A premier’s challenge

Late bloomer … Bob Carr has devoured the classics to make up for what he describes as a limited education.

Susan Wyndham

May 3, 2008

THREE weeks after his election as premier of NSW in 1995, Bob Carr spent Easter at home in Maroubra with his wife, Helena. He remembers it well: “Beautiful weather, autumn sunlight coming in the window, a diary free of commitments, nothing to do but read and go and snorkel at Clovelly for a break … I wasn’t overwhelmed by the job because I’d spent seven years preparing for it.”

What did he read that long weekend as the future of the state pressed at his front door? He settled into Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert’s 19th-century portrait of a bourgeois woman’s adultery, romantic delusion, social pretension and – a phrase that lodged in his mind – “the general mediocrity of life”. So began a new phase in both his political and his intellectual life.

Books have been Carr’s compensation for what he considered a crummy 1960s education, heavy on woodwork rather than Latin. As a history undergraduate, journalist and younger politician, his reading was, by his present standards, “lazy – dominated by current affairs, political biography, American politics and contemporary fiction, often disappointing. A constant, nagging self-criticism was that I should read more of the canon and serious works. But I didn’t know where to start, and they all seemed so clunky and unfriendly, those classics.”

During his premiership, Carr found himself by “an interesting psychological quirk” making a start on the classics as a respite from the job. One Christmas holiday he travelled with a volume of Proust. With a few hours free on a weekend he would sink into another hefty work of literature. Critics saw this preoccupation with books as an effete distraction, fiddling while NSW burned. But for Carr it was mental relaxation, a source of sanity and wisdom.

“My equivalent of Bob Hawke’s racing form or Paul Keating’s absorption in antiques was opening a good reading copy like that one,” he says, pointing to a sturdy, illustrated edition of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov on the meeting-room table in his Bligh Street offices. He decided that when he retired from politics, as he did three years ago, he would plough through the great books. Soon the ambition grew into writing a book about his reading.

“I like the idea of sharing your book recommendations. I wanted to do it for my own purposes, to pay tribute to writers who meant a lot to me, to introduce them to other readers, to shape what other people read and like, to argue the case for those books rather than others, but to share with people the help you need to get into some formidable books. I would have welcomed a book like this when I was 20, 30, 40 but there was absolutely none.”

Post-political Carr is busy as a consultant to Macquarie Bank, adviser to businesses on government policy, board member of Dymocks Booksellers and on the speakers’ circuit. He did much of his book research on planes, rereading slabs of Anthony Powell, for example, en route to Perth. He says Powell’s 12-volume novel, starting with A Dance To The Music Of Time, “may be the best I have ever read”. His collecting of modern first editions began with a Powell set picked up at the London Book Fair in 1987 and with his “co-conspirator” Helena he still plucks gems from an American dealer’s catalogue.

Carr wrote his book at weekends in his office, where the corporate decor is a backdrop to shelves of American books and photographs of Gore Vidal and James Ellroy with their Australian fan. My Reading Life is an emphatic, conversational guide to literature and a roadmap into Carr’s mind. He admits to the gaps in his reading and struggling with some books; he summarises a work’s big ideas, advises on where to read closely and where to skip. I point out to him, rather redundantly, that his book is clearly the work of a white, Western male.

“The process of writing it confirmed the bias in my reading,” he agrees. “The preference for the big canvas and the world of power is there and an enchantment with a certain kind of America. I realised that I’m interested in the world of those white, reformist, liberal American politicians. I had to write to [American documentary maker] Ken Burns and ask him to recommend books that I haven’t read that illustrate the story of African Americans, the story of native Americans.”

Carr’s passions for history and politics are the book’s foundation, sweeping us across centuries of civilisation from ancient Rome to revolutionary France, from dynastic China to fascist Europe, from American presidents to the Australian labour movement, with a stern warning against the left’s romance with “the great con” of Stalin and Mao. But he likes Disraeli’s advice: “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.”

Failure, he finds, is more instructive than success. He recommends a biography of Churchill that ends with his election as prime minister and argues that without World War II he would have been remembered as a romantic with appalling judgment. Even his American political heroes are more interesting for their flaws: F.D. Roosevelt for the “insatiable vindictiveness” in Conrad Black’s huge biography, perhaps a psychological scar of polio; and Abraham Lincoln for his melancholia and ruthless dispatch of political opponents.

