The Vapour Trail

I have come across a wonderful memoir of a Victorian clown, James Frowde. He was born in England in 1831 into the Hengler circus dynasty, the very stuff of an Angela Carter fantasy. A forbidding stepmother, and a father he never had enough of. (‘How I used to long for a time to speak or touch him’, he writes). His grandfather and beautiful dark-haired aunt were rope-dancers, and his younger brother became the Modern Hercules in Hengler’s Circus during the 1860s. 

Frowde’s great grandfather worked a trick horse in the ring with a coldly commanding air, dressed in a stiffly braided frock coat with the whip ever-ready at his side. More extraordinary was Frowde’s great-grandmother, who possessed ‘an European fame as a pyrotechnic’, and was blown to pieces when fireworks exploded in her workshop in 1845.

The glimpses into Victorian provincial life, circus culture and familial intimacy come fast as a juggler’s displays in this memoir. Impossible to keep up with them, especially given that Frowde writes in a dashingly impressionistic style, with little hare-brained darts in odd directions and back again. Check one of his early passages, in which he relates seeing an organ-grinder with a monkey as a child, and mistaking the monkey for a man -

I remember a journey, some straw, a great jolting, finding myself in a strange house and people and a formidable-looking gentleman with a shock of curly black hair and a mouth covered with hair… he spoke a queer language.

The only shame is that the memoir is constantly chopped up by the editors (Jacky Bratton and Ann Featherstone), with bits omitted and annoyingly profuse interjections, as well as long footnotes positioned distractingly close to the text. Their introductory chapters about circus life are really fantastic: I will be working over them for some time yet. But all the way through the memoir I kept wishing they would say less. Let the man speak for himself, I kept thinking, trying to shut out their interruptions and hear his voice undisturbed. I guess there’s a tension there, between the value of the memoir as a literary piece, and its function as an historically useful document. Hard, as an editor, I’m sure, to balance the two.

My little girl, five years old, came out from bed still blurry with sleep early Saturday, blonde hair cloudy ’round her face, and said: ‘Election day!’

She had been so caught up with the reporting almost all the way through the campaign, asking constant questions about who this person was, and what that party was, and who sundry friends of ours would be voting for. She wrote her own how-to-vote card the day before, and announced that she was going to hold an election with her toys since she wasn’t allowed to vote herself.

I really felt the responsibility of that interest – hard to try and explain politics to a child, and especially to express your own political preferences in ways that don’t just reduce it to out-and-out brainwashing. At one point she said: ‘who do you go for, mama? B/c whoever you go for I do too’. The innocence of lambs, &c. Her sweetness is so deep and sharp at the moment I wince when I think of it.  

I am still in shock that the election turned out the way it did. Had been steeling myself for disappointment, and am almost unsure of how to react now that there is no need for it. Extraordinary.

Well, my article on larrikins’ use of popular theatre to fashion their identity on colonial streets is to be published in Australasian Drama Studies sometime soonish, called “The Larrikin’s Hop”. The title comes from a larrikin song sung in blackface in the late 1880s and early 1890s, by Australian minstrel-vaudeville comic, Will Whitburn.

I’m now writing a piece for an American journal about larrkins’ relationship to blackface performance. To this end, I’m neck-deep in four wonderful works: Eric Lott’s Love and Theft (1993), Shane and Graham White’s Stylin’ (1998), W T Lhamon Jnr’s Raising Cain (1998), and William J. Mahar’s Behind the Burnt Cork Mask (1999). For sheer style, these books are treats. Each abounds with the literary equivalent of the black/face masculine dash it describes. ’This passage, in all its woozy syntax and headlong rush’, writes Lott at one point, describing how it feels to be taken on some of his own more virtuoso prose-flights. White historians might not be able to jump, it seems, but they sure as hell can kick up a syntactical shindig if they choose.  

Reading this American scholarship is prompting me to think about the reasons that blackface minstrelsy appealed to Australian larrikins, and how this was different (if at all) to its appeal to the white working-class in America. That blackface  appealed to disaffected youths in Australia, many of them from an Irish background, obviously has a lot to do with the way blackness and blackface operated symbolically throughout English-speaking western society. (On this point, Robert Nowatzki has written an interesting article about the appeal of blackface to Irish immigrants to America).

