia, but both the title and the subject matter seemed relevant to my circumstances. There didn’t seem a better place to be reading about religious ascetics than here in the dark, on a thin single mattress, basking in the meagre warmth of old wood-burning stove, on a mountain where Lord Shiva’s son is said to have pursued samadhi for the better part of a millennium. I showed Tanish how the Kindle worked and he revealed hidden depths of unplumbed English by asking whether I was writing a book myself. I suspect he had seen me taking notes throughout the day.

The novel I am currently writing is about a young Australian who goes missing in India. I wouldn’t call it a mystery, exactly, because mysteries tend to end in resolution. In the real world, such stories tend not to.

My own, or at least its inciting incident, is loosely based on the disappearances of three different travellers—Australian Ryan Chambers, Irishman Jonathan Spollen, and American Justin Shetler—whose cases all remain unsolved, some twenty, thirteen, and nine years after anyone last saw them. I knew Chambers a little growing up and have written about him extensively in the past, both in my first novel, A Death in Phnom Penh, and in an article I wrote on my first trip to India.

He and Spollen went missing in Rishikesh, which is where the bulk of my new novel is set. But Shetler disappeared up here, in the Parvati Valley, with Kheerganga the last place he was ever seen alive. He befriended a sadhu and struck out for Mantalai, a holy lake four days away on foot. The sadhu returned. Shetler did not. The sadhu later hung himself in custody. When I wrote the Rishikesh article seven years ago, some determinedly romantic types online were still convinced that Shetler was living in some Himalayan cave. I doubt that any of them think that nine years later.

Shetler is the subject of Harley Rustad’s 2022 non-fiction book, Lost in the Valley of Death, which I own but haven’t read. None of these men are the subject of mine, and yet they all are, which is why I came here.

I explained all this, or tried to, to Tanish.

“Good,” he said, which was good enough for me.

The asceticism of the shack didn’t last. Eventually, Aryan, who spoke a little English, got the generator going, and the room soon filled with various hangers-on. It also quickly filled with smoke, as wood was fed into the open stove, cooking oil was allowed to burn, and everyone in the room except Tanish and myself lit up and got high. At seven, three more men came in, each lugging a sack of perishables on his back. There wasn’t going to be enough room. As Aryan and his right-hand-man, Akshay, dumped a twenty-kilo sack of sea salt in the corner and started unpacking red onions and potatoes, I went outside, eyes watering from the smoke, and briefly joined a group of trekkers up from Mumbai and Hyderabad. They were sitting around a bonfire comparing adventure stories.

A young man from Hyderabad was fidgeting a bit and, when he stood up, I saw that he had been sitting on his phone. He smiled. “I know there’s no coverage,” he told me sheepishly, “but I can’t stop checking all my apps.”

“The markets are closed, bro,” someone said.

One of the women had studied in Canberra and said she was very keen to go back. I ate dinner back inside with Tanish and the others and went to bed immediately afterwards.

Kheerganga has been a site of pilgrimage far longer than it has been a tourist destination. The reason for this, which like all such tales has many canonical and folkloric variations, is as follows.

Lord Shiva and the Goddess Parvati offered their sons, Ganesha and Kartikeya, the boon of supreme knowledge. But like all bad parents, they set their children against one another: whichever son could circumambulate the three worlds fastest—these being heaven, earth, and the underworld—would take the entire kitty for himself.

Kartikeya immediately jumped on his peacock and set off on a tour of the cosmos, not entirely unlike the hippies and backpackers who would later come to Kheerganga to get baked. Ganesha simply walked around his parents three times and declared that they were the cosmos. This devotion was considered wiser than speed, and, one supposes, literal-mindedness.

Kartikeya returned to discover the contest over and furiously abandoned Mount Kailash in protest. In southern Indian versions of the story, he retired to Palani, in Tamil Nadu, while here in the Himalayas it’s Kheerganga. He set about meditating and listening to psytrance.

Shiva and Parvati, a little worried and perhaps repentant, stayed nearby to make sure he was okay. Parvati is said to have lost an earring at Manikaran, halfway between Kasol and Bairshani, causing Shiva to strike the ground in anger, accounting for the hot springs there. Closer to Kheerganga, the Rudranag waterfall was home to a Shaivite serpent-spirit who guarded the route to Kartikeya’s abode. Locals say that Shiva came to like the valley so much that he later meditated at Kheerganga for a thousand years himself.

I awoke at half past six in the morning, fully dressed and wrapped tightly in blankets. Given that these had also served as both my pillow and mattress, I was remarkably well rested. I opened the tent and looked out into the grey, only to discover that I had been sleeping alongside a cow and that the cow had left me a number of votive offerings.

It wasn’t dark, but a thumbnail clipping of moon still hung a little above the mountains. I appeared to be the only person awake. I followed the stream, which was practically smoking in the early morning cold, up the gentle slope of the meadow towards the temple. According to local Himalayan folklore, Parvati’s maternal instincts kicked in while she was watching over Kartikeya. He wasn’t eating properly, she thought. He was going to become malnourished. Like the helicopter parent she was, she made him kheer, a kind of sweet rice-milk porridge, and poured it across the meadow for him. This is said to explain the stream’s milky quality, and indeed probably that of the dam downstream.

The temple is a modest building of green-and-white-painted stone with a tiered red roof of corrugated iron. The story above has been crudely illustrated in a mural on one of its outside walls. While there has presumably been some kind of Shaivite shrine here for as long as the place has held religious significance, I suspect that the current structure dates back no further than the late 1990s, when Kheerganga was beginning to flirt with permanence. There is no official priest or caretaker, but as I sat down on the steps to remove my boots—and, stupidly, my socks—an old man appeared from a forest path behind me and asked me whether I had come to see the temple. I thought this was pretty self-evident but nodded. He walked on up ahead of me in his round Pahari cap and pullas. As I stood in the courtyard between the little black Nandi statue and the entrance to the mandir, the cold of the concrete pavers beneath me shooting up through the soles of my feet, he paced back and forth against a low stone retaining wall, as though waiting for me to leave. It was too dark inside to make out much more than a few tattered devotional posters on the walls and what I’m pretty sure was a small stone lingam in the centre of the floor.

There were once some hot spring baths here as well, below the temple on the next tier down, but they, like the camps, are a thing of the past. In another version of Kheerganga story, Parvati didn’t make kheer for Kartiyeka, but rather released a river of milk, a doodh ganga, across the landscape. After Kartiyeka returned to the world, the river of milk remained. This was a problem. Shiva was certain that a miracle like this one would be misused by miscreants in the coming Kalyug, the Age of Kali, of darkness and downfall. He sent Rishi Parshuram, an avatar of Vishnu, to consider the problem. Pashuram made kheer with the river’s milk but spilled the pot’s contents into the stream as he was finishing. It wasn’t the most elegant solution to the problem, but it was something.

The Age of Kali, of course, is our current one, and Shiva wasn’t wrong about miscreants misusing the river of milk. By the time of the high court’s anti-encroachment order, tourists had taken to treating the baths less as a scared rite than as a hot tub party, offending locals and pilgrims alike. Rather than Rishi Pashuram, this time the forest department went in. The baths were emptied and destroyed. All that remains of the clean-up effort is, ironically, a mess, an open concrete sarcophagus full of rubble that no one has bothered to do anything about. You can still take a scalding hot shower using the springs, under pipes in a wooden shack down the hillside, but I hadn’t brought a towel with me and it was in any case nearly time for us to go.

The Nakthan route was significantly easier than the one we had taken from Kalgha on the first day. Obviously, we were making our descent, but the path was flatter, less tortuous, too, and the whole thing felt less dangerous. There was more foot traffic on this side of the river. At Rudranag, we saw people performing puja. We encountered shepherds running pack mules up the trails. We overtook and were then overtaken by two of the tourists from the bonfire the night before, including the phone-addicted Hyderabadi, who we then overtook again. At one point, a beautiful young woman walked past, followed by an intellectually disabled young man, then by a big black dog in a pink muzzle that didn’t fit it and that it was close to removing. I connected these three in my mind at the time, but they didn’t have anything to do with one another. It was just a busy day on the mountain.

There was something about having the sun on our faces, which, given the time of our arrival in Kheerganga, we hadn’t properly experienced in more than twenty-four hours, that made the going easier. At one point, I stopped to look across the valley, to see if I could make out the path, or indeed anything recognisable, from the day before. I couldn’t. The hillside opposite appeared as a solid wall or mass of vegetation that neither admitted nor released any light, and even at this short a distance the trees appeared more blue than green to me, as though the sun had already more than half-set on that side.

We didn’t speak very much on our return. We stopped a lot less, too. We were eventually forced to on the edge of Nakthan, where an elderly woman was herding cattle. She may as well have been herding cats. While Tashin stood on a rock up ahead and clapped his hands, trying to move them along, the woman showed remarkable sprightliness for her age and bounded around a steep-looking hillside shouting curses at two that had gone for a wander. I heard the Benny Hill music playing in my mind.

Like Pulga and Kalgha on the other side of the valley, Nakthan is a village of candy-coloured wood, its buildings often inexplicably designed—what’s that door doing on the outer wall of the second storey, opening onto nothing?—and arranged with a certain haphazard necessity on whatever stretches of level ground are available. Others hang precariously over cliffsides, supported by aging, possibly rotting, struts. All have been tightly packed together, confusing the eye with their clashing colours and confounding one’s sense of direction with the warren-like alleyways their arrangement creates. Someone was beating a drum up ahead as we entered the centre of the village and as we walked past a tall wooden building bursting at the seams with straw we could see a whole cackle of the town’s brightly-scarved women sitting beneath its awning talking excitedly among themselves. We kept on through the town, passing through a chowk thronged with men and drummers and what I think was a doli, a decorated palanquin used in religious processions, and I got the impression that some godhead or other was being relocated for winter now that the harvest was at its end. We exited the town into an orchard of denuded apple trees. It will soon be snowing in this part of the world.

It took another two hours to get to the dam. When we got there, Tanish indicated that he had something he wanted to show me on his phone. It was a picture of us together at the waterfall where we had seen the stone cairn, which is to say that it was a composite photo of the photos we had taken of each other. It looked ridiculous, but it was a very sweet gesture. He later put it on Instagram. When we got to the dam, we gave each other a hug. He started up the road Bairshani and I started the winding road back to my hotel. Before I went across the dam, I lightly touched the concrete wall with my fingertips.

When I got back, I looked through my phone at the photographs I’d taken. There were a lot, but most of them were reference shots: close-ups of vegetation I could cross-check later, shots intended to remind me of the order of events, failed attempts at capturing the colours of the Kalgha route. This didn’t bother me. The more useful stuff was what I’d written in my phone at the chai stalls on our way to Kheerganga, and in my frigid tent overnight, as scattershot and impressionistic as many of those sentences were. I hadn’t listened to podcasts for two days, either, and obviously hadn’t accessed the internet, and it occurred to me that my phone is what has been getting in the way of my observational powers since I got back to India. It has been coming between me and the world.

I long liked to quote the passage from The Beach in which Richard, the narrator, explains why he doesn’t travel with a camera. “When I look through the albums of old travelling companions I’m always surprised by how little I’m reminded of the trip,” he says. I used to feel this way, too, and really only took photos when an article necessitated it. What surprised me looking up this passage again, though, was that Richard also complains—in fact, complains first—about notetaking. “I don’t keep a travel diary,” he says. “I did keep a travel diary once, and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down. Everything else slipped away, as though my mind felt jilted by my reliance on pen and paper.” I don’t know that I’ve ever acknowledged it, but this has largely been my experience, too. It used to be that, once I had written an article about a place, my piece largely replaced or became my memory. It freed up space for the next thing, the next story. Over time, I would come to forget everything except those couple of thousand words.

I feel the trek has partially restored my powers of observation. But in writing this, and eventually the novel, I also run the risk of both containing and erasing the trek. I hope I don’t, but I’m not optimistic. As I sat in the cold of Kheerganga on Sunday morning, waiting for the sun to strike the mountaintops opposite and slowly work its way down the hillside, the way it does from my hotel window, I found myself thinking: You will never be here again. You had better soak this experience up. But I also found myself thinking: Because if you can’t write about this place, you have no business being a writer.

You have just read my first attempt.

We have become a little bit silly when it comes to our relationship with stories and storytelling. We selectively quote Didion on our tote bags. We claim to be storytelling animals. We invoke stories and storytelling, with their “kitschy magic,” as Amit Chaudhuri has called it, “almost always with an air of glamour and celebration”.

That was certainly the case at the opening night gala of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival last Wednesday, when festival director Janet DeNeefe told those gathered at the Puri Saren Agung that Ubud is “magical” and that we should “ignite our own magic and share it with each other [because] that’s part of cultures, stories, literature, etcetera.” My hackles went up—at least after I finished laughing at that decidedly unmagical “etcetera”—as they did the next morning when I saw someone walking around with a Byron Writers Festival tote. The sacredness we ascribe to storytelling, which has given rise to the trauma plot, the First-Person Industrial Complex, Ocean Vuong, and other horrors, often smacks too much of the spiritual retreat for me, too much of the scented candle aisle. I was on my guard from the get-go in Ubud against what I considered a certain Ubud type.

Story is not a good in and of itself. Storytelling—“the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images,” as Didion describes it in a less famous section of her most famous paragraph—is as much a reflex of the right as it is of the left, and stories got us into our current spate of predicaments as much as anything else did. Many of the stories we were told in Ubud, with which we were asked to ignite our magic, were horror ones. They were too-late responses to powerful narratives that our own efforts failed to counter or prevent. Wars and genocides and political campaigns and online advertisements are all stories, too. Tony Abbott recently published a book in which he tells a very specific, very skewed story about Australia. Neither the moral weight we ascribe to storytelling nor the role we too often claim for it as an empathy-generating machine is backed up by the evidence of the body count.

It is voice, more than story, that gets me going as a reader. A unique voice is what I look for on the page, and what I hope to put down on it when I write. It’s what I listen for at a writers’ festival, too, and it was on this front that Ubud won me over. This was the kind of cacophony that only a truly international festival emits: William Dalrymple and Ingrid Rojas Contreras one day, Shinie Antony and Maja Klarić the next, Banu Mushtaq and Thammika Songkaeo on another. On the morning of the festival’s third, Yves Rees wrote on Instagram that the event’s “fearless emphasis on anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian voices” was a “welcome reprieve from the overwhelming whiteness and too-frequent timidity” of Australian cultural programming. I agree, and would argue that this emphasis was possible precisely because of the festival’s unabashed internationalism. (There is always a risk, as Chaudhuri has also noted, of literature unwittingly colluding with both the narrative and narrative forms of globalisation, though I think this can, with effort, be mitigated, by doubling down on multilingualism and by reminding ourselves that there are forms besides the novel. I think Ubud passed muster on both counts.) I ran into Yves later that afternoon, having just come out of a session on how language evolves with each border it crosses and each generation that comes to speak it—a session involving US-based Thai author Songkaeo, New Zealand poet and educator Zech Soakai, and Indonesian poet Wawan Kurniawan—and we passed a few moments in furious agreement about the quality of the festival’s line-up relative to the parochialism we are subjected to back home.

Australia’s festivals, as I suggested in my recent attack on our reading culture, are for the most part genteel, predictable affairs, pitched at comfortably middlebrow audiences that like their truth spoken to power politely and preferably without an accent. They attract the kind of crowd that agrees with Antoinette Lattouf in principle, but in practice isn’t entirely sure that she didn’t bring her troubles upon herself. On the first day of the Ubud festival, in his keynote address, Belgian historian and archaeologist David Van Reybrouck told the audience: “If you’re going to cut down a tree, you’d better have something to say.” All too often, at Australian festivals, you feel as though you’re standing in a lumberyard.

Such festivals are not entirely devoid of voices that speak to the issues of the day. Hasib Hourani, Samah Sabawi, and Plestia Alaqad all spoke at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year. Antony Loewenstein interviewed Peter Beinart in Sydney and Gideon Levy in Newcastle. But the Bendigo Writers’ Festival and its gag order loom large, as does the kowtowing to pro-Israeli lobbyists of most of our cultural institutions—from the ABC and Creative Australia to a whole rabble of theatre companies, galleries, libraries, and orchestras—over the past two years. In Ubud, David Marr’s recent Radio National interview with Chris Hedges was still on a lot of people’s minds. It is unsurprising that the festival, which largely put Gaza at the centre of its programming and, where it didn’t, emphasised Indonesian issues such as West Papua, this year’s anti-government demonstrations, and the country’s ongoing reckoning with the Suharto era, would seem such a breath of fresh air to so many of us. It was a festival entirely free of either bothsiderism or whataboutism. It didn’t demand any throat-clearing or self-flagellation prior to expressions of anger or grief. No one was asked to define genocide before being allowed to state that it was happening. It took the reality of the situation as a given.

That last bit is important, as is the matter of emphasis that Yves noted in their Instagram post. Omar El Akkad appeared at no less than three sessions in Ubud, not counting special events. His first was a session with the Palestinian poet Ghayath Almadhoun, who has lost countless family members to Israeli violence. El Akkad and Almadhoun are commanding figures, though not in the way that one usually means by that. They are neither overbearing nor grandiose. Their words are not dripping with self-confidence or authority. (El Akkad, in particular, is self-deprecating to the point of self-harm.) They rather exhibit a kind of anger so quiet, so pent up in their bodies, that you can’t look away from them. It could almost be confused with resignation were it not for the way that it occasionally ripples across their skin, or burns in their eyes, or makes itself heard, crackling slightly, in a choice word. You lean in closer in the hope that it is catching.

Lattouf is angry, too, though in Ubud her anger was no longer so quiet. Instead, like her sense of humour, it was allowed to breathe and stretch it legs by virtue of being somewhere other than Australia. All three writers spoke about how liberating it was to attend an event where they felt they could actually express themselves—where they didn’t have to sugarcoat anything or worry about coming across as some atavistic Arab stereotype—which surely says something about the nature of the discourse, or indeed about the possibility of a discourse, in the Anglophone and wider Western worlds.

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As in Jaipur earlier this year, where I went out of my way to hear Indian authors speak, I made a point of attending as many sessions about Indonesian writing and issues as I could. It is another damning feature of Australian life that the vast majority of us know next to nothing about our largest neighbour. Obviously, because I am still trying to shake my monolingualism, I was not in a position to attend any sessions that were conducted in Bahasa Indonesian. But I was still able to see Melati Wijsen discuss her experiences as a young activist, Okky Madasari discuss the role of literature in Indonesian society and politics, Ronny Agustinus and Windy Ariestanty discuss independent publishing, Agustinus Wibowo discuss travelling to Indonesia’s remote border with Papua New Guinea, and Wilda Yanti Salam discuss the intersections of food, memory, and community. I once travelled up the east coast of Sumatra from Bandar Lampung to Dumai—unlike in Bali, where Australians are basically a part of the teak furniture, I was in more selfies in a single week than I had been in before or have been in since—and I walked away from these sessions, especially Wibowo and Salam’s, keen to see even more of the country, to correct this absurd and unnecessary blind spot.

