Killingly funny revenge
Philip Hensher
MY LIFE AS ME by Barry Humphries Penguin/Michael Joseph, £16.99, pp. 374, ISBN 0718145410 An odd hut indisputable fact about Barry Humphries emerges from the photographs illustrating this second volume of autobiography. In every photograph of a group of people, the eye is instantly drawn to his face, long before one actually recognises him. Even in childhood photographs, or a photograph of the cast of a student play, he looks more charismatic and extraordinary than anyone else, without seeming to be doing anything unusual. Barry Humphries is perhaps the one man in the world who — as one double portrait instantly demonstrates — could upstage Salvador Dal i.
The unstoppable energy and magnetism of Humphries made him a genius long before anyone, least of all he, knew quite how his genius was going to manifest itself. His splendid autobiography of ten years ago, More Please, contains a superb evocation of his Australian childhood. This new volume — and Humphries is one of very few writers from whom one would welcome a second autobiography — returns to that, as well as other strands of a fascinating life. It is oddly but satisfyingly constructed out of a series of episodes, rather than in strict chronological order. Australia remains largely unforgiven. He was brought up among tropical mock-Tudor ('Tudoid' is his word), and the petty snobberies and cultural masochism of that lost Australia are expertly diagnosed.
Not all of this is specifically Australian. His very funny paragraph on why one brand of brown shoe-polish was universally considered 'nicer' than another reminded me with shame of my own unexamined conviction that people like me wash their socks in Persil rather than Daz. But the atmosphere of the time and place is perfectly caught by the story of Anthony Eden being photographed on an Australian visit with one button on his cuff apparently missing. The nation initially went into a frenzy at the national insult, then into a prolonged fit of soul-searching when Eden explained, and it became apparent that no one in Australia knew that Savile Row cuffs could be undone.
Humphries' revenge on Australia initially took the form of mild Dadaist outrages and acres gratuites. These were wildly pursued in every imaginable art form, including, we are told, a mock-Varese tone poem for piano called `Melbourne by Night' (There are not many comedians whose autobiographies would refer to Varese.) At least, the more visible form of revenge, since his most substantial and enriching assault on Tudoid life was, surely, to turn himself into a collector and aesthete on an astonishing scale. Sometimes, watching Sir Les Patterson, it is hard to remember that his creator is so very cultured a man. Humphries' interests are fascinating ones, and, however seriously they are now pursued. often seem to have originated in a spirit of epater les bourgeois and even camp: the fin de siècle, some fairly horrific (to my eye) Belgian symbolists like Toorop, and even, most shock-ingly, classical Australian painting. He has, I believe, an awesome collection relating to that least Australian of novel
ists, Firbank.
The lasting revenge, of course, is Edna the Great. She has now been going for nearly half a century, undergoing a series of astonishing transformations — she is hardly to be recognised in a photograph from the mid-1950s. Vast amounts of analysis have been wasted on Edna-related psychological speculation, but it is fair to say that Humphries is well ahead of you on this one. (No, it's not his mother.) Tottering weakly out into the night after one of Edna's 'spectaculars', I've often thought that the more interesting area for investigation is the sheer technical mastery, the speculative intelligence which searches and finds the exact gesture or comment which will unite an audience and spark it into uncontrollable laughter. It took her several decades to make any impact on America, and one wonders whether they entirely 'get' her even now. That may prove a substantial tribute to the brilliance of the act in the end.
There is a good deal which reflects on the mechanics of comedy in the book, all of it interesting, and it confirms one's sense of Humphries as a philosophical technician. The account of how he found the perfect Madge Allsop is serious and brilliant (and Emily Perry really is the perfect Madge). But the most enlightening story is of any performer's nightmare. One night in New York, Edna observed an apparently pretentious woman in the stalls wearing dark glasses, and expended a good deal of mockery at her expense. At the end, the poor woman was called up on stage, but as she got up the audience all fell silent as they saw that she was carrying a white stick. Edna's miraculous escape is worth repeating; first, helplessly, she threw herself on the audience's mercy. 'I know what you're all thinking — how am I going to get out of this one? Well, possums, I'm wondering the same thing.' But then genius came to the rescue. 'All I can say is, thank heavens you didn't bring the dog.'
A book this length could be filled with Edna's finest moments, but Humphries is not greatly given to congratulatory selfquotation. It only needs to be said that, from a life of appalling mishaps and extended catastrophes, it succeeds in extracting many retchingly funny stories — the one about Princess Michael of Kent being hoisted up by a man-trap taking the prize by a nose. What doesn't need to be said is how deftly and elegantly written it is. The man who so gloriously enriched the English language with chunder and shirtlifter — they existed before Humphries, but it took a genius to notice them — will write prose in need of no recommendation.
One must. however, register a mild protest regarding the editing of this book. Did anyone involved possess or consult a dictionary? 'Solar plexis', 'fetes gallantes', 'Freundinen'. 'matinal', and more. It is disappointing to see so elegant and exact a writer treated so casually.
Previous page
