HUBRIS and S L Goldberg

Professor Sam Goldberg was a professor of English Literature at the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney from which he beat a well publicised retreat back to the University of Melbourne and then went on to the Australian National University in Canberra.

I wrote about the Sydney University experience in 'Being There'  Overland Winter 1999

HUBRIS

On S L Goldberg

For conscious pride is neither a pleasant nor a particularly fertile emotional state at the best of times … [i]

Unlike Jane Grant in the 1- 2010 – AUTUMN Meanjin I would like to think a dignified veil might be drawn over Samuel Louis Goldberg’s life and times as they seem to me consequential only to those who were intimately associated with him. Grant, while offering critical commentary and reminiscences of his … let us say style, maintains the default reverential attitude with which he is apparently regarded, still, in Melbourne, by a few.

I like to think today’s students would piss themselves at his poses and conceits but then again his instincts were finely tuned to exploiting his demographic and students are vulnerable, which is what he knew best.

I offer this response to Jane Grant’s article in the hope that it will disintegrate whatever tatters of the mythos still flap around his name and memory and in the hope we will not see his like again.

In several ways Grant suggests he would not get away with it today [ii] – the sexual predation,[iii] the attempts to set staff members against one another (oh, the intrigues, Goldberg simmered in fantasies of them) and the con jobs. Grant’s interviewee Ian Donaldson offers us a memory of a tutorial on The Faerie Queen which Goldberg did not allow to progress beyond the first stanza (nine lines). Donaldson suggests that was probably because Goldberg had not read past the first few stanzas. It was probably also because he lacked the professionalism and competence to let the tutorial develop as it might amongst a number of very bright students some of whom had probably read at least several of the seven books of Spenser’s poem. Instead he chose to indoctrinate them out of his ignorance. I bet.

He was a terrible teacher. The silences, the crushing of explorative thinking, the setting up of situations into which he might or might not choose to descend deus ex machina to reveal what should be thought and worse, how it should be thought. Goldberg’s teaching was always and nothing but that evanescent mystery, Goldbergian orthodoxy. Joanne Lee Dow, one of Grant’s interviewees, chooses to admire his ‘subtlety’ – oh, he was that alright.

His work is always written and spoken of ad hominen because that is essentially all that he was about. As he says of ‘conscious pride’ it was not a particularly fertile state. One of his clay feet was trying to kick off Leavisite sacrosanctity, the other floundered for a purchase on Establishment approval. He cultivated a personal mystique in order to hide his fundamental unauthenticity. None could follow where no path lay despite  the list – Ian Donaldson, Wilbur Sanders, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Margaret Walters, Germaine Greer, Jennifer Gribble and Phillip Martin - Grant offers. (Grant’s interviewees on the whole avoid offering any comment on the intellectual contribution Grant claims for him).

But let me give those many who have never heard of him an idea of the man and his teaching.

For example. Professor Goldberg organised or allowed to happen a get-together for the English Literature Masters students, many of whom worked in all but complete isolation.  It was even to be held at night so the part timers could … oh I don’t know, partake of the treat too I suppose.

I remember a freezing Melbourne night, a big bare room (surely it was heated?) around the perimeter of which chairs were lined, a little apart. We gathered and sat. Some of the Melbourne people knew one another and the ones who did not have contempt for their neighbours (the University of Melbourne English Department in the Sixties was beset by doctrinaire righteous indignation which expressed itself in personal contempts; these were promoted by Goldberg and Maggie Tomlinson), murmured conversations. After an impressive wait, Professor Goldberg entered, alone and palely loitering as was his style. Forever stumbling through his narcissistic pea souper, what other manner was available to him? But he made a virtue of this misfortune by appearing as if blanched by experiences at the Front. I was yet again under the impression that he had come directly from another frightful row with the Senate who were trying to …  whatever. Now I see he had probably lingered in the staff club over his tinned pears and custard being Machiavellian with Maggie (they should have been separated those two, they only encouraged one another, very different though their histrionic styles were: Goldberg’s was Chekhovian infused with Gogol, Maggie’s Kabuki). There was the Silence of course. This elevated the already huge level of discomfort and awkwardness into manic catatonia. Goldberg didn’t give a shit about, or was completely incapable of intuiting what might have made for a good seminar atmosphere – seminars were just his stage. Then he did the thing with the cheroot. He did this badly. Maggie should have told him but it was probably in her Machiavellian interests not to. He would get out a sort of puny black cigarette thing and, all deliberation, light it and blow a frail plume of smoke into the atmosphere which he then contemplated, sibylline. It didn’t work. Whatever it was supposed to say, it didn’t. I suppose it was intended to be vaguely sinister which he was but the cheroot thing didn’t add. Anyway, after all this ceremony he uttered (this was a special dispensation for that initial evening – two or perhaps three were to follow during the year). We were told how lucky we were; the implication was how, at considerable personal sacrifice, he had allowed … Then we were thrown into a discussion of … Faulkner.