I saw Wibowo and Salam at a special event on travel writing, which also featured the Turkish author Ayşegül Savaş, Australian travel writer Nina Karnikowski, my friend and fellow Substacker Sam Dalrymple, and the Croatian travel-poet Klarić. It was one of my favourite sessions of the festival, largely because the longer running time allowed for greater discussion among the participants. The various juxtapositions between them—between their cultural backgrounds, life experiences, approaches to travel, and genres in which they work—seemed to cause each to consider their output more deliberately, as though attempting to work out where they fit, not only on the panel, but within the larger tradition of travel writing, too. The other special event I attended, which explored mysticism and ghost stories across cultures, had a similar effect on its participants, who spent the evening teasing out connections and commonalities between their seemingly disparate backgrounds. (It turns out that Colombian ghosts retrace their steps—or “unwalk” them, as Contreras translated the Spanish desandar—much the same way that the ghosts of Dutch colonialists still wander around Java.)

This was all very enlightening and enjoyable. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the other great pleasure of the special events was getting to visit five-star resorts. The travel writing session was held in a large pavilion on the edge of a pond fringed with verdant tropical vegetation. The mysticism one took place in a gilded hall down a winding hillside road through terraced rice paddies. There were only a handful of attendees at either and the false sense of intimacy with the authors this encouraged was flattering to the ego. It was nice to drink cocktails and eat canapes and be waited upon and feel that you were doing something luxurious and exclusive. It was nice to be able to revel in your privilege.

The festival seems to me to have a complicated relationship with privilege. On the one hand, simply by virtue of taking place where it does—which even the most well-meaning tourists continue to treat as one vast theme park or service industry—it constantly reminds you of your own. On the other, it also wants to monetise that privilege, and therefore constantly appeals to and rewards it. A four-day pass to the festival isn’t cheap. The added extras—opening night, the evening events, brunch with Pico Iyer if that’s your jam—are often very expensive. (The ridiculously expensive stuff, like the thousand-dollar fundraising dinner that took place on the second night, at least supports causes like the festival’s Emerging Writers Programme and the YLAI Library Project. A friend who somehow attended the dinner said that it made him feel very smart and cultured. I told him that I felt smart and cultured enough.) At the opening night dinner, I overheard three Australian authors comparing the relative luxury of their hotels, a conversation that reminded me of one I heard in Iraq a decade ago, between war correspondents who were complaining about having to fly economy between war zones.

The nature of this year’s programming only served to heighten my growing unease. It felt all too easy to sit there and nod, self-righteous, as though that were actually doing something. I always feel that way when faced with my own and others’ champagne socialism, or, as I suppose you could call it in this case, arak antiestablishmentarianism. It was difficult not to feel, at times, as though many of us were purchasing indulgences, except that the only people whose indulgences we were seeking were seeking ours from us in turn. El Akkad stressed it again and again: he has lost nothing of any importance by writing out against the slaughter in Gaza, especially not compared to the slaughtered. In fact, he got to visit Ubud. That’s still a step up from the rest of us, though, who didn’t write out against the slaughter in Gaza and got to visit Ubud anyway.

He also made the point that there is nothing that can make what has happened okay: not him writing about it and not me listening to him talk about what he has written. The novels and poems and films and dirges we can expect to see in the years to come will doubtless be important testimonies, but it would be better that such testimonies had never been made necessary. El Akkad and Almadhoun should never have had to come to Ubud, at least not to talk about any of this. This, too, is a point against storytelling and the claims we make for it: it can’t bring back the dead. As Almadhoun noted, rather ramming the point home, every poem is a grave at this point. However you try to square it, no matter how you vote back home, sweating by a pool and spouting platitudes about storytelling is kind of grotesque in context.

We don’t tell ourselves stories in order to live so much as we tell them in order to live with ourselves. But I wouldn’t give the festival back. I keep returning to its cacophony of voices and to the importance of having a space in which they were able to speak, without repercussion, together. My favourite event of the festival was the poetry slam that took place on the third evening, breaking down, without the purchased intimacy of the special events, the barriers between writers and readers, the festival’s speakers and its spoken-tos. Poets like Neal Hall and Kismet Krystle competed against and performed alongside anyone else who had something to read, including my friend, Teodora Mișcov, a Bali-based Romanian writer I met on opening night. (She brought the house down, too, which was impressive given that she’d drawn the short straw and had to read the last poem of the night.)

In the end, the Didion line that most mattered in Ubud was not the one that we selectively quote on our tote bags. It was something else she once said, in a commencement address at UC Riverside in 1975, that most came to mind when I sat down to write this piece:

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture.

In Ubud, we were trying to get the picture.

For the first time since I gave up freelance journalism six and a half years ago, I am once again on the road. While I have been abroad semi-regularly in the interim, it has only ever been for three or four weeks, whereas this time I’m away for a little over three months. (Even that seems short to me, though. Only three months? In the last two years of my freelancing career, I don’t think I was in Australia for more than three months in total, which is the kind of wild imbalance I am keen to get back to, preferably in perpetuity.)

This time will be different, though, in that I will still be doing my day job. This is an exciting development. At the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year, I asked Sophy Roberts, author of The Lost Pianos of Siberia and host of the Gone to Timbuktu podcast, how she affords to research her books. (Her most recent, A Training School for Elephants, took her to Belgium, Congo, Iraq, India, and Tanzania.) She laughed and told me that she has a day job, too, and that she puts in the hours whenever she can, wherever she may happen to be. It occurs to me that I should have done something similar—become a salaried nomad, rather than an article-to-article, hand-to-mouth, overly-reliant-on-the-wife one—a long time ago.

In any case, I’m writing from Bali, where the Ubud Writers’ Festival starts tomorrow. I will be in India from the beginning of next week until the Jaipur Literature Festival in January, and in Ho Chi Minh City for a couple of weeks on my way back to Australia. (Packing for a trip that takes in Bali on the cusp of its wet season and the Himalayas in winter is a mug’s game. I haven’t carried this much luggage in years.)

While I’m certainly excited to be back at it, the fact is that my nine-to-five is going to put certain constraints on my movements. I will be spending a lot more time in each place, limiting my travel to weekends, and enduring some very early mornings in order to align at least slightly with my team. I’m on the road, in other words, but not entirely as I know it.

This is not in any way a deal-breaker. It’s simply the cost of doing this at all, and of living life as I wish to live it. (I’m actually looking forward to the longer stays, having often gone hell for leather as a freelancer, constantly chasing stories.)

I have come to realise, or rather remember, that I am happier on the road than at rest. I get antsy when I sit still for too long and listless when I’ve too long been antsy. This always eventually happens to me in Sydney, and this stint, my fourth, has by far been my longest. (I think three years is about my limit, and even that is pushing my ability to metabolise routine.) It’s not that I dislike having a base. When I unpacked my books in 2021, having taken them out of storage for the first time in a decade, I was like a kid on Christmas. It’s that a base is what it actually needs to be. It needs to be a launchpad. My current place isn’t one, and has mice, and in any case the interregnum was only ever meant to be temporary. While giving up freelancing proved financially prudent—and was very well-timed as far as the pandemic was concerned—I lost something vital in my transition to sedentarism and have been running on the spot ever since. My writing, and probably some other things, too, have suffered more than I’d like as a result.

This would probably count as a midlife crisis—I recently turned forty—were it not so very much of a piece with a good two-thirds of my working life. I’ve spent more years working in foreign flophouses than I have in office buildings. I like to think of it, instead, as a return to scheduled programming. I have big plans for the decade ahead. There are a lot of things I want to do and a lot more that I want to write. The next few months are an opportunity to prove that I can make the peripatetic lifestyle work in a way that I couldn’t when I lived it on a shoestring. I have recently attracted a number of new paid subscribers (in the most outlandish tier, no less) and the encouragement is much appreciated. I’m giving this decade over to writing and am taking the whole thing very seriously.

I will obviously keep you updated here: about the places I visit, the people I meet, the nice-to-be-back-in-my-element of it all. I will continue to write my long-form essays and will hopefully record some new podcasts as well. I will keep up my end of the bargain as far as my very gracious employers are concerned. Whether I also find time to work on my next novel—the reason I’m going to the Osho Meditation Resort in Pune and spending New Year’s Eve at a psytrance festival in the Parvati Valley—obviously remains to be seen.

I recently became a paid subscriber to Sam Dalrymple’s ‘Travels of Samwise’, mostly in order to gain access to some of his pieces on Delhi.

What I appreciate most about Sam’s newsletter, aside from its always interesting insights into the forgotten or esoteric, is its heavy visual element: every piece is extensively illustrated with photographs of what he’s talking about. After I read his piece on Delhi’s hidden Hindu temples, I found myself paying more attention to my own surrounds, even in Port MacDonnell, where I recently spent a month with my parents to make up for the fact that I’m not going to be spending Christmas with them. I found myself going out of my way to visit attractions that, growing up in and around Mount Gambier, were always there, as plain as day, but to which I had never paid much attention.

Dingley Dell is one of these. The former home of Adam Lindsay Gordon, who lived there between 1864 and 1867, the cottage is a fifteen-minute bike ride from my parents’ house on the Port MacDonnell foreshore. Despite this, I had never visited it until late last week.

Gordon was born in Charlton Kings, Gloucestershire, in 1833. He was in every respect a child of Empire. His father had been a Captain in the Bengal cavalry and his mother came from slaveholding money. (Her father, Robert Gordon, had at one time been Governor of Berbice, a formerly Dutch colony captured by the British in 1796, in what is today Guyana.) The couple were first cousins.

Gordon was educated at Cheltenham College and the Royal Worcester Grammar School. In between, he attended the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, where he was a contemporary of Gordon of Khartoum and Gunner Jingo. He was eventually asked to leave the academy on account of his undisciplined behaviour. Having proved himself a bit of a wild child—at one point he is said to have won a steeplechase on a horse he had technically stolen, and he himself later admitted that his “strength and health were broken” in his youth “by dissipation and humbug”—his father packed him off to Australia, where there was an opening in the South Australian Mounted Police. “You won’t care a bit about leaving everyone behind you,” his father is said to have told him, “and precious few will care about your leaving, either.”

These words were echoed in a poem, ‘To My Sister’, which our young remittance man wrote on the voyage out. It is a self-pitying but unrepentant affair:

My parents bid me cross the flood,
My kindred frowned at me;
They say I have belied my blood,
And stained my pedigree.
But I must turn from those who chide,
And laugh at those who frown;
I cannot quench my stubborn pride,
Nor keep my spirits down.

He arrived in Adelaide at the age of twenty, at the tail end of 1853, and was immediately posted to the Southeast—what is now known in the tourist brochures as the Limestone Coast—where he served for two years as mounted trooper in Mount Gambier and Penola. He left the service in 1855 in order to try his hand at colt-breaking. (“I am not aware that he was dissatisfied with the police force,” wrote Mount Gambier’s Police-Inspector, who was disappointed to lose him, “but I imagine he thinks it more lucrative to be a drover.”)

It was during Gordon’s colt-breaking years that he became friendly with Julian Tenison-Woods, the Catholic priest and geologist who later co-founded the Congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph with Mary MacKillop. (MacKillop was canonised fifteen years ago this month, becoming Australia’s first saint.) Tenison-Woods was impressed by Gordon—he marvelled at the young man’s ability to quote the classics—and took to lending him books and encouraging his writing. Gordon also became close with John Riddoch, the Scottish-born pastoralist and politician who founded the Coonawarra wine region, and who would later serve alongside the poet in the South Australian parliament.

But for the moment—still only a couple of years in the country and as yet unpublished as a poet—it was as a rider of buckjumpers, and as fixture of regional steeplechase meets, that he remained best known in the district he had been forced by circumstance to call home.

In a 2024 article for the Griffith Review, Jeff Sparrow explored “the remarkable literary cult” around Gordon that emerged in the wake of the poet’s death in 1870. The public’s fascination with Gordon lasted into the 1930s, when he was honoured with a bust in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner, before gradually fading away over the course of the century.

“By 1879,” writes Sparrow, “Marcus Clarke could introduce a collection of Gordon’s work as containing ‘something very like the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry’.” By the 1970s, however, in the words of critic Brian Elliott, “the writer who, fifty years ago, was regarded as without dispute the most vital and representative of Australian poets, has become for contemporary criticism almost a dead weight”.

“We might consider the reasons for such declining enthusiasm entirely obvious,” writes Sparrow. “When John Howlett Ross titled his 1888 Gordon biography The Laureate of the Centaurs, he, like most critics, took for granted that readers would share Gordon’s equestrian enthusiasms. But in more recent times, even an avowed fan such as Elliott expresses a certain weariness at what he calls the ‘horsey poems’.”

It’s true that you don’t hear much about Gordon’s poetry these days, though you do hear more about it in the Southeast than elsewhere. (I was recently in Penola, where I happened upon an exhibition of previous winners of the Poets of Penola Acquisitive Arts Prize, which requires entries to be explicitly based on the works of Gordon, John Shaw Neilson, or William Henry Ogilvie.) As Sparrow notes at the beginning of his article, as he runs around vox-popping Melbourne businesspeople on their lunch break, Gordon has nothing of the name recognition of later bush poets such as Lawson and Patterson.

But then it’s never been as a poet that Gordon has been most celebrated in Mount Gambier. It isn’t his horsey poems we commemorate so much as the horsey things he did. Mount Gambier’s Border Watch, which was the first outlet to ever publish his work, once ran a timeline of Gordon’s life that included, not only every poem he ever published, but every racing meet he ever attended. Victoria seems more interested in his riding, too. He was posthumously inducted into the Australian Jumps Racing Association’s Gallery of Champions in 2014 and became a Colonial Era Inductee to the Australian Racing Hall of Fame in 2023. There is a plaque at Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne that commemorates the day he won three steeplechases in a single afternoon. But I’d wager that Mount Gambier is the only place that has ever gone so far as to immortalise his acts of mindless daredevilry as well.

On 28 July 1864, Gordon was riding around the Blue Lake when, during a game of reckless one-upmanship, he jumped his horse, Red Lancer, over a guard fence, landed it on a narrow ledge some sixty metres above the water, and jumped it back again. “There was nothing in the jump [itself],” explained the Sydney Morning Herald more than fifty years later.

[H]undreds of good riders on good horses have jumped three-rail fences. There was everything in this jump [though], because the space for landing and for take-off was so scanty. If horse or rider had made a mistake they had the best chance in the world of going over the almost perpendicular cliff…

In 1887, when Riddoch laid the foundation stone for the obelisk that commemorates the leap today—a piece of solid granite rising from a base of grey and pink dolomite—he correctly noted that “some people may be inclined to question the wisdom of our commemorating the performance of such a feat”. He also made it clear that, as far as the district was concerned, Gordon’s horsemanship was every bit as important as his poetry:

Gordon’s beautiful poems have become known wherever the English language is spoken and his feats on the hunting field and as steeplechase rider will be remembered in Australia for all time. This beautiful monument, of which we have now laid the foundation stone, is within view of the scene of one of the most sensational and wonderful feats of horsemanship ever carried out in Australia, and will keep his memory green, at all events in this town and neighbourhood—a town and neighbourhood he loved so much, and to which, as one of its representatives in Parliament, he gave an honourable service.

There are lot of inconsistencies in the accounts of Gordon’s leap. According to some, the poet was riding with a group of friends at the conclusion of Mount Gambier’s Border Steeplechase, in which he’d placed third, and others that he was out hunting kangaroos with only one close friend for company. (The friend in question, William Trainor, was more than a little obsessed with Gordon, buying and ultimately occupying the burial plot next to the latter’s grave. If he was the only man present on the day, you’d have to take his claims with a whole shakerful of salt.) The author of an 1897 guide to popular South Australian cycling tours was sceptical that the leap had happened at all. “From a brave jump the account has now assumed proportions sensational even in fiction,” he wrote. It doesn’t help that the monument wasn’t installed until more than twenty years had passed, and that no one knew then, and certainly doesn’t know now, where exactly the leap is supposed to have taken place. I am reminded of Graham Jenkin’s children’s book, The Ballad of the Blue Lake Bunyip, which exposed me to the story as a child. Two stockmen have ridden into Mount Gambier and an old-timer is bending their ears over a beer:

And we talked of cattle and men and nags and women and dogs and sheep,
Till at last the conversation gets around to Gordon’s Leap:
That famous leap old Gordon made to clear a six-foot hedge,
And land three hundred feet above the Lake on a narrer ledge.

I didn’t question the veracity of this until I was much older.

In 1900, a horseman from New South Wales, Lance Skuthorpe, came to Mount Gambier in order to prove that the leap was possible and put any doubts to rest. (“It was not to show the world that another man could do it,” Skuthorpe wrote to the Coonamble Times in 1933. “It was just to show the people of Mount Gambier that it could be done.”) The accounts of this vary wildly as well. According to some reports, Skuthorpe eventually managed the leap, though only on his third attempt. According to the Gordon cultists, he got onto the ledge but wasn’t able to get back, necessitating the removal of the fence. According to Skuthorpe, clearly given to the occasional rhetorical flourish, “I succeeded on [….] one of the greatest jumpers Australia had ever seen, or, perhaps, the world had ever known.”

This is how the sausage gets made: the peddling of myths by writers and newspapermen, the telling of tales by blokes in bars. People will similarly tell you that Gordon’s ‘From the Wreck’, about the 1859 Admella disaster off Cape Northumberland, was autobiographical, and that Gordon himself made the harrowing ride from the Port MacDonnell coast to the Mount Gambier telegraph station. It isn’t, though, and he didn’t. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. Until it’s legend, control the narrative.

A couple of months before the leap, Gordon had bought Dingley Dell, doubtless with some of the £7000 legacy he had received in the wake of his mother’s death. A month after the leap, he had his first poem published, in the pages of the Border Watch. (Written in the style of a Scots border ballad, ‘The Feud’ is an acquired taste. I have not acquired it.) At the beginning of 1865, he was asked to stand for the South Australian parliament. Whatever Riddoch later said, while laying the foundation stone of the obelisk, Gordon was widely considered to have performed his duties in a “very perfunctory manner”. (He scheduled his campaign around race meets and spent his days in parliament drawing horses. His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography suggests that he might have been a better poet had he not been so obsessed with riding, but then it seems he might have been better at a lot of things had that been the case.) But the gig afforded him time to write, and over the two years that he spent in politics his work appeared with ever increasing frequency in the Border Watch, the Australasian, Bell’s Life, and other periodicals. In 1867, his first collection, Sea Spray and Smoke Drift, was published.

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But there was something in him, some temperamental weakness, that meant the good times weren’t to last. An ill-advised tilt at squattocracy in Western Australia, along with the financial failure of his poetry, put a significant dent in what was left of his inheritance. At the end of 1867, he moved his family to Victoria, initially settling in Ballarat before later moving to Brighton. In 1868, his daughter died. He was convinced that he was heir to Esslemont, the Gordon family estate in Aberdeenshire, but his attempts to get his hands on it ultimately came to nothing but lawyer’s fees. He had been prone to bouts of melancholy before, but now they were coming thick and fast, exacerbated by various head injuries sustained in riding accidents. At the beginning of 1869, he returned to South Australia to visit Riddoch, staying at the latter’s Yallum Park estate. Riddoch recalled that visit later:

He would mumble away in the saddle with his thoughts far away and it was absolutely impossible to get anything out of him then. I remember when he wrote ‘The Sick Stockrider’ at Yallum, he climbed up a gum-tree near my house, as he often did when he wanted to be quiet, and composed it there. He generally went out after breakfast when he had a poetical fit and evolved his verses there.