Even with this transnational logic at work, however, it is not possible to make everything said about the American minstrel-show applicable to Australia. Each of the historians I’ve just mentioned see minstrelsy as a way for white Americans to come to terms with abolition, with the consequent troubling presence of free blacks in public places, and the competition for work between black Americans and the white working-class. Obviously, Australia had its own history of violent struggle between Aboriginal people and white colonists. But there was not a daily confrontation and inter-relation between white and black in Australian cities as there was, say, in New York. Australian working-class resentment was directed primarily at Chinese labourers – a fact no doubt influencing minstrel efforts to distinguish representations of blackface from Asianness there.

The combined effect of these things meant there was not the same intensity in Australia to the dynamic Lott identifies in white Americans’ relationship to blackface. He speaks of white Americans’ voyeuristic fascination for black bodies, which built up a kind of Freudian charge from frequent contact in urban places. He also speaks of a white longing to mock and plunder black culture, to steal from it and hobble its power. Neither of these related forms of desire existed with the same forceful immediacy in Australia. As a result, the minstrel-show was never as socially threatening there.

Australian minstrelsy attracted a more diverse audience than its American or English counterparts: it still appealed to workingpeople and the ‘disorderly classes’, but it wasn’t confined to this constituency. Blackface could also be used more freely to signify other things in addition to race: anti-authoritarianism, sexual licence, the pleasures of display and violent release. And in particular, its style was available to Australian larrikins, open for adoption and combination with other influences (that of Irish and Cockney characters from English music-halls, for example) to become part of their own distinctive identity.

Coincidence. I want straight from the dentist to the library, and started reading the Bulletin’s theatrical pages from 1886. And there was a review of a ‘tooth-show’, a particular variant of the medicine show, performed by ‘Professor’ W H Hartley in an oversized tent at Sydney’s Belmore Park.

‘We have seen as many shows as most people, from dog-shows to barmaid exhibitions, but we confess to having but a limited experience in tooth-shows’, wrote the Bulletin’s redoubtable reviewer. The show began in a blare of music and ’some really good singing’, he added sarcastically – after all, how much music does a man want, who has the jaw-ache? The good professor then took his stand on the plank, ‘and having fixed an electric-light on his forehead, declared he was ready to remove all teeth of every make, shape, and state of decay’.

Now, it seems, a great line of men, women, and children appeared, queueing to take part in ‘the tooth-drawing procession’ on stage. Each patients’ treatment was over in twenty seconds: ‘the Professor cast his light down upon the cavity, gave a nod, smiled, touched something, and the tooth was out. Any attempt at an encore was sternly repressed by the patient, but there was no end to his satisfaction’.

This frightening review brings to mind an account of the career of Edward Irham Cole, an Englishman who ended up performing travelling Wild West Shows in Australia after the turn of the 20thC. Cole, ’the Australian Barnum’, began his theatrical life as a cheapjack, lecturer, and medicine-cum-dental-treatment showman. He would discourse upon scientific wonders &c., perhaps deliver a song and dance, and then offer to relieve his audience of a tooth or two.

(On Cole, see Barbara Garlick, ‘Australian Travelling Theatre, 1890-1935′, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 1994).

So I’m reading two things in a desultory way at the moment. The first is William Gibson’s Spook Country. The second is Geert Lovink’s discussion of the new media arts (or lack of it) in a book called Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. Both are coincidentally about similar concerns: new media art, and what Lovink calls the ‘cool obscure’.

Lovink’s beef is that there isn’t really a new media arts sector, to speak of. After all the excitement about virtual reality years back, and the sometimes-publicity generated by an artist like Stelarc, with his robotic prostheses and techno-utopian manifestoes -

- there isn’t really a flourishing scene involving artists on the outer reaches of new technologies. So Lovink says anyway: I am hardly the expert, myself. In Spook Country, Gibson imagines that this is otherwise. He describes a thriving network of new media artists who leave digital images in real space, visible to anyone with the right hardware (a special mask with wifi connections). One of his artgeeks recreates traumatic scenes in the precise locations where they took place. River Phoenix is depicted moments after his death, for example, lying face-to-pavement outside the Viper Room. How much this reflects current artistic dreams or praxis; and how much it simply expresses a desire that what Lovink calls the ‘stagnant “new media arts”‘ might be otherwise; I do not know.

Where Lovink and Gibson really part company is in their attitude to the ‘cool obscure’. As an assoc. prof. of media & cultural studies, Lovink is coming from a field where elitism is disowned, motivated by anxieties about the elitist nature of academic life. New media art will always be a marginalised phenomenon if its practitioners see obscurity as cool, he says – if they adopt the avant garde stance that anything popular lacks artistic value. High end, expensive new media art-installations are not going to allow artists to influence the development of technologies/ideas relevant outside their field. And that’s what artists should be seeking, right?