His voice was mild and clear. It forbade all but listening.

Most of us didn’t know one another, the group was quite large (twentyish), we had no idea what to expect of the experience (I suppose the would-be tutors knew that they were expected to impress), he was Watching us. It was fiendishly awkward; as it was meant to be. Some, wishing to make their mark or as Grant’s interviewee Donaldson confesses, because they simply couldn’t bear the Goldbergian Silence any longer, spoke up.  Hmm. Goldberg was all deep rumination. Then he dismissed Faulkner. This was done with doubt expressed manually, a sigh, a pained look of disappointment cast down as if wishing to hide it, a puzzled little attention to a stab at defending Faulkner from the floor ... but we all knew it was uh oh for Faulkner. Some girl, careless of her future or taking a wild punt on impressing, asked why then did we have him in our bookshelves? Goldberg dismissed his congregation by gathering his little self together and rising.

What could come out of that? Did anyone rush off to reassess Faulkner? I doubt it. [iv]

As for his own person? Can you imagine Peter Lorre out of Kissinger?

He was a cult leader. That was his style. He held himself apart in order to be above and not to expose his mystery to scrutiny. He was vatic. He implied he held some Truth that he might reveal eventually to one or perhaps two of the elect, if only they could bear it. I propose another part of his style was to use students to work through his thoughts on writers (several of Grant’s interviewees choose to interpret this generously). Faulkner had figured on the required texts in Sydney and Melbourne under his direction. Not any more.

A similar process of worrying at literary figures he was unsure of (most) can be observed in his critical commentary; it’s in the elucidating comparisons. In the Meanjin ‘Rewind’ “The Poet as Hero: A.D. Hope’s The Wandering Islands” which accompanies Jane Grant’s excellent article on Goldberg – the reflex is from Hope to Pope and Blake. Pope was deeply unpopular at the time but haunted Goldberg (he had once written something on Pope); Blake forever evaded but worried him. He apparently felt a solidarity with Lawrence (Leavis’ approval would have validated this); Lawrence was the dark lode star of his occluded soul. However Goldberg did his shimmy in poetry. Prose did not allow him his baffling complexities (or ‘subtleties’ if you must), really he avoided prose, no matter what they say about him and Ulysses. I never heard him mention Joyce.

He was fascinated by the idea of contemporary literature but was unable to come to grips with it (vide Faulkner). The ‘conferences’ mentioned in Grant’s articles often contained sessions on the contemporary in order to despise it (the Leavisites, for all their worrying about the modern world, were stuck there with Arnold at Rugby). One of the Sydney period conferences had a session in which Rechy’s City of Night (picaresque tales of hustler – 1963, proto gay) was paraded in order that ‘these people’ could be felt, perhaps, compassion for. The fragile … very bright Andrew Deacon sat there, listening. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was put on the First Year list in Sydney to be compared with Sons and Lovers. We students knew which was the better but couldn’t convincingly say why. The tutors and lecturers couldn’t either. [v]

One reads also with no surprise whatsoever (why can’t these people ever surprise us) in Grant’s article that Nabokov and Saul Bellow were ‘two of Goldberg’s favourite writers’ (each creators of sexually troubled protagonists, Grant explains p 50) and that he read crime fiction for pleasure (of course). ‘Crime fiction’ would have been as close to popular culture as Goldberg, who no doubt longed desperately to be immersed in it, would have allowed himself to get (one knew he had never had a youth).