The poem begins:

Hold hard, Ned! Lift me down once more, and lay me in the shade.
Old man, you’ve had your work cut out to guide
Both horses, and to hold me in the saddle when I swayed,
All through the hot, slow, sleepy, silent ride.

The dying stockman proceeds to reflect, in a wistful, increasingly meandering fashion, on his life and many exploits. I am reminded—and not only because I know where Gordon’s story is going—of Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, in which a writer dying of gangrene in Africa reflects on his creative failures. As Riddoch’s biographer, John Rymill, notes, ‘The Sick Stockrider’ becomes “ominously prescient” as it begins to wind down:

Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,
With never stone or rail to fence my bed;
Should the sturdy station children pull the bush-flowers on my grave,
I may chance to hear them romping overhead.

I don’t suppose I shall though, for I feel like sleeping sound,
That sleep, they say, is doubtful. True; but yet
At least it makes no difference to the dead man underground
What the living men remember or forget.

More than any other, this is the poem on which Gordon’s reputation, at least as an Australian writer, rests. That’s obviously a loaded term, especially in a country where works of art have historically been judged less on their artistic merits than on the extent to which they contribute, or don’t, to the national project or sense of national identity. Both the project and the identity in question have almost always been white, as indeed they were in Gordon’s time. But in Gordon’s time they were also nascent, and it is difficult not to detect in the poem—in the stockman’s display, not of British pluck, but of something more informal and insouciant—the germ of the myths to which we continue to ascribe, or, to put it a little more bluntly, of the lies we continue to tell about ourselves.

It’s also difficult not to detect, well, “something very like the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry”. Well into the second half of last century, long after Gordon’s star had faded, literary critics could and did argue that “Gordon, particularly with ‘The Sick Stockrider’ […] established the style of the pounding rhythm and the long line which is generally characteristic of the ballads after him” and that the poem “will always mark the moment when the literature of this country began to move in a new and more characteristically Australian direction.” Writing a little more equivocally about how “Australian” the poem is—“The landscape, despite the scattering of place names, is still rather generalised, even English, in its descriptions”—Geoff Page wrote that ‘The Sick Stockrider’ did nonetheless create “the template which later and perhaps more sophisticated balladists like ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Henry Lawson could utilise”. (The other poem Gordon wrote at Yallum, ‘From the Wreck’, undoubtedly served as an influence on Patterson’s much more famous ‘The Man from Snowy River’.)

Page’s suggestion that “Gordon, for all his efforts, is not yet truly assimilated” goes some way towards confirming Sparrow’s thesis, which is that the poet’s cult emerged in part because he “could be presented as an unhappily exiled Englishman rather than an upstart colonial.” Despite the fact that Gordon’s family was Scottish—don’t make that mistake in Glasgow, Jeff—the poet did on occasion refer to himself as an exile, and many Australians at the beginning of last century liked to think of themselves as exiles, too. Sparrow writes:

From a modern perspective Gordon makes an odd choice for a national poet, since he wrote only rarely about the country that embraced him. He set many of his popular verses in England and studded the others with the classical references familiar to an English gentleman. [...] At the ceremony to mark his inclusion in Westminster Abbey, the archbishop of Canterbury described him as “the voice of the national life of one of the young nations of the British race”. He was, in other words, the poet of Australia precisely because of his Englishness.

He goes on to suggest that Gordon fell out of fashion with the advent of WWII, when “[t]he realignment of the Australian state away from British imperialism (and into the orbit of the new American order) meant that Gordon’s unselfconscious Englishness sounded suddenly and irrevocably dated”. This may have been true, but I reckon the fact that he’d been dead for seventy-two years by the time Curtin said that “Australia looks to America” is probably more relevant. Gordon’s “more ambitious poems,” as Leonie Kramer calls them, had always been “heavily imitative of Romantic and Victorian poetry” and was never nearly as popular as his bush verse and “horsey poems”. But bush verse was on its last legs, too. Lawson had been dead since 1922 and Patterson died in 1941. A new generation of poets, such as Kenneth Slessor, considered the forms and preoccupations of bush verse stultifyingly parochial. Is it any surprise that Gordon wasn’t the man for a country that was finally coming around, however trepidatiously, to modernism? Another Mount Gambier boy, Max Harris, would found Angry Penguins and publish the Ern Malley poems before the war was out.

For his part, Gordon was pleased with ‘The Sick Stockrider’ and excited when it was published in Colonial Monthly and the Australasian. He wrote to Riddoch:

[D]id you like those verses of mine, ‘The Stockrider’? [...] [T]hey made quite a stir here & were copied into The Australasian & spoken of with praise [though] I don’t think much of them myself.

Perhaps that note of self-deprecation was false modesty or perhaps it was a warning sign. Either way, the honeymoon didn’t last. On 23 June 1870, Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes was published, with ‘The Sick Stockman’ among the collected poems. At dawn the next morning, Gordon walked down to the beach and shot himself with his rifle. The irony of ‘Ye Wearie Wayfarer’, which includes the most famous lines Gordon ever wrote, is palpable:

Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.

Dingley Dell has been closed to the public since the previous caretakers, Allan and Jenny Childs, gave up the lease in 2020. They had run the place—giving tours, tending the gardens, assisting visiting researchers—for twenty-three years. South Australia’s Department for Environment and Water continues to maintain the surrounding scrubland but has been unable to secure a replacement caretaker and is in the process of finalising the management plan it has been attempting to finalise for years. Successive proposals, including a controversial plan to turn the site into a glampground, have thus far come to nothing.

I had been told that I should ride out to the cottage and at least take a bit of a look through the windows. But when I got there the windows were blacked out and the gardens were weedy and overgrown with lavender cotton and seaside daisy. I briefly considered breaking in but eventually thought better of it.

A little sleuthing put me in touch Lorraine Day of the Adam Lindsay Gordon Commemorative Committee. Day put me in touch with the Limestone Coast Manager for National Parks and Wildlife, Nick McIntyre, who in turn arranged with a local, who had the keys, to let me into the building.

I went over again on Friday afternoon with my mother and six-year-old nephew. It was my last day in Port MacDonnell. Our connection had already opened the house and left us to wander around on our own. It smelled exactly the way you would expect it smell after being shuttered, but for the occasional open day, for nearly half a decade.

For whatever romantic reasons of my own, I had expected something a little smaller, a little more utilitarian. In fact, it’s spacious as cottages go, with four rooms leading off from a central hallway decorated with equestrian prints and presided over by a glowering portrait of Queen Victoria. I unroped each of the rooms in turn. The first on the left was a sitting room, containing portraits of Gordon and his wife, an upright piano, a violin, and an ancient squeezebox. An ashtray designed to look like a tortoise, apparently from 1853, sat on the mantle. The bedroom is across the hall. The next room down on the right is the study—or rather has been fashioned as a study—complete with a seagull feather in an empty inkwell and a library that includes three secondhand copies of Edith Humphris and Douglas Sladen’s 1912 biography of the poet and several tattered editions of his poems.

Dingley Dell was built in 1862, two years before Gordon bought it. (It was only the seventh building anywhere to be built with Mount Gambier stone.) One of its later caretakers, Charles Elliott Perryman, described the cottage as follows:

It was a plain double fronted little cottage very new and prim among the leafy wilderness of bush clad hills. A bush road led by the place up and away over the hills to the West where it joined the main road to Gambierton.

Wire fences were non-existent and [there was] a straggling log fence over which pink and white roses grew and thrived, together with the pale blue periwinkle. The log fence has passed away only the periwinkle remains on the slope of the hill beside the old house where a poet slept and dreamed.

In 1873, three years after Gordon died, his wife, Margaret, gave the cottage to the local council. Forty-nine years later, in 1922, the South Australian government bought it at the urging of the Dingley Dell Restoration Committee. It was, at the time, the oldest historical residence in the government’s possession. Perryman described what had happened to it in the intervening years:

Many tenants passed through its homely doors in the years that followed [Gordon’s death] until in the beginning of this century it was given over to chance callers, tramps, and visitors who wrote their names in many mediums upon its plastered walls.

Sheep were shorn in its rooms, and the wild bees built their hive in the corner of the wide chimney place in the kitchen, where at one time Margaret Gordon prepared her good man’s meals.

In 1980, the cottage became the first building to be listed on the South Australian Heritage Register. As a tourist attraction, its golden age seems to have been that of the Childs’ stewardship. Allan Child, in particular, despite knowing little about Gordon before taking the lease, became something of a Gordon tragic, and set about filling the cottage with memorabilia. He also took to answering the phone in character as Gordon. He died last year.

The second room on the left is what remains of his museum. While many of the more important artefacts are now in storage somewhere in Mount Gambier, the room is still very busy. Scenes from ‘How We Beat the Favourite’ line the walls in dusty picture frames, portraits jostle for space alongside newspaper clippings and sketches of Gordon’s homes. A model of the Admella sits on a glass case containing a trooper’s saddle—“similar to that used by Gordon,” we’re told—as well as Margaret’s sidesaddle.

But what caught my eye were the two framed letters, each in facsimile, to the right of the doorway. The first was written in the offices of The Outlook, a magazine headquartered on Fourth Avenue in New York City, by former US president Theodore Roosevelt:

Teddy always was the horsey type.

The second letter is even more striking. It is addressed to F. J. Martell, who was instrumental in having Gordon’s Ballarat cottage moved to the town’s botanical gardens:

This note from the fabled Poet of Empire would seem to bring Gordon’s story full circle: from Berbice and Bengal to the Blue Lake and Brighton to Bateman’s in Burwash, East Sussex. It would seem, too, to give added weight to Sparrow’s argument about Gordon’s posthumous success being tied up in fantasies of Empire and exile. (Of course, in the end, Sparrow’s article isn’t really about the Gordon cult at all. Like everything else he’s ever written, it’s actually about how the left might rise again and strike a decisive blow against the right. He’s always seeing some new opening or opportunity. In this case, it’s the emergence of “a renewed literary infrastructure” that “seems much less likely to take shape as a nationalist venture than as a counter-hegemonic project, drawing its energy from movements for social change,” even though that doesn’t seem very likely, either.)

I maintain that aesthetic irrelevance has more to do with Gordon’s fading from memory than the British Empire’s fading from world affairs. I don’t think geopolitics killed the cult. For one thing, as I discovered while writing this piece, the cult never really died. The same people who were once powerful enough to get Gordon into Westminster Abbey and his poems in front of presidents and Nobel Prize winners are now content to make some calls and track down the keys to an old museum. The cult has become a literal cottage industry.

Don’t get me wrong, though. It’s still kind of weird. Sparrow writes of a tree stump in Brighton that bears a plaque commemorating the fact that Gordon once tethered his horse to it. In a room off the kitchen at the back Dingley Dell, which is used for storing old visitor pamphlets, I discovered a bulging folder of ephemera that included a letter from Queen Elizabeth II’s Deputy Private Secretary, politely declining an invitation to Her Majesty to become a patron of the Adam Lindsay Gordon Commemorative Committee, and an entry form for the Esperanto Federation of Victoria’s Adam Lindsay Gordon Esperanto Poetry Competition. Rather more offputtingly, there is a lock of hair belonging to Gordon’s daughter, Annie, on the wall of the museum, as though it were a kind of religious relic. Annie was ten months old when she died. I don’t think her hair needs to be on display.

This kind of thing is the residue of romanticism, a cringeworthy form of genius- or hero-worship that we don’t see much today outside the secret diaries of adolescents. At least as much as Australia’s changing self-image, though still less than its evolving aesthetic standards, it’s the fading away of this sensibility—the realisation that Werther is not a model to be emulated but rather a pretty troubled young man—that I think explains Gordon’s gradual eclipse. By the time we got to the end of WWI, and shell-shocked soldiers like Septimus Smith started returning home from the front, the conception of the noble, philosophical suicide, undertaken by those, usually men, of refined sensibility, had lost a lot of its currency and appeal. No one older than about seventeen talks of Woolf or Plath or Hemingway as being anything other than deeply unwell. It is only in pockets like Dingley Dell that a tendency to swoon lives on.

My main problem with this is not that it’s sophomoric, but rather that it tends to flatten the object of its affections. In the shrine-like atmosphere of Dingley Dell, Gordon has been turned into a secular saint, where in fact he remained the same wild child he always had been. He was a gadfly and a spendthrift and preferred horses to poetry. He shot himself, not because he felt the world too keenly, but because he’d spent all his money. The Gordon of the cultists is an Orthodox icon. The Gordon who got kicked out of school, risked his life for a laugh, played truant from parliament, and wrote his best work in trees sounds like someone you could actually hang out with.

As we drove to Mount Gambier’s coach station on Saturday morning, people walked and jogged around the Blue Lake without so much as glancing at the obelisk. Like a family heirloom, it has been passed down through the generations to the point that no one can remember where it came from anymore, or when, or what it symbolises. Dingley Dell has been shuttered again and will likely remain locked, unvisited, until May, when there is to be another open day. “There is a queer local apathy to Gordon in the district,” wrote Perryman. “He is mostly regarded as a peculiar, taciturn fellow who rode wildly across country, and over fences, [and] that he wrote poetry that is largely ignored.” It seems to me that little has changed.

I am not especially surprised that Mount Gambier rarely talks about Gordon, though. It rarely talks about Robert Helpmann, either. We’re a regional community and our heroes are not artists. It nevertheless remains true that it was here that Scots border balladry became Australian bush verse. That’s not nothing. Whatever you think about such poetry as poetry, let alone about its colonial history or post-Federation politics, it remains an integral part of our literary story, and there’s no getting around the fact that Adam Lindsay Gordon was its originator. I’m personally rather tickled to think that it was born only fifteen minutes from my parent’s house.

That isn’t an exaggeration. The vast majority of SWF moderators are ABC-affiliated or -adjacent, from David Marr and Annabel Crabb to Waleed Aly and The Bookshelf’s Kate Evans, and a not insignificant number of the sessions are recorded for later broadcast on RN. (I paid more than thirty dollars to watch Aly and Scott Stephens interview Anna Funder for The Minefield, mainly in the hope that one or either of them would call her up on her questionable journalistic ethics, which, naturally, they didn’t.)

I don’t blame the festival too much. It knows who’s keeping the lights on. A Venn diagram of RN listeners and SWF ticket holders—of RN listeners and people who live in Paddington, attend STC matinees, have lunch upstairs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, think the Festival of Dangerous Ideas is edgy, erroneously claim to have always voted Labor—is essentially a single circle. These are the sort of people who will buy a thirteen-dollar croissant at the Carriageworks farmers’ market then head over to the festival to drop even more on talks that, in a couple of weeks, they could hear on the radio for free. (In addition to the sessions that are destined for broadcast, the SWF also winds up releasing great swathes on its podcast. Aside from not costing anything, this level of engagement is a lot more convenient than getting up early on a Sunday morning to brave the cold and cavernous prison that is Carriageworks in order to watch someone field a Zoom call from abroad.) The result is that the festival program—far more than those of the smaller neighbourhood-based festivals, such as the Addi Road Writers’ Festival in Marrickville—tends to be a genteel affair tailored specifically to the tastes of an RN listenership.

The problem is that, under no circumstances whatsoever, should such people and their tastes be allowed to dictate the programming of a literary festival. They are middlebrow, parochial lovers of the mediocre, connoisseurs of the unchallenging and bland. Their favourite kind of literature is YA that doesn’t call itself that. Don’t believe me? They proved as much over the weekend. After nearly two months of audience polling—287,990 votes were cast in the end, a whopping three quarters of them by women—RN announced its Top 100 Books of the 21st Century. While there were certainly some very good books on the list, albeit further down it than they should have been, the top ten was for the most part an embarrassment:

There are a couple of things that jump out at you here. The first is recency bias, with only The Book Thief and Wolf Hall predating 2010. (Recency bias explains a lot about the list, such as the presence of Charlotte Woods’ Stone Yard Devotional but not her Stella-winning The Natural Way of Things. I can’t imagine there’s any other explanation for why Zadie Smith’s White Teeth—number thirty-one on the New York Times’ recent version of this stunt—didn’t make the cut at all, while Funder’s Wifedom, which is not a good book, appeared at number seventeen. It’s amusing to me that the year with the most books on the list was 2023, which suggests that a lot of people simply voted for the last book they could remember reading.) The second thing that jumps out at you is the fact that more than half of the books in the top ten have been adapted for the screen. It would be interesting to know how many people caught the adaptations on Netflix or Apple before actually, if ever, reading the books, and to know as well how difficult or otherwise the screenwriters found the task of adaptation. The third is that Australia is apparently responsible for four of the top ten books of this century. I know that the poll was an Australian one, but this is obviously ridiculous.

I have never bothered much with Trent Dalton—“the definitive novelist of Scott Morrison’s Australia,” as Catriona Menzies-Pike once damningly called him—on the grounds that I have never been able to get past the first couple of pages of Boy Swallows Universe without gagging on the prose. I suspect that his success comes down, not only to the way he “infantilises his audience by feeding them palatable maxims about history, society and human flourishing,” but also to the fact that he’s mates with half the journalistic establishment and that every publication in the country has labelled him a national treasure. (The Guardian remains a notable exception. Jack Callil on Dalton’s “piping-hot sentimentality” and Beejay Silcox on his “bleakly retrograde” politics are both necessary correctives to the gushing.)

But while it’s true that the Australian media tends to function like a herd of elephants forming an alert circle, I don’t think Dalton’s success can be attributed exclusively to the praise of his colleagues. (It’s not as though anyone actually buys the weekend papers.) It also has something to do with what A. A. Phillips, in his famous essay on the Cultural Cringe, called the “Cringe Inverted”. This is a kind of overcompensating jingoism that has been ascendent in Australia for decades—“Culture with a capital C has lost its erstwhile diffidence,” Clive James wrote in 1976, “but in many instances seems to have replaced it with a bombast equally parochial”—but that found its ultimate and emptiest expression in Morrison’s “How good is Australia?” nonsense. (It’s the same thing that causes the commercial news networks to act as though every Australian nominated for an Oscar is a shoe-in to win until they lose.) Aside from the fact that the best Australian books on the list mostly appear buried somewhere towards the back—and that Australian authors like Michelle de Kretser, Gerald Murnane, and Shirley Hazzard don’t appear on it at all—it seems to me that the full-scale repudiation of the Cringe hasn’t resulted in a celebration of our best work, but rather in an unthinking celebration of our weakest, or at least most middling. (Nick Bryant unwittingly proves the point in his tubthumping ABC piece about the list. He would do well to remember that Phillips warned that the opposite of the Cringe is “not the Strut, but a relaxed erectness of carriage.” I wouldn’t so loudly proclaim this as a watershed moment, mate. We just announced to the entire world that our favourite ice cream flavour is vanilla.)

More than anything, however, I think the list reflects how unwilling Australian readers are to be challenged, either by ideas or by style. It is striking how many people will put down a book that doesn’t immediately flatter or placate them—that doesn’t immediately reward them with the junk high of recognition or reassure them that it’s going to proceed in much the same way as other fictional narratives—and how much bad writing they will willingly endure in the case of one that does.