On the other hand, Gibson’s last two novels make a fetish of cool obscurity. In both Spook Country and Pattern Recognition, his Hubertus Bigend character is convinced that ‘secrets are the very root of cool’. He launches viral ad campaigns in which cool is marketed in sneaky and highly lucrative ways. And he spends vast sums in pursuit of secrets in pursuit of cool.

One of the most odious aspects of Pattern Recognition (the novel before Spook Country) is the fact that its heroine is pathologically averse to brand-names, and yet brand name-dropping punctuates the action in the most hypocritical of ways. Cayce Pollard comes out in hives when she sees something like a Ralph Lauren polo-symbol (incidentally, also one of my pet hates), evoking a No Logo ethic, of a kind. But plenty of times we’re told that Cayce buys DKNY cardigans or Fruit of the Loom T-shirts, and then cuts off their labels before wearing them. So she gets to be Naomi Klein and a coolly-dressed brand-junkie at the same time. Ugghh.

Bigend’s money is also what effectively drives the plot in both novels, making possible Cayce and Hollis’s hip trips to Japan and Russia and designer L A hotels. There’s a kind of dishonest pandering to the cool obscure all the way through these books, even though, of course, Gibson’s oeuvre itself is a mass phenomenon, and no doubt he wants to keep it that way.

Not really sure what the moral of all this is, except that questions of elitism, of desires for a cool which only People Like Us possess, are difficult to be honest about. The whole idea of a new media arts scene seems intimidatorily techie for a back-in-the-Victorian-era historian like me. And if it didn’t, in the way that Lovink thinks should be the case, how could its practitioners market themselves? Wouldn’t they have to peddle the kind of ‘I’m not really mass market even though I am’ dishonesty that underscores a William Gibson work? And don’t we all do that in some measure in our various endeavours, after a kind?

Out in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley last weekend I got to thinking about the fascination I’ve had lately for accounts of mid-Victorian street-culture. Melbourne’s Bourke St seems thrillingly eclectic in the slummer-journalism of the late 1860s, with its ballad-sellers and telescope man, its factory girls and colonial braggarts too big for their patent-leather boots. (Well, it does when Marcus Clarke writes about it in his nasty-funny and mannered prose, anyway; misogynistic but horribly seductive, damnit, as that man must have been).

It’s easy to allow such descriptions to inform everything one thinks about Victorian cities, as if Bourke-street might somehow stand in for all Melbourne, Soho all of London, the Bowery all of 1830s New York. Such places weren’t representative then, however – and that’s what I was thinking last Saturday night, out in the Valley.

All of Brisbane CBD’s clubs and bars are squashed into a couple of blocks in the Valley, it seems. Past midnight the mall is rampant with bodies, and with people running pellmell through the traffic on the roads at either side. I stood for a while in an ATM queue while a busker played blues-lite before an audience of maybe eight or nine escapees from a nearby bar, standing unsteadily in front of him. I was thinking how normally I wouldn’t think of this as remarkable. Scenes of happy drunks  in the street hardly create the bohemian thrill, the self-conscious air of being a participant observer, that Clarke felt on his exploits in Bourke-st. It was only having read his work so recently that I took on that self-consciousness myself, noting a forty-something punk in greying mohawk, and a twenty-something Jim Morrison-cum-John Lennon wannabe, decades out of his time (round sunglasses, black denim, ostentatious joint, long hair), walk past. Mostly, of course, there were teens and those not long out of their teens, lots of girls in fake tans and potato-sack minis (what is it with all those baggy empire-line tops masquerading as dresses?) and boys with oversized biceps and colourful Ts.

One wouldn’t try to make such scenes stand in for ‘urban life in Brisbane’ in its totality today. But somehow for me – and not just me, I think – descriptions of the devil’s own nights in Manhattan, or the Moulin-Rouge in Paris, or Henry Mayhew’s darkest London, or the Rocks in 1880s Sydney, come to inhabit a wider terrain when it comes to imagining cities past.

(Gratuitous latterday Bourke St shot from Julia Shiels’ fab blog City Traces: http://citytraces.julieshiels.com.au/index.php?s=bourke).

Can’t stop listening to P J Harvey’s White Chalk, and to this song, ‘When Under Ether’, especially. Keep waking up at night and lying there, listening to it quietly repeating itself in the layers between sleep and full consciousness.