Carr read the Iliad and Odyssey, and studied the Bible with secular zeal, spending $400 on a 60-CD set read by American actor Alexander Scourby and engaging a teacher of Semitic studies to lead him through the Old Testament. Amid the Bible’s wrath and violence, he says, “The Sermon on the Mount stands out for the sheer radicalism of the demand that we love our enemies.”

Is it possible for a politician to love his enemy? “Well,” he says, “my advice is that in politics it’s better to ignore your enemies – better for you, better for your mental health. But if they keep coming back, jabbing you, incorrigible, then settle the issue but do it swiftly, make your response deadly and uranium-tipped.” He quotes Lincoln and Norman Mailer on this approach and cites “the Carr curse”, which several times saw his opponents unexpectedly crushed. “My fingerprints were nowhere,” he insists. “It is my only experience of the supernatural.”

There are topical chapters on China and on environmental writing, back to the first awareness of climate change in the 1970s. But there is also plenty of fiction, from his favourite Shakespeare plays and performances to Dickens (a late discovery, and he promises to read more), James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Don DeLillo and John Le Carre. There are stories about time spent with authors such as Vidal, Mailer and Patrick White. But there he disdainfully draws a line on contemporary fiction.

Much of the book is an intellectual search for God’s justice – or even His existence – and man’s decency, though Carr often finds the opposite. He opens and closes with If This Is A Man, Primo Levi’s account of surviving the Holocaust at Auschwitz. “I think it is the greatest in the works of testimony because it is so personal and it is imbued with his personality. Where do you find decency there? You find it in a few flickers, a few personal encounters. I’ll keep reading that book: it’s luminous and it’s a memorial to these people who enter the pages and vanish as they’re murdered or just lost on the death march.”

The Brothers Karamazov recurs, too, for its argument about God and evil between Alyosha the monk and Ivan the intellectual, who gives examples of unbearable cruelty to children as evidence that there is no God, or none he wants to know. “The suffering of youngsters is one of the inexplicable things in our universe,” Carr says.

As we’re speaking, the comedian and writer Wendy Harmer arrives to discuss Carr’s donation of proceeds from the book to Interplast, a charity (of which she is patron) that sends Australian plastic surgeons overseas to repair facial deformities. The idea that fixing a cleft palate could enable a child to go to school attracted him. “Imagine the liberation that enters their lives,” he says.

One of Carr’s favourite achievements is the Premier’s Reading Challenge, an idea he picked up in the US, which provides book lists that primary children race through each year. “It’s the appeal of reading lists that this book is about,” he says, fingering his new paperback. “This is a Premier’s Reading Challenge for adults. Ha ha! I’ll be signing certificates!”

My Reading Life: Adventures In The World Of Books, Viking, $35.

Sydney Morning Herald

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Bob Carr’s unwritten guide to Australian books May 3, 2008

My Reading Life has a chapter on Australian political history and biography, but Carr had neither time nor space to cover Australian literature other than Patrick White’s “comic novels” and Colleen McCullough’s ancient Rome series. He would like to do so in another book. “I’ve got to write something about novelists who capture Sydney and it’s the unwritten chapter of this book,” he says.

Among the books he would include: White’s The Vivisector for “his acidic observations on people in Sydney society and his recreation of a world — I can still remember a bit of it — where there were the balls of pawn stores in Taylor Square or piano shops in Surry Hills”; Water Under The Bridge by Sumner Locke Elliott, “which starts with a little party in Sydney’s eastern suburbs on the harbour the night the bridge opens”; The White Thorntree by Frank Dalby Davison (better know for Man-Shy and Dusty), “a sort of Freudian novel, set in Sydney in the 1920s, about the disastrous romantic choices a diverse group make”.

Carr is also keen to write “a shake-out of rival historiographies. I like Geoffrey Blainey — he’s an essential historian — but I might be inclined to revive Manning Clark. His narrative history is flawed but engaging; he is right to emphasise class but he ends up giving too much emphasis to groups of the left and too little to business and technology.”

Brisbane Times

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Bob Carr’s reasons we must read

Christopher Bantick

May 03, 2008 12:00am

HAROLD Bloom in his 2000 book, How to Read and Why, makes the following observation about the place of reading in our lives:

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such alleviates loneliness.”

It is a view that Bob Carr, bibliophile and former premier of New South Wales, above, not only subscribes to but takes further. In his new book, entitled My Reading Life: Adventures in the World of Books, Carr offers a personal and, at times, eclectic collection of his fiction and non-fiction preferences.