This is as true of the gatekeepers as it is of the readers. I remember once watching the ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club and being shocked when the panel, which included Marieke Hardy and Leigh Sales, shot down host Jennifer Byrne when she complained that the prose in Ann Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread was bad. That, they argued, was not the point. The story was compelling. It was moving. When Byrne argued that you had to be able to read the story without grinding your teeth before you could be moved by it, they doubled down. Not one of them—including Hardy, which is a little concerning given she ran the Melbourne Writers’ Festival for two years—engaged with Byrne’s critique of the writing as writing. The writing didn’t matter.

It’s important to remember that this dismissal of form in favour of feels didn’t take place in your neighbour’s house while everyone was drinking wine and eating cheese. It took place on what was then Australia’s only television show dedicated to books. (There are none now, so complaining about it seems a little bit churlish. I’d rather it than nothing at all.) While there are certainly exceptions to the rule—Claire Nichols’ recent interview with Peter Carey abot The True History of the Kelly Gang comes to mind—the RN shows tend to be similarly story- and character-focused to the exclusion of all else. When prose and sentence-making do come up, it’s usually only to note the extent to which a book does or doesn’t conform to a narrow definition of the lyrical. This matters. It’s thanks to these shows, alongside the festivals at which their hosts appear as moderators, that this has become the primary model, and these the primary parameters, for most mainstream literary discourse in Australia. (One recent, rather amusing exception was this year’s SWF ‘State of the Art’ panel, which usually involves two or three of the festival’s big-name guests answering the usual, tired questions about their most recent books. This year, apparently a bit miffed that they weren’t going to get to talk about, well, the state of the art, Rumaan Alam, Robbie Arnott, Samantha Harvey, and Torrey Peters hijacked the session, ignored the questions, and simply started talking to one another. It was easily the most enlightening session of the festival.)

Obviously, there are other places to talk books: universities, journals, Substack, residencies, the penniless down-and-dirty spaces that seemed a lot more numerous in my twenties than they do now (mostly because I’m no longer in my twenties and haven’t any idea where to find them). These are where I prefer to spend my time and energy, but they ultimately have little influence on how the majority of readers think about books, namely because they don’t perpetuate the permission structures that allow people to ignore how the things are actually written.

Substack is awash in pieces about this sort of thing: the point of literature, the point of reading. We have argued and will argue again about whether literature should provide moral instruction, engender empathy, model radical politics, normalise kink. We have argued about sentences, about style for its own sake. The site teems with critiques and defences of “poptimism,” which are relevant to fields of endeavour beyond music, such as the writing of airport novels and the deliberate confusion of these with quality. There have even been a couple of good pieces about why all Australian literature is YA and—suggesting that the Cringe is still very much alive—about its “necessarily parasitic relationship to the metropole and ‘culture’”:

We see it today in criticism that insists on connecting new Aussie books to American forebears; in the dim facsimiles of globally successful genre writing that presses major and minor churn into airport bookstores each financial year; in the constant checking of the exits by writers who don’t ultimately believe that writing is possible.

I know that middlebrow taste isn’t unique to Australia, and that it isn’t anything new. (Whenever I’m feeling down about what other people are reading, which is in any case a ridiculous thing to feel, I always go back to Orwell’s essay about working in a bookstore: “[O]f all the authors in our library the one who ‘went out’ the best was—Priestley? Hemingway? Walpole? Wodehouse? No, Ethel M. Dell, with Warwick Deeping a good second…” Perhaps Trent Dalton is our Ethel M. Dell?) I know, too, that to have a national radio network that’s willing to dedicate an entire weekend to books is, whatever the actual content of the broadcast, a positive thing for which we should be grateful. At the same time, I can’t help but feel that RN’s list, and especially its top ten, says something kind of depressing about what books we value, why we value them, and how we talk about that value. I’m not sure whether it’s a chicken-and-egg scenario or a tail-wagging-dog one. Are reader tastes setting the terms? Are publishing decisions determining tastes? Or are readers, writers, publishers, and journalists all stuck in some ungodly feedback loop in which everyone’s constantly agreeing with one another without ever stopping to ask whether they should? Who and where in the hivemind is the queen?

What fresh Hell is this?

A spin-off of Cheers was never the plan. By 1993, when the series ended, Kesley Grammer had been playing Frasier Crane for the better part of nine years, and he wasn’t especially keen to keep doing so. The audience wasn’t especially keen on it, either. When Pew Research polled audience members about which Cheers characters they’d most like to see in their own series, Frasier garnered a paltry 2 per cent. But the network wasn’t in love with the idea that Cheers alumni David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee had come up with—their proposed sitcom about a paraplegic magazine publisher would have been, if nothing else, unique—and insisted that Frasier was a better bet. Loathe though I am to give any kind of respect to the suits, who were doubtless thinking, like the jackals they are, that they could capitalise on the post-Cheers hangover before ignominiously calling closing time, it seems to me that they were right, especially as far as Grammer’s career was concerned. I can’t imagine we’d be talking about him now—except, of course, in the context of The Simpsons’ Sideshow Bob, the other decades-long role he’s made his own—had it not been for the suits’ insistence. It’s certainly telling that, having starred in a string of non-starters since Frasier ended in 2004—Back to You, Proven Innocent, Hank, Partners, The Last Tycoon—as well as the excellent but short-lived Boss, Grammer is once again playing Frasier in the entirely underwhelming reboot. As in the case of McLean Stevenson before him, it turns out that the audience didn’t love Kelsey Grammer. They loved Cheers and, eventually, came to love Frasier Crane as well.

Of course, the irony of that is that Frasier’s creators went out of their way to distance the show from Cheers, or at least to avoid direct comparisons with it. They set the series on the other side of the country primarily so that NBC couldn’t insist on a conga line of cameos. They also very quickly put a lot of daylight between Cheers’ Frasier and, well, Frasier’s. While they have always said that they toned the character down for the spin-off, grounding him and giving him depth as befit his transition from supporting character to lead, I don’t think that’s accurate at all. If anything, they ramped him up. Cheers’ version was occasionally a bore, occasionally haughty, occasionally on the edge of a nervous breakdown. (“I’m running with scissors!”) But the beer-drinking shrink who watched games with the barflies was a lot more grounded than the sherry-sipping collector of African art who couldn’t abide watching sports with his father. While not quite so cartoonishly arrogant in the series’ first couple of seasons—the better to throw Niles’ role as elitist fop into sharper relief—it doesn’t take long for Frasier to become a raging egomaniac. This is not a criticism, by the way. It is only once the writers turn Frasier’s arrogance and status anxiety up to eleven and start gleefully kicking his feet out from under him that the show begins to find its own.

I’ll never understand how two men like you could have been spawned by that sweet, courageous old astronaut

If M*A*S*H is three shows masquerading as one, and Cheers is the same show played twice at different speeds, then Frasier is a single episode played on an eleven-season loop. This is not a criticism, either. The template of the episode in question—Frasier allows his pomposity, presumptions, passions and priggishness to get the better of him and is punished with humiliation and celibacy as a result—is a good one. It is also custom-built for the mode in which the show best operated: farce. (It’s not surprising to learn that, a couple of months before the series ended, the five core cast members staged a reading of The Importance of Being Earnest at a Los Angeles benefit event.)

Farce litters Fraiser’s seasons like confetti. In ‘The Seal Who Came to Dinner’, Frasier and Niles discover the rotting carcass of a seal on the beach outside Maris’ seaside bungalow. Worried that the smell might detract from their dinner party, which Niles is hosting to win some award, they wrap it in one of Maris’ peignoirs, douse it in perfume, and dispose of it in the ocean. When it washes back in, Niles stabs a series of holes in it in order to encourage it to sink, leading a nosy neighbour to call the police and the guests to conclude that the brothers have committed murder. In ‘Merry Christmas, Mrs. Moskowitz’, Frasier allows himself to be set up on a date with the daughter of a woman who listens to his show. It isn’t until the daughter comes over, with her mother not too far behind, that Frasier, preparing the apartment for Christmas, learns that the mother is under the impression that he’s Jewish. Obviously, because telling the truth doesn’t occur to him, he proceeds to pretend that that’s what he is, despite the fact that there’s a ham in the oven and Niles dressed as Jesus Christ hiding a Christmas tree in the bathroom.

Of course, when I say that the show is a single episode on an eleven-season loop, I’m not being entirely accurate. For one thing, you could make an argument that the loop is only seven seasons long, ending or slackening when Daphne learns that Niles is in love with her, or perhaps ten, terminating when they marry. More relevant to the discussion here is the level of variation—from cosplaying as Christ to stabbing a seal—that exists within that repetition.

Whatever the situation, however, and however absurd its inevitable escalation, the one constant in Frasier’s use of farce is the way it always emerges from character. According to one of his English translators, French farceur Georges Feydeau—who is namechecked in the intertitles of ‘The Ski Lodge’—once told his son that the players in a farce must never be allowed to say or do anything that is not strictly demanded, in the first instance, by their characters. This is where Frasier surpasses its predecessor. In my piece on Cheers, I wrote about the show’s relationship with and debt to Fawlty Towers. It’s obvious that episodes like ‘Home Malone’ and ‘An Old-Fashioned Wedding’ were influenced by the earlier series. But the results seem superficial somehow, the silliness silly but hollow and unmotivated. Everything seems a little back-to-front, the writers increasingly shoehorning the characters into situations rather than allowing the situations to arise organically from the characters. “[I]f the audience ever says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Why would that person do that?’ you’ve lost them,” said Frasier writer Joe Keenan in the oral history of ‘The Ski Lodge’. A Cheers episode like ‘Let Sleeping Drakes Lie’ makes this mistake and then some, ultimately collapsing on the grounds that the characters as we know them and the slapstick that they’re engaged in have next to nothing to do with one another.

While the co-creators of Frasier had left Cheers by that point of the latter’s run, it’s clear that they were very much aware of what the show was trying to do in its old age. It’s also clear that they thought they could do it better, aiming at something more polished and precise. (In the oral history, Keenan uses the word “mathematical”.) Kevin Levine, who coincidentally wrote on all three of the series I’ve written about over the past two months, defined his own approach to farce in a blog post twenty years ago. For him, the key elements were jeopardy (“something the characters need very badly and are willing to go to the greatest lengths to achieve,” such as Frasier’s desire to keep dating his girlfriend and Niles’ need to impress his dinner party guests) and lies (“a character lies and then to keep from getting caught must lie again”). You can see both of these elements at work in Levine’s own semi-farcical episode, ‘Room Service’, in which Bebe Neuwirth’s Lilith comes to town and winds up having a one-night stand with Niles. When Frasier rocks up at her hotel the next morning, hoping to rekindle their own sexual relationship, Lilith and Niles are forced to conceal, not only their encounter, but also the breakfast they ordered the night before. Hiding Niles and a serve of eggs benedict in the bathroom is all very good and well, but Lilith is also waiting for ketchup. When it rocks up, she’s at a loss to explain it, let alone to explain to the room service attendant why the breakfast cart is now in the bathroom. (When he notices that Niles has been replaced by Frasier between the delivery of breakfast and the delivery of condiments, the attendant cocks an eyebrow. When he comes back at the end of the episode—Frasier having ordered eggs benedict, too—to find that Lilith has been replaced by Niles, well, it’s fair to say that he cocks two.)

It helps that Frasier, like Fawlty Towers, is more of a comedy of manners than Cheers, and that Frasier Crane, like Basil Fawlty, is the kind of character whose obsession with status, sense of superiority, and inability to shut up and listen make the kind of misunderstandings that fuel farce all but inevitable. Watching someone try to save face and fail is always inherently funny. In ‘The Two Mrs. Cranes’—an episode in which everyone gets their comeuppance—Daphne pretends to be married to Niles in order to put off a visiting ex-fiancé. Before long, Frasier is pretending to be married to Niles’s actual wife, Roz is pretending to be the wife in question, and Marty, who doesn’t want to be left out, is pretending to be a retired astronaut. At this point, with everyone lying and trying to keep their lies straight, both women realise that the ex-fiancé is a catch and start shamelessly trying to flirt with him. He makes to leave, disgusted by the perversity of it all, at which point the attempts to save face reach a fever pitch of desperation. (You can tell that things are getting desperate on Frasier when someone deigns to tell the truth.)

DAPHNE: Really, we’re not the awful people you think we are!

FRASIER: No, the truth is we’ve been lying to you all night!

Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t do the trick.

All the motivations in this episode, and therefore all the escalations, track with the characters as we know them: Daphne isn’t interested in her ex but doesn’t want to hurt his feelings, Niles is in love with Daphne and only too happy to pretend that they’re married, Frasier will always grudgingly help his brother, and Roz and Martin are both inveterate shit-stirrers who take pleasure in watching hair-brained schemes unravel. It all makes a lot more sense, and is funnier, than Norm carrying a rich man in pyjamas around the yard.

Quick, Niles, kill five eels

While Levine’s jeopardy-plus-lies equation accurately describes a lot of Frasier’s farces, my favourites—‘Ham Radio’, ‘The Innkeepers’, and ‘The Ski Lodge’—mostly lack the supposedly necessary element of stacked or nested falsehoods. In the case of ‘Ham Radio’ and ‘The Innkeepers’, the only lies that are being told are the ones that Frasier’s telling to himself. In both cases, his deluded self-aggrandisement and inability to admit when he’s licked work a little like compound interest on the deteriorating situations in which he finds himself. Levine had something to say about this as well. “The pressure must never let up,” he wrote. “Constant roadblocks must be introduced. Complications on top of more complications. The vice tightens…and tightens…and tightens.” In ‘Ham Radio’, Frasier over-directs a radio play to the point that he turns his entire cast against him, leading to a live broadcast that’s characterised by vows of silence, petulant improvisation (Gil Chesterton refuses to allow his character to die before he has delivered the rather suggestive monologue that Frasier has cut), and more than a little sabotage. It’s also characterised by Roz’s drooling, novocaine-induced line deliveries, which are barely comprehensible.

‘The Innkeepers’ follows the same basic trajectory—pride going once more before the fall—on a larger, more cataclysmic scale. It’s the closest that either Frasier or Cheers ever came to actually besting Fawlty Towers at its own game. It begins with Frasier and Niles visiting a restaurant that they remember fondly from childhood, only to learn that it’s fallen on hard times and become bit of a shambles. They decide to buy it and do it up, namely because they fancy the idea of running an exclusive hangout for the hoi aristoi. But because of their inability to communicate with one another—they give contradictory instructions to the chef, causing him to walk out, and continually add slugs of booze to the cherries jubilee, unaware that the other is doing so, too—things on opening night go south. In addition to losing the chef, they also manage to injure the busboys and scare off the rest of the kitchen staff by announcing that someone from the immigration department is in the house. This leads to Niles taking over the kitchen, Daphne stepping in as his sous chef, Roz becoming a waitress, and Martin tending bar. (Like ‘The Two Mrs. Cranes’, this is one of the show’s great five-handers, in which every member of the core ensemble is given a moment in the spotlight.) Following an amazing sequence in which Daphne proves herself to be more than adept at killing eels—probably the funniest thing Jane Leeves ever did on the show—Roz goes to flambé the cherries jubilee, blows herself up, sets off the sprinklers, and causes everyone in the place to evacuate. As they’re leaving, one of the restaurant’s old waiters, whom the brothers have retained as a valet, drives a car through the wall for good measure. Only Basil thrashing one with a stick could be funnier.

So, it’s a threesome you want—well, I don’t do those anymore

Actually, no, ‘The Ski Lodge’ is funnier. It is to Frasier what ‘The Chinese Restaurant’ is to Seinfeld, what ‘Modern Warfare’ is to Community, what ‘Marge vs. the Monorail’ is to The Simpsons: not necessarily the show’s best episode (though it is) or its most representative (which it isn’t), but rather the one that so encapsulates its spirit that that it could, were the rest to be irretrievably lost, stand in for the whole. Perfect in its construction and execution—a Rube Goldberg machine of finely calibrated misunderstandings, a clockwork orrery of carnal rather than celestial bodies—it mostly stands as a testament to itself and to the talent and ambition that went into its creation. This, it says, is what firing on all cylinders looks like.

Everything about this bedroom farce is worth the price of admission. The guest performers and set design are perfect. The editing is a masterclass. (The bedrooms were built on different parts of the soundstage, necessitating various camera setups and resulting in the kind stop-start shooting rhythm that can occasionally be fatal when you’re shooting comedy in front of an audience. The theatrical vibe of the final cut is largely down to the edit, which creates the illusion of contiguous space and stage time and thus gives the episode its propulsive sense of movement.) I would also highlight David Lee’s direction, especially of the camera. As I discuss towards the end of this piece, Frasier was never as clever visually as it was in various other ways, but ‘The Ski Lodge’ is a good example of how a camera can tell a joke as well. Watch for the pan that reveals Guy—on the other side of the room only seconds before—sitting next to Niles on the couch. Watch for the longer one that takes in the characters’ faces as they absorb Martin’s words about the chances we don’t take, each of them drunkenly deciding, in that moment, to pursue the object of their lust for the remainder of the episode.

It’s Keenan’s writing, though, that’s the star. He doesn’t put a foot wrong. Every decision he makes—from Guy being gay to Martin being deaf to Fraiser’s final, humiliating realisation that he’s the only one who’s not being pursued—turned out to be the right one:

I realised the fun of it would be if everybody was completely unaware, or they were only dimly aware, of the person who was chasing them. So the person you were chasing never was quite aware that you were chasing them, and you were never quite aware of who was chasing you. I thought, “Everybody has to have some kind of incorrect signal that they’ve gotten the green light, so they’re not just barging into people’s bedroom with no reason to think their advances would be welcomed.” What if Martin were somebody people went to, and he kept giving people incorrect information because he was not hearing stuff correctly?

What follows is one the most madcap, ribald, and suggestive half hours the show ever put to air. It also feels, in retrospect, like a kind of high watermark for the three-camera sitcom. I’ll come back to this a little later.

In retrospect, I’m reasonably sure that you’re not the devil

While the show managed to avoid Cheers cameos in its first season, it was not, in the end, without them. Not including Bebe Neuwirth’s appearances as Lilith—there are only twelve, but like the scenes of gratuitous violence in American Psycho they colour everything around them to the point that you’d swear there had been more—there are four crossover episodes. With one exception, which we’ll come to in a moment, they are not especially strong entries, but they are nevertheless of interest for the way they colour and complicate Cheers and its ending. What is especially interesting about this is that they were helmed by Cheers’ creators themselves: James Burrows directed three of the episodes and either one or both of the Charles brothers co-wrote all four. In doing so, they corrected some of Cheers’ mistakes—its lionisation of Sam, its treatment of Diane—and made it at least a little bit clearer that the series finale was not in fact a happy ending.