It is a relief to read Grant confronting anti-Semitism. Goldberg would have spent his life oppressed by it, his denials notwithstanding  (think of the psychic damage T S Eliot’s anti-Semitism would have inflicted on him; Goldberg, almost as elitist as Eliot, would have longed to be entirely of his reactionary party). Consciousness of anti-Semitism would have driven and corroded him, would have made straying from the received very, very difficult for him. He had been a brilliant boy, rewarded for that. The young declared ‘brilliant’ are usually those who do not disturb those thus declaring them. And they are composed as the young should not be. Goldberg would have learned very young how to garner approval.

Goldberg’s work betrays the characteristic variety of philistinism. The Leavisites were imprisoned in their suffocating version of literary culture. Goldberg kept dashing away from that. And one can easily imagine him reaching for Raymond Chandler (did he model himself on Philip Marlowe?) but not popping on a tram to have a look at what this fellow Nolan was about or making the effort to see a play. At the beginning of the Sixties Australia was coming to consciousness again after being stunned by the Depression and the War but these people did not seem to be able to get with the action. And then again they saw themselves as part of the Establishment (very strong in Melbourne).

Goldberg’s work had a whiff of staleness not only because it is derivative but because of his narrowness and failure to be of his time and place (I wonder if news of the concentration camps had their part to play in this?).

What did they do on their overseas scholarship trips, these people? They seem to have returned as limited as they left. Didn’t they experience the Life they were forever intoning but cowered from in their wainscotted departmental rooms? Australian society was unbearably philistine in the fifties and sixties; perhaps the lively did not return.

Grant’s article allows insight into the academic context: it is clear from it that a loose nepotism informed its workings. I was surprised to learn just how much Professor Maxwell, a conservative (of course), against his better judgement apparently, played in promoting and sustaining Goldberg’s career. He not only installed him in Melbourne University, he smoothed the way for Goldberg’s retreat after the Sydney University debacle. Astonishing too to have revealed (by Donaldson) how this revered Melbourne University figure indulged his eccentricities at the expense of his students’ progress. [vi]

Goldberg’s heritage might best prove to be the object lesson his career provides for those contemplating an academic life. 

He wasn’t ready. He was too young, inexperienced and unsuited to wielding the power which had been heaped upon him. This still happens. Goldberg was corrupt in his own unpleasant way but much of his manner was hardly idiosyncratic. We still find young academics who will berate their subordinates in worried terms such as Goldberg’s What is more, we have been too ready to forget the hard, uncompromising integrity of spirit, on which the highest artistic and intellectual achievement depends (quoted In Grant’s article p 51 – Eliot’s influence is surely clear). Imagine the horror of an attempt to translate this sentiment into action.  This sort of thing used to be blokey, a demonstration of machismo by the gender doubtful but it is easy to imagine it coming from an insecure woman these days. The evidence of Grant’s interviewees suggests Goldberg used different modes when differentiating between genders: active for the young blokes. Ian Donaldson for the blokes - He was tough in a way that no other tutor I had was tough in that he treated you like an adult … he wouldn’t help you at all at getting a conversation started … it was very intimidating because when you did get going very often he’d slam you down for saying something facile (p 48). [vii] The games playing manipulativeness of Goldberg is epitomised in this. And passive for the distaff side, Joanne Lee Dow – Goldberg tended to coopt rather than to fight. Somehow you became of his party rather [than] he of your party (p 49). He apparently gave the female subordinates female kind of work characterised by Lee Dow as laying out pieces of paper and stapling (p 52). As already suggested, one’s expectations of Professor Maxwell properly mentoring (as we now say) Goldberg in those days would have been disappointed; it is clear from the accounts in Grant’s article and Sedgley’s essay (op cit see footnote 6) that he was most particularly the wrong man for that job. Indeed Goldberg may well have been corrupted by what he observed of Maxwell’s absurd indulgences and egoistic posturings. The object lessons for senior academics are clear if not easy to enact.

Is Melbourne University still the last of the Australian universities to enter students into Medicine straight from school?

Let us clear up one other misapprehension: academics in those days were not worked to death; their work lives were an endless series of fêtes galantes in comparison to say that of a public servant or a state school teacher, or a contemporary academic (Goldberg, forever burdened, complains to Clem Christensen of a hellish teaching load p 51).