The reviews of the song I’ve read so far make much of the fact that it is about a woman having an abortion, and of course the spare, close, near-beauty of the song makes that all the more powerful:

Something’s inside me
Unborn and unblessed
Disappears in the ether
This world to the next.

At the moment, however, what draws me most about the song is its evocation of being between forms of consciousness, and of being between forms of being itself. It makes me think of the Victorian spiritualists who believed in the imbrication of the spirit-world with our own, in the possibility of communicating one world to the next. They sometimes spoke of spirits taking on an ethereal substance in order to appear to those who loved them. Some even believed that this ethereal matter could be caught on film; hence the sombre charge generated by spirit-photography, in which dead relatives were made to appear in hazy daguerrotypes (much like the image of P J Harvey herself on the cover of the album). And others since have described the kind of mysteriously benign inter-place this song inhabits, visited in the course of a near-death experience or dream.

Another part of the song’s pathos for me is its intimation of the hopes that surgical ether inspired in the mid-Victorian era, in line with the numen people invested in electricity, in telegraphy, in mesmerism, in photography, and the rest. As one German enthusiast declared: ‘The wonderful dream that pain has been taken away from us has become reality. Pain, the highest consciousness of our earthly existence, the most distinct sensation of the imperfection of our body, must now bow before the power of … ether vapor’. Viewed from the vantage of retrospect, such enthusiasm now seems mournfully naive. And listening to this song, all those precarious beliefs in dreams coming to pass are evoked and then themselves made to pass, disappears in the ether / One world to the next.

In a short-lived little paper, Society, published in Sydney in 1886, the editor describes a city teeming with street-commerce and promenaders: omnibus boys with ‘diabolical’ whistles, an army of ‘peripatetic fruit shops on wheels’, pretty girls to sigh over, boys with lawn-tennis racquets, a great miscellany of hawkers, and ice-cream carts trundling by. (Query: how did the ice-cream stay cold, and where was the lawn tennis happening?) One couldn’t pick flowers or smoke in the Botanic Gardens, this editor observed, with his characteristically doleful air, but there were plenty of passing vendors with goodies to buy.

Chaotic descriptions of Melbourne’s Bourke Street similarly abound in The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1887), a novel by Fergus Hume, and in Marcus Clarke’s slummer-journalism from the late 1860s. A restless crowd ‘jostles and pushes along the pavements’, Hume wrote, notable chiefly for its griminess, as also for the vivid dresses of the prostitutes milling about the street corners. ‘Round the doors of the hotels a number of ragged and shabby-looking individuals collect, who lean against the walls criticising the crowd… Then here and there are the ragged street Arabs, selling matches and newspapers; and … further up, just on the verge of the pavement, a band, consisting of three violins and a harp, is stationed, which is playing a German waltz to an admiring crowd’. Clarke offered up other characters in his sketches of Bourke-street by night. A street preacher, hand upraised, singing a hymn as passers-by stopped to join in the chorus. A peddlar of ballads, calling out the titles of his ‘noo and fav’rite’ melodies. And ‘the man with the telescope’, evidently a Bourke-street fixture, ‘who shows Saturn’s rings for a penny and describes Jupiter’s moons for a glass of gin’.

These sources amply bear out what I’ve just been reading in Andrew Brown-May’s, Melbourne Street Life. This wonderful book is all about the vibrancy and jangle of the street in this period – buskers, newsboys, shoppers, workers, and hawkers combing the laneways ‘in a diaspora of fruit, fish, flowers and fancy-goods’ (157). The book is also about the progressive removal of this enterprise, the progressive attacks on all its noise and clutter and debris. Boys used to line up on the footpath in Swanston Street with armfuls of daffodils and wattle blossom, he wrote. In 1901, the District Court fined them for getting in pedestrians’ way. Also gone by the turn of the century were the men selling monkeys and the occasional kangaroo, and the cockatoo hawker from the late 1880s. (‘In one hand he holds two caged birds, while with the other he thrusts out a stick on which a melancholy cockatoo sits and surveys the passers-by’).

Brown-May ends the book with a call for the revival of city streets as democratic spaces, ‘providing optimum opportunities for the freedom and accessibility of all classes of people’. Mindful of the history of the street, he says, we should recognise ’the significance of public space to the renewal and conviviality of cities and to the practice of community and citizenship’. Having just moved to a fast-yuppifying suburb of Brisbane, and having seen far too little of the city’s pavements and outdoor life,  this plea strikes almost too close to the bone.