This is especially true of Sam’s episode, ‘The One Where Sam Shows Up’, in which Sam, well, shows up, having run out on the woman he was about to marry. Can there be any doubt that this man is broken? That nothing has changed since the last time we saw him? Even before the episode trots out its get-out-of-marriage-free card—the revelation that Sam’s fiancée, Sheila, once slept with Cliff, the writers’ favourite punching bag—there’s never really any question that he’s actually going to go through with it. There is never any question of forgiveness, either, despite the fact that Sheila is, like Sam, a recovering sex addict. He, of all people, should understand. But that would require him to be more than the narcissistic, commitment-averse cad he was for the entire duration of Cheers’ run, the guy who never tired of the chase—he puts the moves on Daphne, to Niles’ chagrin—but whose one true love was and remains a long piece of varnished wood with a brass railing. (The casual cruelty of Cheers creators has long gone overlooked. Even the little that did change for the better at the end of the series’ run has, they inform us, reverted to the depressing norm. Rebecca’s husband? Got rich and dumped her. “She’s back at the bar.” “Working at Cheers again?” “No, she’s just back at the bar.”) ‘The One Where Woody Shows Up’ is a sweeter, more melancholic affair in which Frasier and Woody, who had nothing in common but the bar to begin with, realise that memories alone are insufficient to sustain an ongoing friendship. ‘Cheerful Goodbyes’, in which Frasier, Niles, Daphne, and Martin visit Boston and wind up attending a going away party for Cliff, is little more than a half-hour of fan service, though Rhea Perlman has a meltdown for the ages when Cliff announces that he’s decided to stay. (She tries to kill him with a harpoon gun.)

‘The Show Where Diane Comes Back’ is different, a genuinely cathartic experience on multiple on- and off-screen levels. Having left Frasier at the altar in Cheers’ fourth season, and the show itself at the end of its fifth, Diane arrives in Seattle for the debut of her new play. While Niles advises Frasier to be honest and to tell Diane about the pain that she’s caused him, Frasier has a better idea: he will rub his success in her face instead. But Diane, characteristically oblivious, doesn’t even notice, bragging about her own meteoric career until the play comes up and her face begins to twitch. It turns out that her producer has backed out and that things aren’t as rosy as she’s been letting on. Frasier agrees to produce the show himself, but is gutted when he attends rehearsal and discovers that it’s a piece of tepid autofiction about Cheers and Diane’s love for Sam. When the actor playing the thinly-veiled Frasier character stops the rehearsal to ask for direction—he isn’t sure how he’s meant to be feeling in the wake of being left at the altar—Frasier explodes: “What you are feeling is that this woman has reached into your chest, plucked out your heart, and thrown it to her hell-hounds for a chew toy! And it’s not the last time either! Because that’s what this woman is! She is the devil!” He storms out having said his piece.

But he eventually comes back. In the final moments of the episode—before trying to walk out the bar’s front door, having forgotten that the whole thing’s a set—Frasier tells Diane what she meant to him in the past, and she tells him him what he meant to her. While her life remains stunted because of her association with Cheers (I really cannot stress enough how much damage that bar did to everyone who spent time there), this feels like a moment of grace for them both, and is a gentler, kinder, more meaningful goodbye, to character and actress alike, than either of those they were afforded on Cheers.

The bar has, according to Grammer and Burrows, closed in the world of the Frasier reboot. I’ve only watched one episode of the new series and then only to see Bebe Neuwirth as Lilith. I imagine it will be her final appearance in the role, or in case very close to it. (I can always rewatch the criminally cancelled Julia when I need a Neuwirth and David Hyde Pierce fix.) Neuwirth remains as good as ever, but the whole thing left a metallic taste in the mouth. Levine has said that, when writers from Frasier’s original run came in to share their ideas for the reboot, those ideas had not been well-received. There have also been grumblings about the reboot’s unwillingness, despite Frasier’s return to Boston, to even mention the bar’s name. Nevertheless, Grammer has reportedly expressed interest in bringing Diane back one last time. There are things, he says, that remain unsaid. This is patently absurd. What needed to be said was said in ‘The Show Where Diane Comes Back’. Frankly, I hope Long says no.

I’m a humane man, but in the mood I’m in I could kick a kitten through an electric fan

After completing M*A*S*H and Cheers in their entirety, I was a little bit hesitant to do the same with Frasier. For one thing, it lacked the historical interest that the other two had held for me. M*A*S*H predates me by more than a decade, and Cheers’ fourth season premiered exactly two weeks after I was born. That was not the case with Frasier, which aired throughout my adolescence and ended in my first year of film school. (I can’t remember ever watching it, though. My family was more into Home Improvement and The Nanny.) For another, based on what I had seen, it didn’t look particularly different to anything else that was airing at the time. I am glad to have corrected the oversight, not least because I think that Frasier is a kind of masterclass in sitcom writing. While the ‘The Ski Lodge’ demonstrates its bona fides at the level of structure, it’s the sheer auditory delight of the show’s dialogue that really floats my boat. Frasier and Niles’ pretensions allow, and in fact demand, a significant amount of writerly play, whether in the form of intellectual allusion, double entendre (Frasier is almost Allenesque in his obsession with sex), or archaic, acrobatic syntax. (“It’s almost as if you’ve forgotten that, not three days ago, I was punched in the face by a man now dead!”) From the beginning, the writers granted themselves the freedom to be as smart (or smarter) than their characters, never deigning to dumb things down for the audience, whom they trusted would be able to keep up. This results in some of the most enjoyable dialoue of its time, on par with, though obviously different to, Seinfeld’s neologism- and catchphrase-heavy writing.

At the same time, I don’t think you can reasonably argue that Frasier comes close to M*A*S*H for experimentation, or to Cheers for subtle, intelligent camera direction. Like every other three-camera sitcom of the 1990s, with the exception of Seinfeld in its more cinematically ambitious years, it’s a largely disappointment as far as the eyes are concerned. ‘The Ski Lodge’ may be a semi-exception to this rule, but the times were changing, or had already changed. The Larry Sanders Show, which finished the year that ‘The Ski Lodge’ aired, had already created the visual template (and plenty of other templates besides) that would go on to inform the single-camera sitcoms that would follow, from Curb Your Enthusiasm and Veep to both versions of The Office. Malcolm in the Middle, which would premiere a couple of years later and immediately be labelled a “live-action Simpsons”, would do something similar with its whip pans and cuts-to-black in advance of shows like My Name is Earl, Arrested Development, Community, and 30 Rock. (As for The Office, especially in its American incarnation, it would go on to have an even greater, more deleterious impact than any of them by convincing the world that a documentary crew would spend multiple years in an office or local government building or the various houses of a large extended family. My favourite moment of Big Mouth is the one in which Coach Steve is being interviewed for some reason and points out the inherent laziness of the mockumentary format: “Boy, these straight-to-camera testimonials are great for narrative structure. They’re a crutch, but they cut right to the chase.”)

Of course, it’s unlikely that a prolix, farce-heavy show, three-camera or otherwise, was likely to inspire many imitators to begin with. But then, by the early 2000s, three-camera sitcoms in general were unlikely to inspire many imitators. There would still be huge, juggernaut-like hits—the kind of slop that has made Chuck Lorre a wealthy man—but the format itself had ossified and the interesting work was being done elsewhere. This is obviously a wild generalisation, but the trajectory I’m describing, the vibe of the thing, was real, and plenty of people were saying so at the time, long before the results were in. The reviews of Frasier’s series finale were often elegiac as a result, with a number of critics, such as Dana Stevens, lamenting the demise of “situation comedies for adults”. This was obviously more than a little hyperbolic. But in terms of the three-camera sitcom, at least, it was probably also more than a little right.

When the weight of the world has got you down, and you want to end your life—bills to pay, a dead-end job, and problems with the wife—well, don’t throw in the towel, because there’s a place right ’round the block where you can drink your miseries away.

Wait. No, that’s the Flamin’ Moes song. This is a piece about Cheers.

But I suppose it’s only appropriate that I once again open with The Simpsons. If my childhood awareness of M*A*S*H was due to re-runs, which led into The Simpsons on weekday afternoons, then my awareness of Cheers was based almost exclusively on the animated series’ parodies of it.

I was also aware of its reputation: it consistently tops, or nearly tops, lists of the greatest sitcoms ever made, regularly edging out M*A*S*H and, somewhat less regularly, Seinfeld. (On the last such list I read, it came second to—what else?—The Simpsons.) But unlike M*A*S*H, I had never seen an episode until recently. For whatever reason, Cheers wasn’t really syndicated here. (My first exposure to Ted Danson was through Three Men and a Baby and its sequel, and, on television, Becker. These are not the sort of productions that send one racing to the archives for more.) In any case, after finishing M*A*S*H in its entirety a couple of months ago, I decided to give Cheers a try.

The show arrives fully formed. Not only does it know, from the moment it begins, exactly what it wants to be, it also manages to be that thing, or at least a very convincing version of it. The thing in question is a 1930s or 1940s romantic comedy, with sexual chemistry and cutting dialogue providing the momentum that a plot usually might. (The show doesn’t leave the bar at all during its first season and I am honestly at a loss to recall a single actual story from it.) The show’s creators—Glen Charles, Les Charles, and James Burrows—liked to cite Tracey and Hepburn as their models, but what I am reminded of, when I watch Sam and Diane, is His Girl Friday, with Danson in Carey Grant’s role and Shelley Long in Rosalind Russell’s. Watch any of their verbal sparring matches—not least the lengthy, contentious one that ends the first season—and note the way their bodies advance, ostensibly in the interest of saying something cutting, but actually in the interest of something else, then retreat in exasperation, only to immediately repeat the process. While the show’s physical comedy would become broader in later seasons—think Carla kissing Norm half to death in season eight—the show’s real bread-and-butter, at least at the beginning, was this older, more Hawksian, Sturges-like style, which denied or at least deferred physical intimacy and so turned banter and repartee into sex. Like Sam Malone’s, the show’s self-confidence on this front was preternatural. Unlike Sam’s, it wasn’t misplaced.

This confidence extended to almost every aspect of the show’s production. In order to maintain a consistent style, Burrows remarkably (and I think uniquely in sitcom history?) directed all but thirty-eight of the series’ two hundred and seventy-five episodes. He told the actors that they had to be on at any given moment lest his constantly-moving camera—think of all those rapid dollies from one end of the bar to the other—found them rubbernecking when they were supposed to be drying glasses. According to Danson, it was, as a result, occasionally more like being in a play than being on a television show. Burrows was so confident in both the writing and his style that he rarely shot things twice: “I only reshot jokes that didn’t work or I went back and picked up shots I missed.” During the first season, he was told to shoot video in order to save money. He ran a couple of tests and said that video made the set look ugly. He continued to shoot on film, costs be damned. (In a couple of episodes, you can see that he was right, in scenes where a shot or two has been lost and the video backup has been spliced in. The richness and warmth of the bar give way to something the colour and texture of wet cement.) This was, as I say, a supremely confident show.

Nevertheless, like M*A*S*H before it—and Seinfeld after it—Cheers wasn’t at all an instant hit. Given the times in which we now live, when network shows are told to succeed within a couple of episodes or die, and in which streaming shows, even when they do succeed, are regularly killed off after one or two seasons on the grounds that they have attracted as many new subscribers as they are likely to ever attract, it is strange to remember that executives used to go into bat for shows they believed in, occasionally for several years, even when those shows were rating so badly that the executives in question might well have been forgiven for slowly backing away. Strange, too, when you haven’t had free-to-air television in nearly a decade, to remember that something’s time slot can determine its fortunes far more than its quality. (Seinfeld’s own fortunes only began to improve after it started airing after Cheers.)

Danson is characteristically winning as Sam, to the point that one regularly misses the fact that Sam is not a very good person. But they caught lightning in a bottle with Long. When I was growing up, I knew her primarily as Carol Brady in the two (very strange) Brady Bunch movies. In Cheers, she is a supernova, or perhaps a black hole, effecting, or perhaps infecting, every scene she’s in. A lot of this is down to her chemistry with Danson, which is as undeniable as it was fraught. Like the characters they played, Long and Danson had different, even incompatible, styles of working: he was instinctive, open to the moment, and she was particular to the point of persnickety. While Danson has admitted to telling the producers that casting Long was “a bad idea”—and that he occasionally found it difficult to be in the same room as her—he has also said that he was wrong about her and that she was ultimately the best thing about the show’s first season. She certainly brought out the best in him, usually by bringing out the worst in Sam, the clash between their styles and temperaments mirroring the characters’ own. Danson is never as good, or as close to having a nervous breakdown, as he is when he’s with Long. He loses a certain unpredictable volatility and becomes goofier in the series’ second stretch. (Perhaps this is a good thing. Even some of their most famous moments—as when he threatens to “bounce [her] off every wall in this office” or when they stand there slapping one another in the face—make for uncomfortable viewing today.)

Even more of Diane’s impact is down to the writing. While there is nothing especially original about a fish out of water scenario, it’s comparatively rare that the fish in question doesn’t know that it’s flopping around on the dock, let along that it thinks that now is the time to recite some of its poetry. Diane’s cheerful, wide-eyed obliviousness to reality—made all the more amusing by her unwavering certainty that she’s the smartest person in the room—is matched only by Long’s abilities as a physical comedian and her unflagging willingness to make herself look ridiculous. Consider ‘Diane’s Perfect Date’, when she bursts into the bar looking like a crazy cat lady after a blind date with an ex-con, or ‘One Last Fling’, when she bursts out of a novelty cake at Sam’s bachelor party, dressed in a corset and furious at him for what he’s been saying in her supposed absence.

There’s no question in my mind that the Sam and Diane years are Cheers’ best. (The classic moment—“Are you as turned on as I am?” “More”—has been endlessly referenced, parodied, and ripped-off for a reason.) In the two hundredth episode, Kirstie Alley says that her first appearance as Rebecca was one of the scariest moments of her career on the grounds that she wasn’t Shelley Long. She needn’t have worried, because she’s excellent, too (though the show eventually runs out of things to do with her), but there’s no getting around the fact that Dianne was a once-in-a-blue-moon character, the squarest of square pegs, and that Long, playing her, nailed her to the wall.

Then she left. While Long’s reasons at the time were that she didn’t want to play will-they-or-won’t-they forever and was interested in pursuing a film career, I can’t help but feel that there’s more to it than that. Beginning in Cheers’ fourth season and continuing through to her departure at the conclusion of its fifth, the show becomes increasingly cruel to Diane. Like M*A*S*H’s later treatment of Frank Burns, it leans more and more into the character’s worst qualities, to the point that she becomes a caricature. Her behaviour—whether litigating Sam into proposing to her again or inviting the former owners of their new house to celebrate the holidays with them—becomes so erratic and off-putting that a 1987 profile of Danson, written before the season finale had aired, suggested that “the smart money says Diane goes bonkers and gets carted off for another, longer than usual, nervous breakdown”. I might have left as well.

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In my piece on M*A*S*H, I wrote that Cheers “is the same show played twice at different speeds”. This is not to say that it simply repeats itself: repetition with variation is key. Where Diane walked into the bar and never left—until she did—Rebecca walks in and blindsides Sam by telling him that his services are no longer required. While the show certainly has fun, for a couple of seasons, teasing a romance between the two—which is putting it a little strongly, because all Sam really wants to do is hook up—it becomes pretty clear pretty early on that this isn’t a will-they-or-won’t-they affair so much as a how-many-times-must-she-say-no one.

More important than the introduction of Rebecca is the reintegration of the rest of the cast into the warp and weft of the show. After five years focusing on its central couple, Cheers opens its eyes and realises, not that it’s been underserving its supporting players—it hasn’t been—but rather that it’s paid scant attention to what it actually means to be a regular at a bar. That means helping one another out, running errands for one another, driving people places, and so on. It means becoming, if not friends exactly, at least acquaintances with benefits, a community. There is a lot more of this kind of thing in the second stretch of the series.

This is what I mean when I talk about different speeds: Cheers repeats itself, first as romcom, then as broader ensemble comedy. Norm, originally an accountant, becomes a roaming jack-of-all-trades. Woody falls in love with a dopey socialite. We spend way more time with Cliff and his mother than we ever have before, even as the show, through Carla (and increasingly Norm), becomes ever nastier towards him. (I’m possibly overthinking it, but I do think it’s interesting that, as soon as Diane leaves, the show, which was never especially nice to Cliff to begin with, becomes positively disdainful of him. It is though the writers needed someone, not only for Carla to loathe, but for them to loathe themselves. Over the course of the last six seasons, Cliff, too, is given what I have come to think of the Frank Burns treatment.)

As I mentioned earlier, the comedy becomes broader and more physical in the later seasons. The set pieces are more elaborate, too. This is doubtless a function of multiple things: larger budgets, a desire to shake up the format, the need to come up with twenty-six new stories every year. (You see the same thing happen with Seinfeld a few years later.) I’m certain that at least one of the reasons is the influence of Fawlty Towers on the show’s creators. Always a touchstone for Burrows and the Charles brothers—they initially saw Cheers as being an American version of the show and early drafts of the pilot were set in a dowdy Las Vegas inn—you can see its impact clearly in a number of the second stretch’s more elaborate episodes. In ‘Home Malone’, Sam is babysitting Frasier and Lilith’s son, Frederick, when the latter locks himself in the bathroom. Sam climbs out the bedroom window and into a tree, in order to reach the next window along, at which point Frederick reemerges, walks over to the bedroom window, and locks it. Hilarity ensues. In ‘Let Sleeping Drakes Lie’, Norm, who has been painting Evan Drake’s bedroom, comes up with increasingly ludicrous ways to get Drake out of bed (such as claiming that it’s his fantasy to carry a rich man across the lawn in his pajamas) so that Rebecca, who is hiding under it, can get out of the house. She is ultimately rescued by a group of guys from the bar, who spirit her out the window and down a ladder.

Perhaps I’m misremembering Fawlty Towers’ love of ladders, but this is all very familiar in its contours. It’s also a very long way from the bar and from Cheers in its His Girl Friday mode. Like ‘An Old-Fashioned Wedding’—complete with its very Fawlty-esque dead priest—such episodes anticipate the high farce that Frasier would later perfect and make its mainstay. (I won’t spend much time on Frasier here—I’ll be writing about him and his spin-off soon—except to say that, as with Long, the creators clearly realised they’d caught lightning in a bottle with Kelsey Grammer, too. The only thing more electric was Grammer with Bebe Neuwirth, the pair proving that Danson and Long weren’t the only ones with undeniable chemistry. It’s rare that one show gets to become such a combustible science lab twice.)

I have been a regular at bars on a number of occasions. My first novel, A Death in Phnom Penh, is about the guys I knew in Ho Chi Minh City, at a place called Gumbo’s, ten years ago this year. My novella, Terms of Service, is largely set in and around the Durham Castle Arms in the Canberra suburb of Kingston. I wouldn’t give either of those experiences back, as both gave me stories and lifelong friends. (The true test of a bar-born friendship is one’s ceasing to be a regular at the bar.) It is true that one’s local can and often does foster a sense of community. It is true that people often become close, and help one another out, whose lives would scarcely have brushed up against one another except in such a setting. Sometimes you really do want to go where everybody knows your name.

But I’d be lying if I said that Cheers doesn’t sometimes cause me to cock my eyebrow a bit.