What did they produce, these people? Goldberg’s output is greater than the others but is scant considering his opportunities (he was a Reader at the ANU for many years). Maggie left a couple of short commentaries. Wherein lies Grants’ claim for Goldberg’s intellectual contribution?

He and they were dead hands. Many ex students will tell you they took years to get over the sterilising process which a Goldbergian education was. The creative especially found the process destructive. This was because essentially Goldberg and his shifting cohort were threatened by creativity. They sought to stamp it out. Grant struggles to come to terms with this and misses the mark completely with … students increasing frustration and alienation to the absence of political and historical perspectives (p 44). Her interviewee James Simpson is closer to it with every class became a ghastly test of the students’ moral probity (ibid). The atmosphere was poisoned by a covert, ever shifting righteousness: the cult members were never quite sure where or on whom the glare of disapproval would fall next. The criticism produced in these circumstances was extremely narrowly focused, insistently moralising, utterly devoid of generosity – essentially disapproving of creativity. It was as if they thought writers wrote to be despised. A fundamental of Goldberg’s attitude is expressed in Australia was so anxious to create art of our very own, so obsessed with counting every hair on our cultural chest, that we have been too ready to forget our fundamental dependence (p 51). Nothing vital could flourish in such a climate.

Goldberg was too subtle to have an ideology as such (for which we may be grateful), nothing which could be written down in any case though Grant’s article offers a hint of a credo – In my belief (sic) that some people are finer in spirit, deeper and more intelligent, more creative and courageous in action, than others. I am an elitist: in my belief in democratic institutions I am not (p 43). He certainly did have ambition of a narrowly personal kind and was driven by a neurotic agenda (nothing unusual per se in any of that). We might though gaze appalled at And in reaching at the very end of Ulysses towards an all-embracing vision of Life itself, a Summa so complete that it would be morally invulnerable, he perfected the self-defensive tactics of his earliest works [viii] (had Goldberg at this point fallen under the spell of the Bhagavad-Gita as well as Leavis?) – not just for its nakedness but also for its mad overarchingness.

His article on A D Hope’s ‘The Wandering Islands’ (published in the autumn 20101 Meanjin as ‘Rewind’) also reveals these tendencies – there is the desperate inflation: he strings A D Hope up not only on Pope and Blake but Nietzsche, Apollo and Dionysus (well Hope did rather fancy himself in that way), Heraclitus, Milton, Swift, D H Lawrence, Keats, Yeats, Byron, Chaucer .... Goldberg’s criticism is always pretentiously couched. And there is the cringe-making self-revelation (one looks away in embarrassment from the dwelling on ‘maturity’ – It is not that the mature self necessarily regrets the earlier self’s mistakes pp 54 – 55). Goldberg’s criticism is unconsciously solipsistic; unmediated projection is a very serious failing in a critic.

This review of ‘The Wandering Islands’ is a display of sound critical instincts (Maggie Tomlinson had these too) in confusion with the characteristic pretension and flattery. [ix] By placing Hope amongst the great and divine, suggesting (as Hope would have been terribly pleased to recognise) that he was a prophet, Goldberg was connecting to that loose academic nepotism already mentioned (Hope and Goldberg had been in contact since the early days at Melbourne University). This sycophancy worked for him – he ended up at the ANU where Hope presided.

Nearly all who write about Goldberg worry whether he achieves the status of a ‘tragic’ figure. Grant knows he does not. [x] I have suggested he was too typical to have this dimension claimed for him. One night at a Literature Club get together (it must have been on Dr Johnson) I noted Professor Goldberg change tones – from Light Vatic (to mark the informality of the occasion) to Worried-Engaged. This arresting transposition into the sincere was brought about by these lines from ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’

Unnumber'd suppliants crowd Preferment's gate,

Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great;

Delusive Fortune hears th' incessant call,

They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall.

‘I suppose … ‘ he said, ‘there are fireworks behind the image … rockets.’

It is now for me a recollection of some poignancy.

I suspect that as a Jew Professor Goldberg partook of tragedy. There was a cynical attitude apparent in his work and which expressed itself in his life in ways which gradually and inevitably undid him. I would like to suggest this attitude was a result of the Holocaust.