There are gaps. D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, for example, do not make it into his canon, at least not yet. The point is that this book is very much a work in progress. There is no end point to reading and Carr is a prodigious reader. He says that for him, reading defines who he is.

“I wouldn’t exist without replenishing my knowledge. Reading is life. It is also about being curious. If you are curious about other people and the creativity of humanity, you’ll find this in books.”

Carr takes reading seriously. It does not mean that he just reads serious books, although this book is replete with worthy and weighty literature leavened with dashes of humour and maybe a little controversy. Canonical? Absolutely.

Literary and at times popular, Carr’s reading tastes are nonetheless catholic. His selection criteria are simple: “The book has to have something to say.” Even so, this history buff, who divides his time between consultancy to Macquarie Bank and being on the board of Dymocks, says he’s catching up.

“After an indifferent education, I think I am compensating for it in books. I felt that my reading, until I left politics in 2005, had been pretty lazy. There had been too much politics, current affairs and economics.

“In my mid-40s, I felt I had to apply myself to read the great books. It would have been more logical to maybe read spy fiction and thrillers.

“I didn’t want to head down that path so I chose to read Homer and Tolstoy.

“What I’d like to think the book achieves is to give guidance on books that may be intimidating to readers because of their reputation. I want to give clues as to how to read these books. When I began reading, this advice was not around.”

Given that the book is a ringing endorsement of the potential books have to change individuals, Carr says he does not see the intrusion of e-books as having a deleterious impact on the longevity of the traditional book.

“I looked at electronic books just last week. They are convenient, I suspect, when people travel. If you can download what you want to read, then this would seem to be where their value lies when moving from place to place.

“For me, I like the feel of books, the smell of books and the age of them. I collect old editions. From my perspective, it would be hard to replace them. I think the internet may have actually helped the place of traditional books. Now you can track them down anywhere in the world. More than this, for some books on politics for example, that I think are important, they are no longer in print. The internet helps find them.”

While Carr is a champion for reading generally and the enduring role of the book in our culture specifically, his tome is a library and he welcomes us to it.

He begins with an arrestingly bleak chapter simply called “The Silence”, where the post-Holocaust literature of Primo Levi is accentuated. So why begin a book with a harrowing analysis of man’s inhumanity to man, let alone raising searing questions on the nature of God?

“If you look back at the last century, the horrors stand out. Seventy million dead as a result of dictatorship in China, between 30 million and 40 million in the Stalin purges and six million Jews under Hitler. How do you come to terms with the experience of those behind the barbed wire of human suffering last century?”

Considering that, in the opening, far-reaching chapter, Carr asks us: “Where has God been?” It is a question that resonates not just in this opening chapter but several times in the book. Carr is interested in the motivation of good and evil and how it is visited on the hapless.

But this book is no tub-thumping treatise of opinion and advocacy. How could it be when immediately after the deep perturbations of the Holocaust, the next chapter is about laughter and comedy? Carr says this was a challenge.

“Humanity can also be funny. Still, I could start the book nowhere else than with the harsh reality of the result of dictatorial rule. I also wanted to relieve this by saying some writers – Chekhov, Evelyn Waugh and Isaac Bashevis Singer, for example – present a comic tone. This, too, is a way of looking at the universe.”

Carr is, if anything, devoted to self-improvement: his own and also the young. He tells the story that when he was premier, John Bell, of the Bell Shakespeare Company, came to see him expressing concern that a student could go through NSW schools and not be exposed to Shakespeare. Carr’s reaction was immediate. “We changed that situation,” he says. He adds that a chapter on Shakespeare is what he believes in about education.

“It is good that it is hard and good that you are challenged at school.

‘We don’t do this when we are older. For me, I needed to find time to undertake serious reading. Shakespeare fits into that.”

The book ends not with an Afterword but an Epilogue. The chapter immediately preceding it, “The Present Danger: The Environment and Our Future”, comes with warnings from environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, Al Gore and others. Where the book began with the silence of the Holocaust, it ends with a Rachel Carson- like sense of Silent Spring. Carr is clear why an Epilogue to reading was necessary.

“I looked at man’s propensity for destruction. But for the Epilogue, I shook all the books I’d referred to and I looked for a cause for hope. I believe it exists.”

How do we find it in books? Carr’s final line in his book tells us:

“Read Levi’s story. Live his life. And all these others.”