I’ve had my struggles with alcohol and have been very open about them. I’ve also written at length about addiction as it has pertained to others. I don’t want to rehash it all here because that isn’t what this post is about. I also don’t want to suggest that I think a half-hour sitcom is under any obligation to deal with alcohol abuse merely because it’s set in a bar—I love It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia—still less that I would expect a forty-year-old sitcom, a product of its time, to do so. But I do think it’s strange that Cheers never gets into it in any meaningful way. Yes, we are told that Sam had a drinking problem when he was a relief pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. Yes, we are told—although I don’t remember it being said so explicitly—that this precipitated the end of his career. We see him fall off the wagon once, in the first episode of the third season, though this is merely a pretext on the writers’ part to get Diane back to the bar. He is sober again by the following episode and his relapse is never spoken of again. (By the end of the show’s run, his alcoholism is hardly mentioned at all, though he is, by that time, in therapy for sex addiction.)

That’s pretty much all Cheers has to say on the subject. Norm’s drinking—which begins when the bar opens and ends when it closes—is played exclusively for laughs, despite the fact that, in the words of George Wendt, the character “is an indictment of what hanging out in a bar can do for you.” He ignores his wife, ignores his tab, can’t hold down a job, and is deeply unhealthy. We nevertheless shake our heads in amusement when it turns out he has a set of keys to the place. (Meanwhile, Carla drinks while pregnant without anyone saying so much as boo.) The network was adamant that Norm, in particular, never appear to be getting loaded, which is all very good and well, I suppose, in the context of commercial television, though I don’t know what message you think you’re sending by showing a guy drinking fifteen beers and not getting drunk, either. It’s the uncritical nature of Cheers’ anti-wowserism that causes moments of pause for me. It’s the way in which that anti-wowserism at times tips over into other, more questionable positions. (There is an anti-intellectual streak to the show that starts at Diane and runs through Frasier and Lilith to any number of minor bit players.) It’s the way it depicts drinking at scale as not having any consequences that gets my goat.

The final scene of the series throws the strangeness of some of its positions into sharp relief.

It’s closing time. Having briefly eloped, Sam and Diane have taken advantage of a well-timed flight delay to realise they’re not right for one another. (Long returned for the series finale.) Sam has returned to the bar and the series regulars have all made their exits. Norm, too, is on his way out.

NORM: Sammy, can I let you in on a little secret?

SAM: Sure.

NORM: I knew you’d come back.

SAM: You did?

NORM: You can never be unfaithful to your one true love. You always come back to her.

SAM: Who is that?

NORM: Think about it, Sam.

Sam stands alone behind the bar, looks at it a moment, and laughs. “Boy, I’ll tell you,” he says to no one. “I’m the luckiest son of a bitch on earth.” He places a palm on the wood, gives it a light pat, and turns away. A latecomer knocks and Sam—in a shot that, intentionally or otherwise, directly recalls the final shot of Cassavetes’ Love Streams—waves him away, telling him, and us: “Sorry. We’re closed.”

There’s something about this scene that reminds me of Breaking Bad’s final moments, when Walter White, bleeding out from the gut, wanders through the neo-Nazi’s meth lab, smiling as he handles the accoutrements of his trade, the luckiest son of a bitch on earth. The affection, even nostalgia, he displays for this shiny, miserable junk is perverse. He places a palm on one of the tanks, as fondly as Sam placing his own on the bar, before falling over backwards, dead.

Obviously, Cheers’ final moments are not nearly so extreme. “Sometimes he hurts me and seems to like it,” Diane says in one of the series’ more unsettling moments, diagnosing Sam’s toxicity with striking simplicity. It seems to me that sometimes he hurts himself as well, and seems to like that, too. He walks out into the darkness of the pool room, as alone as he ever was.

You can never be unfaithful to your one true love, but it’s still better that you love the right thing.

For people of my generation, at least in Australia, M*A*S*H holds a certain place in memory: it was the show we endured for a few minutes every afternoon before The Simpsons came on an hour before the news.

I was vaguely aware of the show’s particulars: namely, that it was about Korea but actually about Vietnam, and that its finale remained the highest-rated episode of scripted television—the highest-rated episode of anything outside of sports—in broadcast history. I suspect that Klinger was the first man I had ever seen in a dress, a fact only slightly more confronting, at the time, than the fact that Jamie Farr was the first person I had ever seen of Lebanese descent. (Mount Gambier was, in the early 1990s, still pretty blindingly white.)

Later, as I was getting into cinema, I watched the 1970 Altman movie and loved it. Altman’s version, for all its misogynistic flaws, remains a kind of masterpiece. It certainly set the template for his career: the inquisitive, constantly moving camera, the jarring mid-pan cuts, the overzealous use of the zoom, the overlayed-to-the-point-of-muddy audio. (He perfected the style the following year with McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which is near to as perfect a film as I know, and also a cornerstone entry in one of my favourite genres: the alt-Western.)

The lingering trauma of having The Simpsons withheld from me, and the genuine affection I held for Altman’s film, meant that the series never appealed itself to me. While it had been sneaking onto my radar (no pun intended) for a couple of years—not least during the pandemic, when Alan Alda hosted an episode of Clear and Vivid with his former co-stars, and then again in 2022, when the show celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a slew of documentaries and think-pieces—I’m still not entirely sure what compelled me to watch it, in its entirety, this year. Usually, when I’m in a funk, I’ll rewatch Seinfeld or The West Wing.

M*A*S*H, it turns out, is better than either.

Of course, it’s really three shows masquerading as one, or rather one that is better thought of as three, or as having three distinct periods. (This is in contrast to Cheers, which is the same show played twice at different speeds, or Frasier, which is one show played, to its benefit, on a loop. I’ll be writing about these soon, too.)

In its first three seasons, M*A*S*H is a comedy with dramatic elements, taking its tonal cues entirely from Altman. It’s a broad and, within the confines of 1970s network television, bawdy affair. In its fourth and fifth seasons, it’s a comedy that doesn’t really want to be a comedy anymore, but doesn’t know what to do with itself—and certainly not with Frank Burns—as a result. The remaining six are what most people probably think about when they think about the show: a drama that occasionally makes you laugh.

This is interesting. The tone of the final, longest stretch is what people remember of the show when asked about its mood or vibe. But when asked about its characters, they will almost always cite Henry Blake or Burns, characters from the earlier, sillier seasons. (On the other hand, I think most people recall B.J. Hunnicutt before they recall Trapper John.)

This is unique in my viewing experience. When I think of my favourite moments from, say, 30 Rock, I think of Jack explaining why he’s in a tux (“It’s after six. What am I, a farmer?”) and Gladys Knight yelling at the gang to knock it off after Kenneth misses his not-quite-midnight train to Georgia. I remember Rip Torn and General Electric more than I remember Ken Howard and Kabletown. I almost entirely ignore the vibe of the last few seasons, when the show became little more than a pop culture recycling factory propped up by Hollywood cameos that failed to prop it up. I bask fondly, instead, in the glory days of the first two seasons. But that’s because 30 Rock became a disappointment. M*A*S*H, on the other hand, only gets better, even though its most memorable characters leave before it has really hit its stride. This isn’t normal or usual: shows that reinvent themselves, like Cheers, often stay good, and sometimes, like Cheers, stay great, but rarely actually improve. M*A*S*H improves. I have a theory for why this happened, but I’ll come back to it a little later.

I’m not going to make this a history lesson because it’s all on the record already. Alda wouldn’t take the part unless the horrors of war were presented as horrors (no laugh track in the operating room, for example). Wayne Rogers left as Trapper John became subordinate to Hawkeye Pierce, McLean Stevenson left because he thought he could make it on his own (a decision he later regretted), and Larry Linville left, I think correctly, because his character had become so obnoxiously one-note that there was nothing left for him to do with it. They stopped calling Houlihan “Hot Lips” and started calling her Margaret, mostly because Loretta Swit called them on it. The show got darker as Alda began to play a greater role behind the camera as well as in front of it. Klinger and Father Mulcahy became fully-formed characters, both to the show’s net benefit, in part but not exclusively because Gary Burghoff left on the grounds that his off-screen life was falling apart. (He’d also been playing the character for more than a decade, a feat only Kelsey Grammer seems happy to keep performing.) All fascinating titbits, as far as gossip goes, and interesting in context to the extent that the cast changes helped to effect the wider tonal shift. (The problem with the show’s two-season middle period is essentially that it no longer has space for Burns, or any clear idea how to square him with its evolving vision, and so turns him into an even more monstrous version of what he already was when it began.) But pub trivia is beside the point. It is in any case not what I want to write about here.

I am consistently surprised, when I go back and watch television from before I was born, how much invention there was going on. This is clearly down to recency bias. I studied cinema, a field in which invention has been baked in from the beginning, but I always naively assumed that television in general, and American network television in particular, was a congenitally conservative affair. Invention began with The Sopranos, didn’t it? It’s quite striking, watching M*A*S*H for the first time today, to encounter, say, an episode shot in first-person POV. (I had the same reaction to ‘Point of View’ that I had when I first watched Delmer Daves’ 1947 Dark Passage, which is to say: How did they do that, with the tools they had, then?) Striking, too, to come across a very Sopranos-like dream episode, or one that plays out (or rather is made to look as though it plays out) in real-time. (It is perhaps worth noting that these latter two were both directed by Alda.)

The famous 1976 documentary episode, ‘The Interview’, with Clete Roberts doing his best Edward R. Murrow, is also worth mentioning. Co-creator Larry Gelbart’s final episode, which he wrote and directed, it is not only presented in black-and-white, as though it were being broadcast in 1950, but is also one of the few episodes in the series to feature a significant amount of improvisation, with Roberts occasionally posing unscripted questions to the the cast members. William Christopher’s performance as Father Mulcahy is alone worth the price of admission, and arguably one of the most affecting moments in the entire series. Which brings me to the real thing.

For all its experimentation—something it in any case shares with everything from The Sopranos to Buffy the Vampire Slayer—M*A*S*H wouldn’t be remembered today unless it didn’t still hit you where it hurts. You wind up falling for it because it does. You fall for its characters, and through them for its message. I recently wrote, in relation to exergue – on documenta 14, about the effect that duration can have on a viewer. As I noted in that piece, binging at home and experiencing extreme duration in the cinema are not really the same thing, though I think it’s fair to say that series length does ultimately play a similar role on cumulative emotional effect. I didn’t watch M*A*S*H the way the people who watched it when it was on the air watched it, or the way people like myself caught glimpses of it as kids. I smashed it, eleven seasons in something like two months. This is abnormal, and akin, it occurs to me, to a kind of voluntary Stockholm syndrome. exergue caused me to care about art I don’t care about and people I don’t know, to the point that I didn’t want the fourteen-hour film to end. It’s the same way you don’t want to finish reading any substantial book with which, by virtue of length, you have spent an awful lot of time, and whose characters have come to feel more real to you than the actual people in your life. It matters to me that the guys become nicer to Margaret. It matters to me that Margaret becomes nicer to them. One of my favourite episodes, and certainly Harry Morgan’s best, is ‘Old Soldiers’, in which everyone thinks that Colonel Potter is losing it. In the end, it turns out that his last friend from WWI has died, meaning that he is the recipient of the last bottle of brandy that he and his comrades took from an abandoned château in 1917. He toasts his dead friends, and then his new ones. I’m pretty sure than Morgan’s tears are the real deal in that scene. Even if they’re not, though, Potter’s are, and this matters to me, too.

Even Charles Winchester III, one of television’s great unreconstructed snobs (he’d eat Frasier Crane alive for breakfast then complain about the seasoning), has his moments, especially in ‘Goodbye, Farewell and Amen’, the series’ famous two-hour finale, in which he befriends and trains a group of Chinese musicians to play Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. They later, inevitably, die, causing him grief that David Ogden Stiers—phenomenal in the role from day dot—had not to that point been given license to perform. That it is in response to the death of Chinese characters is particularly pertinent, because, while not racist on the level of the proto-McCarthyite Burns, Winchester has never been particularly enamoured of Asia or its inhabitants, either. (I do like that there’s no hugging or anything like that with him at the very end, just his usual, dismissive, “Gentlemen,” then off. It stings a bit, because perhaps there was something more to be said, but it’s fitting and correct and very much in character that, whatever it was, he doesn’t say it.) It matters to me that Potter and Margaret have their goodbye (Harry Morgan and Swit adored each other, so that’s all very much real) and that Potter rides off on Sophie, the horse that Radar gave him as a gift. It matters to me that Hawkeye makes out with Margaret for more than half a minute. It matters to me that B.J. comes back.

B.J. coming back matters a lot, actually. ‘Goodbye, Farewell and Amen’ is a sister episode to the fantastic double that opens the fourth season, ‘Welcome to Korea’. It’s more than that, though. It’s actually the earlier episode’s mirror or inverse, a kinder, more crowd-pleasing version of what Larry David did when he came back for the Seinfeld finale and flipped the audience the bird (and then somehow did it again, inverting his own inversion, when he finished Curb). ‘Welcome to Korea’ was shot mostly on location, on the former Fox Ranch at what is now Malibu Creek State Park. The whole thrust of the thing is that Trapper has left to go home and Hawkeye is trying to reach him before he flies out. In the process, he picks up Hunnicutt, Trapper’s replacement at the 4077th and Rogers’ replacement on the show. Hawkeye pays little attention to B.J. at first, single-mindedly trying to get to Trapper. He doesn’t make it. But B.J. is there, and, while different to Trapper (which is to say happily married), he’s also willing to play along. Some of the great episodes of the seasons that follow are those in which Hawkeye and B.J. clash over their differing opinions on casual sex during wartime or, better yet, their differing opinions on who is funnier. (‘Bottoms Up’ is the classic example, though it’s still always better when they’re at war with Winchester: the wordless three-minute sequence of ‘Pressure Points’, where the three of them willingly trash the Swamp in an attempt to one-up one another over cleanliness, is as funny a sequence as I know.)

B.J. leaving the same way that Trapper does hurts, especially as we know that Hawkeye’s mental health has been bad. (The thing with the chicken on the bus was something about which I had read but never seen. I had forgotten about it when it finally came up. Alda’s performance, when he admits that the chicken was actually a baby, is the rawest performance he ever gave on the show. I don’t even like to think about it.) For B.J. to come back, even if only by virtue of administrative error, is the show’s redemption for the disappearance of Trapper. B.J. also knows how to say goodbye in style.

All of this mattered to me. I was too far gone. This is again my argument about duration, series length, time spent, costs sunk, life lived.

Why, though, do I keep coming back to Henry Blake? I told you earlier that I had a theory about why the first three seasons infect the mind even as M*A*S*H becomes a better and more impactful series. I don’t think it’s a very original one, but it’s this: ‘Abyssinia, Henry’ changed M*A*S*H and thereby television.

Blake has got his marching orders. He’s going home. The entire episode consists of McLean Stevenson walking around the camp saying goodbye to everyone. Let’s not forget that Henry Blake was a dope, deferring almost every decision to whomever argued loudest soonest, and leaning on Radar like a crutch. (His farewell to Radar—running back from the helicopter to tell the latter to behave himself—is far more touching than Potter’s to Klinger in ‘Goodbye, Farewell and Amen’. Like Morgan and Swit’s in the latter episode, though, it, too, was based on real emotion. Stevenson and Burghoff had shared nearly every one of their scenes together to that point.) This is a happy episode. Blake should never have been in Korea. More than Hawkeye or Klinger, who don’t want to be there, or Burns, who wants to be there too much, Blake isn’t cut out for war and is likely putting lives at risk. His going home is a blessing to everyone, not least to himself and his wife. This is a happy episode.

Famously, the final scene of ‘Abyssinia, Henry’ was shot without anyone knowing what was going to happen. It was shot without anyone knowing what Burghoff, as Radar, was going to say when he entered the operating theatre, where the cast believed they were shooting pick-ups. Burghoff didn’t know, either, and you can hear it in his voice when he says: “I have a message. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.”

Put aside being an actor in the room, hearing this for the first time. (It’s hard to emote from behind a surgical mask, but you can see what’s going through their minds in their eyes, particularly Swit’s.) Imagine being a family on the couch. This is the last thing anyone says in the third season finale of M*A*S*H. They ended the season that way. There was no skipping to the beginning of season four. Henry Blake is dead. I think we forget, now that it’s become de rigueur to kill off Ned Stark and the rest of them (Hitchcock started it with Janet Leigh), that something like this was not done on a network sitcom in 1975.

The impact of ‘Abyssinia, Henry’ was absolute. M*A*S*H is irrevocably darker after that—scripted television is darker—and never quite so silly again. But this is why, when asked about it, we remember Henry Blake: not because of anything he said or did (though Stevenson was fantastic in the part and said and did many funny things), but because of how he died. His death marks a moment of profound rupture: it not only declares that M*A*S*H is going to be a different show from the one it has been to this point, but also that the cardinal rule of sitcoms—that everything will go back to normal within twenty minutes so that something funny can happen again next week—no longer applies.

One needn’t spend much time on why they decided upon such apostasy. M*A*S*H was anti-war from the Altman on and it never got any less anti-war. It only got more honest about that fact that war does not hew to a sitcom structure. As is often said, the series outlasted the war it was ostensibly about by roughly eight years. But it premiered while Americans were still killing in Vietnam and it ended the same year that Reagan made his “Evil Empire” speech and invaded Grenada. (He and his administration had also already started selling arms to Iran to fund death squads in Nicaragua, so, I mean, it wasn’t like Americans didn’t have cause to think about their reasons for being in other parts of the world.)

The characters in M*A*S*H didn’t always love one another, but they never truly hated one another, either. The only thing they actively hated was the war they were in (and the food they were served). I haven’t written too much about Alda here, because I think his performance, writing, and direction speak for themselves, but he puts it best in one of the series’ best lines, which remains as pertinent now as it was when he said it: “War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.”

I wanted to share two things with you. The first is what I wrote about him in my novella, …

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For a while now, Matt and two other of my favourite critics, Adrian Martin and Zach Campbell, have been trying to get together to discuss that piece. It’s been difficult. Matt’s in New York, Adrian’s in Spain, and, until very recently, Zach was in the Midwest. I, of course, remain two doors up from Antarctica, so that’s been an issue, too.

We finally got together last weekend. Matt—unfortunately, given the purpose of the call—missed it. I will do a follow-up call with him soon. But Zach, Adrian, and I nevertheless had a long, freewheeling chat about the state of criticism. It’s been a while since I’ve been on the radio and my editing skills (and my voice) are a little rusty. But here’s roughly half of our ninety-minute conversation regardless. It’s occasionally niche and gets into the weeds—and Adrian and I did not know that David Stratton was about to die, in which case we’d doubtless have discussed Stratton’s legacy, too—but, if you’re into movies or critical writing generally, I think you’ll dig it. I hope you do.

I would like to do more of these, so let me know if that’s something in which you’d be interested.

Until recently, the longest film I’d ever seen, in the cinema or otherwise, was Shoah by the French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. I watched Lanzmann’s film, which is nine-and-a-half-hours long, on DVD over the course of a day, back when I was at film school. This was in the days before smart phones, so I more or less endured it as it was intended to be endured. It, too, is a masterpiece, and incidentally one of the scariest films ever made about trains.

But time—real time—passes. As of June, the longest film I have ever seen, in a cinema or otherwise, is exergue – on documenta 14 by the Greek filmmaker Dimitris Athiridis. At fourteen hours and eight minutes long, it is the second longest non-experimental film ever made. Over three days, in five-to-six-hour blocks, myself and a steadily dwindling group of die-hards watched how a contemporary art show is put together, begins to wobble, collapses under its own weight, and is torpedoed by the press for its troubles. The film, if not the exhibition, was fantastic.