There are hints in his work that this unbearable tragedy had a devastating impact on him -

Even Yeats, living and writing on the edge of Europe, failed to achieve more than an uncertain idiosyncratic balance – and who has achieved more in the twentieth century? (‘Rewind’ p 54)

It was not only that he thought Australia was a ‘waste’ and disordered (see footnote 8)  - rubbish, [xi] he thought everything was

… and in the disentangling of what makes for sanity and growth in the nightmare of history and its accumulated rubbish in the present. [xii]

No wonder he embraced Leopold Bloom.

---

[i] Goldberg S L ‘Rewind: “The Poet as Hero: A. D. Hope’s The Wandering Islands”  Meanjin Volume 69 Number 1, 2010 pp 58 -59

[ii] Grant’s understanding of the historical context is awry – she writes At a time when deconstruction and postmodernism were considered cutting edge in English departments across Australia, such an open expression of admiration for the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis was deeply unfashionable p 43. ‘Deconstruction’ was unheard of and ‘postmodernism’ did not exist. Indeed in my five or so years study under Goldberg’s auspices I did not hear the term ‘Modernism’ and would not have known what it meant. I am not alone in this.

[iii] Grant goes to absurd lengths to explain this away – see her on ‘Intellectual Eros’ p 44. The ‘Eros’ was the ordinary one when acolytes are attracted to power; it is as often homoerotic as hetero.

[iv] I felt that Goldberg was thinking how the Leavisite orthodoxy he was forever bouncing off did not do Faulkner justice, as we had not been able to that night – because the greatness of Faulkner could not be accounted for by their – no matter how subtle – moralising approach to the novel. Goldberg did not have the amplitude of spirit or the professionalism of a teacher to share his doubts, his critical dilemma with us that night. Joanne Lee Dow may be describing a comparable process of intuiting his mental processes - What you saw in lecture was a mind making propositions, asking questions, raising counterpoints of view, the inner dialectic of the lectures (p 48). Obviously it could be stimulating.

[v] On the contemporary and creative as a Leavisitic failing: in his Memoir Patrick McCaughey relates how at a dinner party (for six or seven it seems) given by Jennifer Strauss, Maggie simply ignored Christina Stead. She chose to go on about cheap pet food and to chortle over the current posters (witty, it is true) of the London Underground; they would have been about as close to Modern Art as Maggie ever got. Her rudeness to Stead would not astonish anyone with any acquaintance of her and meeting a real writer would have been the stuff of nightmares for her. The Bright Shapes And The True Names  The Text Publishing Company Melbourne 2003 pp 48 - 49

[vi] See Sedgley Anne Meanjin On Love, Sex and Desire Volume 66 Number 1, 2007 ‘In Fealty to a Professor’ pp 226 - 232  or Google: Anne Sedgley Best Australian Essays 2007 ‘In Fealty to a Professor’

[vii] Donaldson does not reflect that neither was ‘adult’ (he was nineteen – in those days we were all relative innocents) nor on the propriety and efficacy of a senior academic treating a student to this humiliation.

[viii] Goldberg S L 1962 Joyce  Writers and Critics Series Oliver and Boyd Edinburgh and London p 100

[ix] But this, after all, is what makes Hope an important Australia poet – that, as I have said, the honesty, the persistence, the maturity of mind and art with which he has dealt with life make him, whatever his limitations, one of those men whose effort to irrigate and order the wastes is recognisably part of our own. ‘Rewind’ article of A D Hope’s ‘The Wandering Islands’ – p 64

[x] If Goldberg never presumed to see his own life as exemplifying the fine spirit of what he termed ‘conduct morality’, by today’s standards of pedagogical ethics he is in many ways a troubling figure (p 43).

[xi] Possibly Australian society offers too little direct stimulus to poetry concerned with men and women rather than ideas, or values, or inflated ‘myth’ – making; and the realistic intellectual, whether poet or not, finds it natural to look for inspiration to what Hope calls ‘the Arabian desert of the human mind’ in the absence of anything much else to look to except the aridity of science or the pretensions of religion. (‘Rewind’ article of A D Hope’s ‘The Wandering Islands’ – p 64 Whatever this means it can hardly be positive about Australia.

[xii] Goldberg S. L.  The Classical Temper A Study of James Joyce’s Ulysses  1961 Chatto and Windus London p 315