Alas ... I Knew Him, Horatio

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 10, 2004

John Clare

I have been in Bob Carr's house more often than Bob Ellis, Richard Hall and Gore Vidal combined. It's true. Stairs sweep up from the front room, where American officers danced to a program of swing music on the ABC. I've been up there, and on up a kind of ship's ladder to the attic. From that secret space I have fired a high-powered air gun down into the night-time bowl of Maroubra, sighting along an army signal lamp.

Lying in the sunroom at the back, I have read my way into the mountain of comics piled on the floor until I have fallen asleep.

Carr did not live there then. Graham Nelson did. It is his name I am dropping, not those of the characters previously mentioned, none of whom I have met. Nelson became a champion road cyclist, a scientific instrument maker and a leading systems analyst.

Speaking of Maroubra, I have seen Peter Garrett walking along Glebe Point Road. But who is Garrett? I could drop many illustrious real Maroubra names - Des Renford, John and Barry Rogers, Johnny Morgan - but you would think I was big noting. Anyone who hopes to impress by name dropping should get out of the name game immediately.

Let's concede that the window of opportunity for good name dropping is narrow. Here is an example of bad name-dropping: "Yeah, I used to get drunk with David Bowie." Obviously this implies that you are so interesting that some famous person chose you to hit the town with, and then, no doubt, confide their deepest dreams in the early hours.

The most pretentious man I ever met once recommended that I read The Diaries Of Anais Nin. After a few pages of "Visited Picasso today; he told me I was the most beautiful woman in Paris. Called in on Henry Miller; he told me I was his muse ...' I decided to forgo whatever insights lay ahead. Tres mauvais name dropping.

In Dipped In Vitriol - a richly unpleasant book of essays edited by Nicholas Parsons - Vidal notes how the great Miller would obsessively record every compliment paid him by each new person he met. "For a man who boasts of writing nothing but the truth," Vidal wonders, "I find it odd that not once in the course of a long narrative does anyone say, 'Henry, you're full of shit."'

So how can name-dropping be good? That is very tricky. First, it can be a vehicle for nostalgia. To enjoy nostalgia without wistfulness is a trick in itself. Let me stress at this point that I am a notably uninteresting person. That is beyond dispute. Through sheer accident, I have known people whose names summon up an era or a world. Names that can prolong a conversation just long enough to give me all the social intercourse I need.

Just before we went to Japan, my Chinese girlfriend and I had lunch at the National Gallery with Sir Kenneth Myer, whom I had known in my years as a teenage layout artist in the advertising department of the Myer Emporium. Myer's Japanese wife also lunched with us. Unfortunately, while we were in Japan we heard that Myer had been killed in a light aircraft crash.

To drop his name - as gently, as unostentatiously as possible - is to send the conversation out in concentric waves, which might touch - Helmut Newton, for instance. His studio was in Collins Street, and he did fashion shots for Myer. Sometimes I have coffee with Ron who lives up the road. He was a supervisor on the wharves and a fairly successful greyhound trainer. Ron has the dirt on many people famous and obscure. By occasionally dropping a pertinent name into the pleasant shallow pond of our conversation, Ron and I seem, sometimes, to achieve the impossible: to actually share an experience. You might call this companionship.

Lionel Feininger once said that his architectural and marine paintings - where he took cubism in a more literal direction than some of the early cubists may have liked - were inspired by "a kind of unearthly nostalgia". Without nostalgia the past is wasted, surely.

A kind of unearthly nostalgia overcomes me when I think of certain coastlines, certain avenues and lanes, but unlike Feininger I have no means of sharing this. Rather I have to settle for something a little down the scale: the memories or associations, of a world or an era, that can sometimes be shared by tactfully dropping a name.

Of course, if you are famous and happen to write a book, your readers will be disappointed if you don't drop names. Famous or not, you will soon irritate the same readers if you do it crassly. Name-dropping is a literary art only famous names can practise. Vidal himself gets away with it at times, and so does the photographer Cecil Beaton. Also, I am told, Newton. But I knew him anyway.

© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald

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