I have a prickly relationship with contemporary art. This is to say that I have a tendency to hate it. When I first moved to Melbourne in 2006, I actually had to leave a show at ACCA after beginning to hyperventilate in rage. (I can’t remember what caused this: the caravan that had been taken apart and had its pieces laid out on the floor, or the prefab bird feeders that had been purchased from IKEA, painted different primary colours, and installed upon a wall. I suspect it was the latter.) From Warhol on, the idea of the thing—as opposed to actual skill or craftsmanship or artistry—became the thing itself, which is how we wound up with Hirst and his shark and Koons and his balloon animals and other frauds and furphies of that nature. I was not inclined to to like exergue.

It is true that not much of the art in the film did it for me. A lot of it was trash. But I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t understand the passion of the show’s curators for that art. Even when they defend their curatorial choices in terms best left for an university seminar, you can’t but admire their dedication to the artists. This is not a spoiler, as the film opens with it, but documenta 14 was a critical and political disaster. (We’ll come to why this is funny a little later.) But at no point do you doubt the curators’ commitment, or indeed their vision. The film almost convinced me to do a Masters in Art History.

There is something about duration, in a cinematic context, that changes the way you experience the thing being watched, particularly when the thing being watched is properly, almost preposterously, long. I do think it’s funny how, in the age of binge-watch television, we think that films like Lawrence of Arabia, Once Upon a Time in America, Andrei Rublev, or anything else that maxes out at about three-and-a-half is “long”. The difference is only that, in the theatre, we are being asked to concentrate for that long. Obviously, we’re all quite content to watch a season of this, or of that, in a day if we have the time. (I recently watched M*A*S*H in its eleven-season entirety, and will be writing about it soon. I am already roughly halfway through Cheers.) But all of these things are often written and directed by different people. (Cheers, of which James Burrows directed all but thirty-four of nearly three hundred episodes, is an interesting exception.) They are series. More importantly, you don’t really watch them. You do a crossword. You do the ironing. You eat. You experience them largely as noise.

I do have a suspicion that you’d watch exergue the same way if it were, as it should be, released in serialised form. It seems almost designed for that: it’s broken up into more or less hour-long “chapters” and is, in a way that a film like Shoah is not, pretty televisual in its grammar. This is a slight, though not an especially cruel one. Some of cinema’s greatest documentarians—I’m thinking of the Maysles brothers in particular, and of Frederick Wiseman—read as televisual now, because they’re the filmmakers who created modern documentary’s grammar in the first place, and television adopted that style and ran with it. (Ken Burns, who I am also soon to be writing about again, ran in a different direction, and is arguably even more important in terms of what television documentaries look like now. Like Wiseman, he’s also a duration-reliant filmmaker—or, rather, a volume-reliant filmmaker—but the relationship between duration and volume is a discussion for another time.)

Why does exergue hold up, in a theatre, in the dark, without your phone, for days at a time? The answer is boring, but it’s this: its subject. Yes, I could take or leave the art. The politics—especially of Paul Preciado, who, in a remarkably funny and sad scene in Athens, has his academic continental philosophy served back to him on a platter of Mediterranean fuck-you—are often undergraduate to the point of childishness. (Preciado, I should say, is actually a very interesting writer, and I would urge you to check out Testo Junkie and Countersexual Manifesto. I just liked seeing Preciado get slammed by the Greeks for being the kind of leftist who doesn’t know he’s also a colonialist.) Athiridis, who met documenta 14’s artistic director, Adam Szymczyk, by chance in Thessaloniki in 2015, knew immediately that he had something special on his hands. Whether he knew that Szymczyk was a tragic figure, I couldn’t tell you, but he knew that he was something special, and Szymczyk is. I would describe him as a cross between Ian Curtis, Nick Cave, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Giorgio Vasari, and maybe Andy Warhol, with the emphasis on Ian Curtis. You can only watch exergue for fourteen hours because Szymczyk is worth fourteen hours.

He is at once both so stressed out by the job that you worry for his mental health and yet the only one who seems to find the whole thing amusing and unimportant. He has a capacity for detachment—which, given the fortunes of documenta 14 in the long run, may or may not have been a good thing—that is, if not always admirable, very much always compelling. When he’s not actively travelling the world to see art—the passages in India, South Africa, Lebanon, Norway, and everywhere else the team manages to travel, were my favorites—he seems to be floating slightly above the muck, like an outsider in his own life. He’s never quite there. (There is a sequence in Johannesburg, where he sees a queer performance artist do his bit, and it’s the only time in fourteen hours where it’s clear that Szymczyk is so genuinely bowled over that he doesn’t know what to say. He otherwise always knows what to say, and it always has a quartz vein of disdain running through it.) It’s not that he doesn’t care. If you fuck with his chosen artists, he will cut you. It’s that he doesn’t care about the institution itself, as an institution. Not its corporate relationships, not its relationship with the German government, not its legacy. He doesn’t respect the institution, or, rather, respects it so much that he wants it to be better than it is, and doesn’t respect those who want it to stay the same. (Mind you, he also chose to stage half of it in Athens, not because of the politics of the time—which was his argument for doing so—but because he had a girlfriend there and didn’t want to spend two years in Germany. It’s not as though I don’t understand. Athens is a better city than Kassel.) He is glad to be running the thing, but he’s also out to critique it, and if it ends with him, well, good, as far as he’s concerned. As a result, you can’t take your eyes off him. For fourteen hours, you never know what he’s going to do next. I don’t know a single documentary, outside of perhaps the Maysles’ Grey Gardens or perhaps Herzog’s Grizzly Man, where you dislike the people involved so much that you begin to love them. (Okay, yeah, there was the Jordan thing.) But then we get to hour thirteen.

Hour thirteen is pretty much in real-time, at least for the first half-hour. Szymczyk is heading to the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens (EMST). I don’t want to spoil this very long film for you, but things have not been going well with the EMST for pretty much seven hours by this point. But that’s not the problem today. The problem is that Szymczyk, who is about to give a speech opening documenta 14, is hungover to the point of passing out in a cab. Luckily, he doesn’t, because he’s on the phone, apologising to someone (almost certainly Greek-Swiss choreographer and visual artist Alexandra Bachzetsis, pictured above) for his behaviour the evening prior. He’s had maybe two hours of sleep. He’s in the clothes he slept in. We listen to the entire phone call in the cab. He gets out at the museum. He calls back and we listen to them talk again, and for the first time he talks about how depressed he is, and then about how much this show matters whether he’s depressed or not. I have some experience with narcissists, and I can assure you that he plays every fiddle available to him. Then he goes in, meets the Greek and German presidents, makes an unbelievably good speech—I mean, it’s actually remarkable, especially given his state—gives the dignitaries a tour of the exhibition, then finds a place to lie down. He’s listening to an indigenous Norwegian, a Sámi, sing. Then he gets into a fight with an art critic.

You couldn’t make it up.

The real point I want to make here is about duration. Tarkovsky said that cinema was “sculpting in time”. Gilles Deleuze wrote two books about cinema. The first was about the “movement-image”. This is a very basic explanation, but he was essentially talking about a Hollywood-style of cinema in which movement and to a lesser extent plot dictate screen time and thus duration. The second book was about the “time-image”. You can guess what the second term means: time dictating movement. (He referenced Tarkovsky, Ozu, Antonioni, Renais, and others.) It would be interesting to know what Deleuze—who I like a good deal, outside of the cinema books—might have thought had he not thrown himself out of a window in 1995. His examples are outdated now, and everyone he put up as an example is long dead, and cinema has changed.

Because of his suicide, Deleuze missed the most interesting thing that has happened in film studies since then, which is the increased interest, from around the early- to mid-2000s on figuration and the body, which I don’t think the “movement-image” or “time-image” quite capture. Nevertheless, cinema remains the only visual art in which duration plays an outsized role. (Obviously, duration is central to music, but music isn’t a visual art. I did originally have a paragraph here about comics, but while comics are visual, they are, like literature, a choose-your-own-adventure story as far as time goes.)

This does bring me back to where we started, though. Now that we’re in an age of indefinite time-shifting, where you can do everything at your own pace, duration means something different for everyone involved. To properly binge something—as I did M*A*S*H and am currently doing with Cheers—means not playing the New York Times crossword. Even then, that sort of home-based engagement is not the same. To be in a cinema, for hours and, in my case with exergue, days at a time, changes your relationship to the thing. You live in it. You are forced to live in it. The experience is different—and I think more interesting—when you’re sitting in a seven-minute tracking shot by Tarr. But Athiridis isn’t out to make you contemplate the ontology of the cinematographic image, or of human existence. The impact of sitting through a half-hour budget meeting—one, I mean, that you are being forced to watch, as opposed to one you are being forced to attend—has its own curious effect: only the cinematic budget meeting is interesting. (Weirdly, you kind of don’t want it to end.)

Extreme duration changes your relationship to reality outside the cinema, too. I’ve done a lot of things in my life that have made me feel, whether I liked it or not, very present. I’ve been in war zones and I’ve run with bulls. I’ve been shot at by the Indian military and I’ve been, unfortunately, in love. Being in a cinema for six hours, fully focused, isn’t entirely different. It’s actually better. You are, for a moment, a horse wearing blinders. It reminds you that blinders are not actually a bad thing.

In 2005, at the Brisbane International Film Festival, I saw James Benning’s 13 Lakes. This is a nearly two-and-a-half-hour picture in which Benning, one of the greatest non-narrative American filmmakers, sets up a camera and shoots, well, thirteen lakes, each for the length of a full reel of film. I drifted in and out of it. I am sure I took a nap. Benning’s sound design—always fantastically clever—is there to teach you how to look and listen and pay attention. But I still had a nap. I was watching thirteen lakes. The naps didn’t change my experience of it at all. 13 Lakes is an incredible film.

At a certain point, two or three lakes in, I was fully invested. I entered the zone where you watch such things—lakes for two hours, curators for fourteen—and begin to have a parasocial relationship with what you’re watching, even if it’s just water. This is obviously why peak television has been such a thing. But the impact of it in a cinema, in the dark, whether with a lake or with a weird Austrian gallerist, is so much stronger. Time spent changes our relationship to time lived. It changes our relationship to looking, seeing, registering, and thinking.

The great irony of exergue is that documenta 15, which was curated by the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa, was a proper, unmitigated disaster. Ticket sales were way down. Everyone—with good reason—hated the art. The politics were even further to the left than those of Szymczyk’s too-woke-for-its-own-good documenta 14. This is mentioned in a very brief title card before the fantastic episode about the losing of Szymczyk’s shit on the day of the Athens launch. What the film doesn’t mention, but is worth noting here, is that documenta 14 kind of set the standard for international art festivals going forward. Sister cities, parallel exhibitions, shared responsibilities: these are now all the rage. Szymczyk is doing just fine. Probably better, I suspect, than when he was directing documenta 14. In the very first hour, when we already know that things have gone entirely to shit, he gets up on stage at a German death-metal club and screams out a song. The man is broken yet unrepentant.

After you’ve spent fourteen hours with him, you do actually kind of get it.

You may hate the running of the bulls, or the fighting of them. My parents do. (They once walked out of Ronda’s Corrida Goyesca, which must have been one of the strangest things the Andalusians around them, dressed in their Sunday best, had ever seen. Many a tongue was doubtless clucked.) They hate it when I go to Pamplona, too, and not only because I occasionally run. But nothing makes me sadder than being away from Spain at this time of year. I do not necessarily miss the encierro. I do not even necessarily miss the corrida. I miss my people, and my second home, and I miss the knowledge that, somewhere in the world, for at least ten days a year, I belong somewhere.

My best friend Joseph Furey recently re-upped his 2015 piece for the Daily Telegraph’s Sunday magazine, ‘Taurus rising’, which is the best piece of journalism written about Pamplona this century. My own piece, which follows here, is not as good, and was written a couple of years earlier, in advance of my second fiesta in 2013. It was first published in Running the Bulls with Hemingway & Other Pamplona Tales by Graeme Galloway (ed.) and others. It has been ever so slightly edited.

1.

On the morning of the first encierro I ever saw, the first encierro of the year in question, I found myself on a balcony overlooking the square outside the town hall. It was before the first police lines had broken and thousands of people, mostly young men, were packed in tight as they awaited their fate.

Unlike most of the foreigners among them, I had been given the opportunity to speak to some of the veteran runners and to ask for their advice prior to the first bulls being loosed: almost all of them had advised me not to run on the first two days, if at all, if ever, and to make sure that I’d watched at least two encierros, or three, or a hundred, before I decided to go into the streets myself.

I knew that at least one person in the crowd hadn’t had that opportunity, and I knew, too, that, even if he had, he wouldn’t have listened to the advice on offer.

“If I don’t run on the first day I’m there,” my younger brother, Sam, had told me when we first discussed the encierro, “I’ll never run.”

Sam and I had agreed to catch up in Pamplona, but neither of us had any way of contacting the other. Which is to say that he had no way of contacting me. I had no phone, my laptop was on the blink, and, after all, couldn’t we just find each other amongst the throng? This is honestly what I had thought at the time, and this is because I am an idiot.

And yet, despite the near-identical costumes of those assembled, and despite the sound of a thousand voices that couldn’t but drown out that of the individual, I spotted my brother across the square.

“Sam!” I screamed from the third-floor window. “Sam!”

He looked around, then up.

“Matt?” A look of recognition. “Matt!”

I thought he looked nervous. He’s a brave enough guy, my brother, and he’s good at hiding it when he’s not. But I thought he looked nervous down there in the square, preparing for something he knew nothing about, beyond how dangerous it was. I felt a surge of pride for him. He was down there and I was not. And I thought he looked nervous.

“Good luck!” I shouted through cupped hands.

“Thank you!” he shouted back, smiling.

I was staying in the city and he was staying at a campsite. He had gotten drenched in wine and sangria at the chupinazo the day before and I had been at a champagne luncheon. This was the moment that our two fiestas were bound to meet and collide: the moment, indeed, that everyone’s fiesta, however base, however exclusive, however unlikely to encounter the other on the street at almost any other time of the day, must needs collide. Much more than the corrida, the encierro is the only event of any given day that is certain to command the attention of everyone in town who is not passed out or in the process of passing out. It sounds impossible, but this much I knew: if I had any chance of contacting my uncontactable brother, it would be by attending the first encierro. He may have been nervous, but he was brave enough to be there.

“I’ll meet up with you after the run!” I yelled, holding up my palm and spreading my fingers. “In five minutes!”

“Yes!” he yelled back. “In five minutes!”

Then the police lines broke and I lost sight of him as everyone on the course moved into their position of choice. Sam disappeared somewhere down Mercaderes and we didn’t see each other for the rest of the fiesta.

Which is why one shouldn’t make plans in Pamplona.

2.

I was at an Irish pub with a friend when a young Irishman with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth approached us and, incorrectly assuming us to be locals, gave the internationally-recognised thumb-flicking gesture for: “Do you have a light?” We said we did and offered it to him, whereupon he gushingly told us how pleased he was to finally find someone who could speak English.

“I’ve been in this fecking town twenty-four fecking hours and you’re the first fecking people I’ve met who speak fecking English!” he sweared. “It’s so fecking good to meet you! Do you mind if I join you?”

We said we didn’t.

He proceeded to tell us, in his inimitable manner, how he had come to be in Pamplona for fiesta. He was a musician, he said, doing some shows in Bilbao and San Sebastian, and he had been told that the busking scene during fiesta was mad, which it is, and that he should check it out, which he was wise to. (He played the wood flute and was very good. I later saw him jamming on the street with a steel guitar player he had only just met, and they were deservedly drawing quite the crowd.) “But you know,” he said, repeating what so many others have said before him, including myself, “I’m really here because of Hemingway. I read The Sun Also Rises and I just had to see what he was on about for meself.”

“I’ll tell you what, though,” he added after a sip of his beer, “that guy was a fecking cunt.”

My friend and I nearly choked on our drinks.

“Excuse me?” said my friend.

“A cunt,” the Irishman repeated loudly. “Ernest Hemingway was a fecking cunt.”

“How so?” my friend inquired politely.

The Irishman proceeded to enumerate the ways in which the Nobel laureate was a fecking cunt, from his treatment of his various wives to his vindictiveness towards his former friends, especially writers like John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald, summing up his argument with a declarative if slightly slurred: “The cunt.”

“Ernest Hemingway was my grandfather,” said my friend, John Hemingway, who also happens to be Ernest Hemingway’s grandson.

The colour drained from the Irishman’s face. “You’re fecking kidding me?” he asked.

John wasn’t.

Of all the bars in all in the towns in all the world. Then again, of all the towns in all the world, this one more than any other is one in which one should consider the unlikely coincidence likely.

3.

Everyone has a story about the Bomber. Which is to say that everyone who knew him for one or two fiestas has a story about him. Anyone who knew him for more than one or two fiestas has rather more stories about him, and those who knew him for twenty or thirty years have stories numbering in the thousands. Unfortunately, I belong to the former group, having made his acquaintance much too late, during what would turn out to his final fiesta. He died eight months later.

To be honest, my story isn’t even much of a story: it’s just this vague and slightly ridiculous sense that I had, when I finally did decide to run with the bulls, that Bomber was the only thing keeping me from getting killed.

Now, anyone and everyone mad enough to run with the bulls subscribes to a superstition of some kind. The religious pray to San Fermín or to the Virgin, others follow the tradition of buying, rolling up, and carrying the morning’s newspaper with them as they run, and still others wear the same jumper or jersey or Eton athletics jacket that they first ran in so many years ago. But these are all to some extent pre-encierro rituals. My superstition was one I couldn’t prepare in advance: I could only have it confirmed for me after the dust had settled. During my first fiesta, I ran three times, and each time I finished the first familiar face I saw was always that of Bomber. He would shake my hand, enquire about my run (“I didn’t fall, I didn’t cause anyone else to fall, and at one point I saw what looked vaguely like a bull,” I would usually answer), and I would walk away convinced that he was somehow responsible for the fact that I wasn’t dead: my guardian angel in Ray Bans. (The Bomber, “whose eyes no living man has seen,” as the British writer Alexander Fiske-Harrison once put it.) It didn’t surprise me at all when, towards the end of my time in Spain, immediately prior to my trip to Israel, where I was due to visit the Lebanese and Syrian borders as well as the West Bank, Bomber was one of the first of my new friends to wish me luck on Facebook. It wasn’t surprising, but, given my superstition, it sure was comforting.

If you want to know what Bomber looked like—and the chances are that you’re going to hear rather a lot about him in your travels, so you may as well—I advise you to find a photograph of the American actor Sam Elliott. Not only was Bomber the spitting image of Elliott, some of the Navarran locals, who had known him for years, even assumed that he was Elliott. There’s more than one blog post online in which young American travellers, visiting Pamplona for the first and only time in their lives, inform their readers that a local shopkeeper had assured them that Sam Elliott runs the curve every year in Ray Bans that prevent him from being recognised. Actually, Bomber had an eye condition than necessitated the glasses.

I will find another superstition, I’m sure, now that my first one is no longer available to me, though an atheist at an ostensibly religious fair is automatically at a disadvantage. Then again, I say that knowing full well that I don’t believe in guardian angels, either. Yet I believed in this one absolutely. This is hardly surprising: as you walk out onto those cobblestones each morning, you’ll take whatever reassurance you can get. I don’t know how I’m going to go this year in the knowledge that Bomber isn’t out there anymore, but I’m sure that something will pull me through the barriers. Indeed, it will probably be his memory. It’s either that or I start believing in God for fifteen minutes a day. Frankly, I’d rather believe in the Bomber.

4.

I don’t know if Bomber knew about his illness during his last fiesta or not. If he did, he hid it very well. On the other hand, there was something nostalgic and eulogistic about the way he would talk about the event in general, especially to the people he considered to represent the next generation, like Fiske-Harrison and younger foreign runners like Bill Hillmann and Angus Ritchie, and even to wine-sodden wannabe aficionados like myself. An intrepid traveller and obvious lover of world cultures in all their multiplicity—indeed, someone who believed that singular cultural traditions like the corrida have an important role to play in an increasingly homogenised world—he described the fiesta, memorably, as a gift.

It took me a little over half of my first fiesta to fully realise quite what he meant by this. Assuming that you, dear reader, are a first-timer, let me save you a lot of time and heartache by spelling it out explicitly: San Fermín is not a gift being given to you, but one that you give, that requires you to give of yourself. For the first five days of my first fiesta, in part because I’d never been to anything like it before and didn’t know how to pace myself, I partied like a madman, occasionally became indiscreet, and usually tried to make up for it by buying people drinks.

But no one is interested in a free bottle of wine: they’re interested, believe it or not, in the person buying it for them. Don’t get me wrong, a bottle of wine is great, but only if it is accompanied by your personality, your character, unalloyed and honest. In Pamplona, as in Spain more generally, a spirit of generosity means nothing unless the person who possesses it is also generous with his or her spirit. Not only did I hold back for my first five days in Pamplona, I also stood apart, I think, observing journalistically, in part out of habit, and trying to analyse where I should have been engaging. One of the most confronting questions I was asked in my whole time in Pamplona was why I had gone there in the first place. Before I went, I knew I would probably run with the bulls, though it wouldn’t have killed me if I hadn’t. I wanted to see corridas, too, though I knew that, in terms of the crowd’s noise and the size of the bulls that would be fighting, there were better cities and towns in which to do so. In short, when confronted with the question, I had no idea why I was there.

The answers supplied themselves, unbidden, over the course of my ten days in town: in conversations with Fiske-Harrison about honour; in Tom Gowen’s apartment as he played the guitar and sung a lament for years passed and friends fallen, bringing tears to the eyes of everyone present; and in the moments before the final encierro of the fiesta, when Bill Hillmann, Angus Ritchie, John Hemingway, Gary Masi and I shook hands and wished each other ¡buena suerte! in the entry hall of the building in which the Pamplona Posse was then headquartered, walking silently into the street for the final time that year, to meet our fates in the same way that my brother had done a little over a week before. I believe in fate as little as I believe in guardian angels, which is to say that, that morning at least, I was happy to delude myself. Perhaps we are drawn to the things we most need in our lives at any given moment? As I took my place at the top of Estafeta, where the buildings finally give way to the sky and the wooden barriers start curving left towards the Plaza de Toros, I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t come to Pamplona to be a better person than the one that I had been in the past. The best runners—Matt Carney, Joe Distler, Tom Turley, Bill Hillmann, not to mention the countless Basque and Navarran divinos whom the countless foreign backpackers who come here every year will never really know aside from the amazing shots of them taken every morning as they lead the bulls to the place where the animals are to die—are said to run in a style that is noble y brava. But this is not merely a style of running. It is also a way of living. One doesn’t need to run in the encierro to receive, or to give, the gift that Bomber was talking about: one merely need show up in Pamplona in order to learn what it is to live more nobly.

5.

Of course, one may not always succeed at this. Even someone like Fiske-Harrison can have a vodka too many and wind up losing, not only an encierro to fate, but most of the day on which it occurred as well.

The day after my first fiesta was over, I found myself sitting at the train station drinking coffee and reading The Sun Also Rises. (I had planned to read it during the fiesta, which in retrospect strikes me as an insane thing to have planned.) A lanky Australian approached me and sat down.

“Hey, man! Good to see you! You heading to Madrid or Barcelona?”

“Madrid,” I said, putting the book away.

“Awesome, awesome,” he nodded. “I’m off to Barcelona.”

I nodded, too, not exactly knowing why.

“Man,” he said, “the other night was epic. I was completely fucked up after, like, the first bar.”

While most of my personal ignobility—as well as most of my drunkenness, indiscretion, and so on—occurred during the first five days of my first fiesta, I did allow myself, on Graeme Galloway’s insistence, one final night of hard-core debauchery after the penultimate corrida of the feria.

Actually, I say hard-core, but it was really quite tame after the first three hours of slightly manic imbibition. We bar-hopped until about five, I remember having a strange bilingual conversation with a local in a park, and then the last men and women standing had a photo together on the route of the encierro seconds before the street cleaners came round in order to make sure that none of the bulls or the people running away from them were liable to slip up on the revellers’ vomit.

“You got home all right, though?” I said.

“Oh, yeah, man,” he said. “I fucking ran the next morning.”

“Really? How’d you go?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” he said, “I fell over.” He glanced at his watch. “Anyway, I should probably board my train. You ever been to Barcelona?”

“No,” I said. “I hear it’s nice.”

“Yeah, man, yeah,” he said. “Anyway, you should look me up when you’re back in Australia.”

“I will,” I said. “That’s a great idea.”

He wandered off towards the back of the queue that was forming for the train to Catalonia. I still had a half hour or so and opened up the Hemingway again. I was up to the part where Jake and Bill go fishing in the Pyrénées and leave their bottles of white wine in the stream so as to get the wine nice and cold while they sleep in the shade. I would later give this copy of the book to an American guy at my hostel in Jerusalem, a stone’s throw from the Damascus Gate.

I looked up at the end of the chapter and the lanky Australian was at the front of the line. He showed the fellow his ticket, made eye contact with me, and raised the now-scanned ticket in a wave.

I smiled back, waved as well, and wondered to myself: “Who the fuck was that guy?”

You will make plenty of friends like this in Pamplona.

As an added bonus, the following comes from my 2013 piece for The Lifted Brow, ‘Blood rituals’, which was written after I got back from my second fiesta. It has again been very slightly edited.

There are better places to see bullfights than Pamplona. In fact, during the city’s annual fiesta, Pamplona is one of the worst places in Spain to see corridas de toros. The crowds up here in the Basque country demand the biggest bulls on offer, despite the fact that such bulls are almost impossible to dispatch with any great art, and the constant distraction to the animals provided by the peñas, social clubs that take up residence on the sunny side of the arena, drenching themselves in sangria while their in-house brass bands compete with one another, make it almost impossible for the matadors to maintain the bulls’ focus, impossible to dominate them. For someone who wishes to learn about bullfighting, Pamplona teaches only one thing: what a bad corrida looks like.

Yet I write these words having recently returned from the city where, for the second year in a row, I attended all eight corridas, as well as the rejoneo, or horseback fight, and the novillada, in which slightly younger bulls are fought by novice toreros who have not yet graduated to the level of professional matadors. There was a lot to dislike about this year’s corridas. Far and away the worst performance of the week, on an evening that had been billed as the must-see fight of the feria, was that of Morante de la Puebla, about whom I had heard great things and whom I was very much looking forward to seeing in action. I had been promised a masterclass with the cape, but instead bore witness to incompetent butchery. I can’t usually countenance those who say they want the bull to win—let them see Juan José Padilla, who lost an eye to a bull, fight without depth perception and see if they wish him to slip beneath the horns—but this really was one night when one wished to see the bulls pardoned, simply by virtue of the unmitigated, ugly punishment they were being subjected to.

If there was one night that redeemed the feria—and thus the corrida in a more abstract sense—it came three nights later on the thirteenth. It had been a bloody morning: a massive pile-up of bodies at the mouth of the arena during the morning encierro, what we know in English as the running of the bulls, had stopped the Fuente Ymbro bulls in their tracks and resulted in twenty-three injuries, including the near-death of one young man, trampled to the colour of eggplant by runners, who was in a coma. The cartel for the evening included Padilla, Miguel Ángel Perera, and Iván Fandiño.

One couldn’t help but look forward to Padilla, appearing in his second corrida of the feria. I had been in the arena on July 14, 2012, for his first appearance in the city since he was gored through the face in Zaragoza the previous October. It was an afternoon that those who were there will find difficult to forget: Padilla placed his own banderillas, the colourfully decorated barbed sticks that are inserted in the corrida’s second act (“He’s mad,” the old man next to me muttered), and killed near-perfectly, lingering over the horns in the way that Hemingway described (“that flash when man and bull form one figure as the sword goes all the way in, the man leaning after it, death uniting the two figures in the emotional, aesthetic and artistic climax of the fight”). Until then, I had only read about such things. As the woman next to me cried tears of happiness—I maintain that I merely had something in my eye—Padilla was carried out of the ring on the shoulders of his supporters, waving what in this city has now become his trademark: a big, black skull-and-crossbones, a pirate flag to match his eyepatch.

But this year his performance seemed trickier somehow, less marked by valour, in my mind, than by a certain vulgar populism. The dangerous-seeming histrionics he engaged in—opening his mouth over the point of the bull’s horn and leaning on the animal’s forehead with his elbow—came off as crass and disappointing. Don’t get me wrong: he still put on a show, and the peñas in particular loved it. But for my money the evening belonged to the more classical stylings of Fandiño—the president of the ring apparently agreed, awarding the matador the two ears of his first bull as trophies for his performance—and the feria to the insane death-drive toreo of the young Jiménez Fortes, who fought on the twelfth and fourteenth and who in both cases passed his bulls so close that he seemed to me to be actively inviting death. As the British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan wrote of El Litri facing a Murube bull: “When you have seen that, you know a little about dying.”

You may be wondering why I am using my theatre column to discuss bullfighting. The answer is very simple: I consider the corrida and the theatre to be cousins. Like many budding aficianados, I came to the corrida through the work of Ernest Hemingway. Not Death in the Afternoon, which I read only later and which, in spite of its undeniable expertise, also marks the beginning of the author’s tendency towards hard-boiled peer-baiting and literary penis measurement, but rather short stories like ‘The Capital of the World’, with its hotel full of toreros and its tragic, wannabe matador kitchenhands, and ‘The Undefeated’. But when I saw my first corrida, in Mexico City in 2010, it wasn’t Hemingway’s “feeling of life and death and mortality and immortality” that caught my attention, overwhelmed me, and planted the seed of my afición. It was the corrida’s resemblance to the other arts I love, particularly theatre, dance, and sculpture. It is for this reason that I give pride of place on my bookshelf, not to Hemingway’s treatise on the bulls, but to Tynan’s wonderful Bull Fever. (I did read Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer this year, mind you, and loved it despite its lesser reputation. It’s a weird, bloated, strangely homoerotic book, densely packed with details about the corrida while also serving as an unintentionally revealing portrait of the writer as an old man. The preface by James A. Michener is indispensable, too.) For the sake of conciseness, I will not touch upon extra-aesthetic justifications for the corrida in this column, though those interested in arguments from the standpoints of conservationism, animal biology and economics would do well to consult Into the Arena: The World of the Spanish Bullfight by Alexander Fiske-Harrison. For obvious reasons, my concern here will be solely aesthetic. Not that it particularly matters: the ethical question mark that hovers above bullfighting is as deeply related to the aesthetics of the corrida as it is with other concerns. As Wittgenstein wrote: “Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins.”

Tynan was not convinced, as others have been, that the corrida is art in and of itself. He described it, rather, as “the cause that art is in other men—poets, for example, painters, sculptors, and musicians”. Personally, I don’t see why it can’t be both, though of the roughly one hundred and thirty bulls I’ve seen killed in the ring, I’d say I’ve seen maybe three killed in a manner that truly ascended to the level of artistic creation. But the fact that it is the cause of art in others is undeniable, the evidence convincing: the Hemingway short stories; Picasso’s series of twenty-six remarkable aquatints, La Tauromàquia, and his cubist Le matador; and Goya’s own series of prints, also named La Tauromaquia, which Robert Hughes described as “one of the benchmarks of popular Spanish identity”. I have never seen José Tomás fight, but one would have to include Anya Bartels-Suermondt’s remarkable photographs of the greatest living torero, too.

In his essay on Jennifer Gough-Cooper’s photographs of Rodin’s sculptures, collected in Working the Room, Geoff Dyer outlines the connections between the two art forms, “between the images emerging gradually in the tray of chemicals and the figures’ emergence into form. ‘Stone is so still,’ sighs the statue in Rilke’s song. Still photography is the logical medium for conveying stillness…” This speaks to the relationship between toreo and sculpture—“the figures’ emergence into form” recalls not only Hemingway’s “flash when man and bull form one figure” but Orson Welles’ description of the matador’s art as the “[reduction of] a raging bull to his dimensions”—as well as to the relationship between toreo and still photography. This may seem an odd thing to say about a medium that involves the near-constant movement of a terrifying, dynamic force—the bull—but to the extent that the modern corrida has been marked by a ceaseless, paradoxical movement towards stillness, it does make some degree of sense. Perhaps this is why Tomás does not allow his corridas to be broadcast on television: the essence of his art is stillness, and thus he is better served by the still photographer than by the man with the movie camera. In this respect (and not only in this respect, given the obvious relationship between the corrida and flamenco), I am reminded of dance. Unless a dance piece has been choreographed specifically for the screen—and from Maya Deren’s A study in choreography for camera to the New York City Ballet’s 2010 film of Jerome Robbins’ NY Export: Opus Jazz this tradition has been fruitful indeed—there is something not quite right about seeing film or video of a dance performance. Such documentary evidence serves an important archival purpose, of course—in this day and age, it is nice to be able to keep up with what’s happening a world away, even in unsatisfactory facsimile—but something essential doesn’t translate. The same is true of the corrida: I will occasionally catch up with the progress of El Juli or Padilla online—the former’s January 30, 2011, performance at Mexico City’s Plaza México, available on YouTube, is the closest that a filmed bullfight has come to eliciting the emotions that the real thing might have done—but the effect is usually not the same. Because of his moratorium on broadcast cameras at his corridas, this is even truer of Tomás. The available videos of his fights are all iPhone bootlegs, shot from the nosebleeds, usually of his masterful solo performance in Nîmes last year.

I suspect that this is one of the reasons—alongside the desire to have his film seen in countries where viewers are more broadly opposed to the corrida—that Pablo Berger does not show too much actual bullfighting in his excellent silent version of Snow White, Blancanieves, which screened at the Sydney Film Festival the month before Pamplona’s fiesta. Berger prefers to shoot toreo de salon, in which matadors practice and perfect the various classical passes alone, sin toro, than trying to capture the essence of the corrida itself. Along with Miguel Gomes’ formally similar but more elusive Tabu, Blancanieves follows hot on the heels of Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist, which it greatly improves upon in terms of both originality and technique. Where The Artist was merely a rehashing of Singin’ in the Rain, Blancanieves is a thorough reimagining of the fairy tale, which it sets in the unlikely world of torero in 1920s Seville.

More than this, it is a rewriting of the original, too, to an almost Wellesian degree. In the wake of the Holocaust, Welles found himself unable to countenance the idea of Kafka’s Joseph K. being led like a lamb to the slaughter at the conclusion of The Trial, and so had Anthony Perkins take his own life in defiance of his captors in a startling but somehow appropriate deviation from the dénouement of the novel. Berger does nothing so remarkable here. What he does do, though, is find a way to capture something vital about the corrida that the motion picture camera cannot: unable to give us the essential form of the bullfight in the way that a still photographer might, he gives us instead its essential narrative characteristics, which is to say those of tragedy. “A bullfight,” said Welles, who trained for a time as a torero himself, “is a tragedy in three acts. These noble creatures, who are waiting for their death this afternoon, are the heroes of that tragedy. The tragedy of the bullfight is based on the innocence of this creature.” To achieve the trajectory and sense of tragedy in the film, of course, requires a departure from the source material: when the innocent young matadora Carmen (Macarena García) eats her evil stepmother’s poisoned apple, there’s no coming back from it. Having signed a contract with a ruthless promoter before her demise—and here Berger appears to be mixing his Disneys, granting Pinocchio’s Stromboli a role in the proceedings—Carmen’s body is trotted about as part of a Ripley’s-like believe-it-or-not show. Her prince charming, one of the seven bullfighting dwarves she befriended and, through her art, made famous, can kiss her all he wants. Blancanieves, as she has come to be known, is not coming back.

This is not the plot of Snow White, perhaps, but it is that of the bullfight. Whatever one thinks of the often untenable cruelty of the spectacle, when an aficiando speaks of the tragedy of the corrida they are referring, not to the suspension of animal rights, but to the inevitability of the bull’s demise at the hands of the man. The bull has often been compared to Hamlet, but Tynan thought him more akin to Othello: great in size, strength and nobility, he is reduced, unwittingly, by the superior cunning of an adversary who should by rights be his sport. (I am less inclined than Tynan to carry this comparison to its logical conclusion by comparing the matador to Iago. A matador may need some degree of madness to get into the ring, let alone to fight as Fortes did in Pamplona, but he is no sociopath. Iago might be a master with the muleta, convincing the bull to charge at the cloth as opposed to his body, but he is entirely lacking in honour.)

This is why the English word “bullfight” is such a misnomer: there is no fight here, no contest, no competition. Even when the man gets gored, the bull will die. (According to Fiske-Harrison, at least 533 matadors have been killed in the ring in the past three hundred years, a figure that doesn’t include amateurs killed in unofficial town square fights and on ranches. Thankfully, advances in modern medicine have ensured that fewer die today than used to. No less a figure than El Juli might have done so himself had his April 19 cornada been sustained as little as fifty years ago.) It is true that concerns about the ferocity of the stock means that more bulls are being judged brave enough to be pardoned at present than at any time in a number of years, but they still represent a tiny percentage of the number of bulls entering through the toril doors onto the sand each year. “La corrida de toros” translates literally as “the running of bulls”: the art is to incite the bull to run by you using a series of classical, agreed-upon passes. What we know as the running of the bulls, the encierro, actually translates literally as “enclosure,” which is what those countless thousands on the streets of Pamplona are supposed to be doing every morning for eight days: leading, herding, shepherding the bulls from their pens on the edge of the old city to their enclosures in the bull ring. When people speak of the corrida not being a fair fight, they’re absolutely right: it’s neither fair nor a fight. When they call it a sport, they don’t know how wrong they are, but when they say it’s unsporting they’re right on the money. There’s a reason the bulls appear in the cultural pages of Spanish newspapers alongside the theatre and dance notices. It’s the extent to which the inevitable, unavoidable cruelty of the corrida is transcended by the man’s grace and dignity that determines the spectacle’s status as art. It is the extent to which the bull hurtles inevitably, constantly, unwaveringly towards his fate that determines—think of Oedipus, Medea, Antigone and the rest—its status as tragedy.