For all the attempts of Giblin, Brigden and even Copland to practise diplomacy with respect to wages, they received the obloquy of the Left.[16] (See for example, Lloyd Ross.) The irony is that, throughout the 1930s, Giblin displayed an attraction to extreme left ideals.
The Saturday morning readers of the conservative Argus on 2 November 1935 would have seen this listed amongst the public notices:
TWO-DAY CONFERENCE OF FRIENDSHIP WITH THE SOVIET UNION
At Central Hall
Speakers: Miss D. Alexander, Miss M. Heagney, Prof J. N. Greenwood, Mr W. A. Smith, Ex-Senator R. D. Elliot, Mr J. D. Blake
Chairman: Rev S. Evans, Mr Max Meldrum, Prof L. F. Giblin[17]
At Unity Hall
Talk on Art, Chekov, Russian Music
Giblin’s participation in this Communist Party front could not have been unpremeditated. In October 1933 Giblin had addressed the Melbourne University Labor Club, another Communist Party front, on ‘socialism’. To the student society Boobooks he spoke on the ‘The Practical Communist’. In a radio talk (on 3AR) innocuously entitled, ‘Shaping the future of Australia’, he registers his sympathetic gaze towards ‘one country, Russia’ that ‘was in the process of giving some answers’ to questions of planning.
Russia has adopted conscious direction in the most extreme form for some years. The experience of Russia, carefully interpreted should help greatly. It is too early to draw certain conclusions. We know that production has greatly increased, that unemployment has been abolished, and that the standard of living is now rising. We also know that this has been done at very heavy cost, and that the standard of living is still very low in comparison with western Europe.
At about the same time he penned another letter to John Smith, entitled ‘The lesson from Russia’.
Ten years ago Russia appeared to be down and out as a result of the war and the revolution … Since then progress has been in leaps and bounds. In about three years it looks as if Russian production would have grown to three times pre-war production. It has been possible because Russian leaders recognised the facts. It was Lenin who set the pace. It is useful to remember that Lenin was a statistician. (NLA LFG).
Has the rhetoric of ‘facts’ ever made such a fool of itself?
How can one explain such a lapse of judgement? In the mid-1930s a trustful indulgence of the Soviet Union was commonplace among surviving members of the Edwardian Liberal-Left. H. G. Wells was one example. So were the Webbs, (also highly enamoured of facts: see Webb 1889). And so was John Maynard Keynes (see Coleman 1992).[18]
For Giblin, the attraction of the Soviet Union may be more particularly traced. The attraction lay in its rigour, its severity. The Soviet Union was delivering to its population in severe terms the necessary austerity that soft-minded Australians were hiding from. While ‘Russia the land of dreams getting down to hard facts. Australia, the land of realities, still dreaming about a sacred standard of living’ (‘The lesson of Russia’).
Giblin was never an enthusiast - Russia’s standard of living, remained ‘miserably low … the lowest in Europe’. He was an eccentric.
More certain conclusions will probably emerge during the next few years, and will probably penetrate to Australia in spite of censorship. Meanwhile we must keep an open mind, think carefully and experiment boldly.[19]
‘In spite of censorship’: the modern reader will assume that this is a reference to Soviet censorship. However, it is more likely a reference to Australian censorship which, at this point of time, forbade the dissemination of works deemed to advocate ‘the overthrow of civilised government’. These included Lenin. In the 1930s Australian censorship was at its peak of confidence and completeness.
The Lyons Government Minister for Customs, Sir Thomas White,[20] had proved a particularly assiduous censor. In response, a Book Censorship Abolition League was formed in 1934, and Giblin was one of its public speakers. ‘Book Anti-Censorship are staging another big show at the Town Hall. Six speakers taking each a banned book and dealing with it – a good representative lot of speakers – Paton from the University taking one of Lenin’s books and so on’ (RBA LFG April 1935).[21]
The occasion of his memorable protest was the controversy over Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza that appeared in 1936. Harold Holt described it as ‘brilliant’; Casey thought it ‘dull’. But Brave new world had been banned, and White had sternly announced: ‘Huxley should not escape the process of the law’. The prospect of banning Eyeless in Gaza was floated. This moved Giblin to protest; the protest is worth quoting at some length.
It would be difficult to imagine a more thoroughly depressing piece of news. The collapse of the wool-market would be a trifling mishap in comparison.
Mr Huxley has for some years been the most interesting of the younger English writers. Enormous promise, expressed often in tentative and experimental form, has left some dissatisfaction with the total performance, despite brilliance in parts. It has for some time been an anxious question whether he was going to get anywhere … ‘Eyeless in Gaza’ goes far towards answering this question and dispelling this doubt. The superficial brilliances have in effect disappeared, merged in the high seriousness of the story. I have read no new book for years which comes so near to the Greek tragic idea of purging by pity and terror.
What would make the censorship news supremely farcical, if it was not so revolting, is that Mr Huxley shows himself here as fundamentally a moralist of the old dispensation … ‘Eyeless in Gaza’ is a dramatic re-statement in terms of present day experience of the vision opened in the Sermon on the Mount – the most honest and convincing given to this generation. And Mr White is considering whether it should be banned!
It is of course possible to pick out from the six hundred pages a minor incident, a touch of colour, here and there, details necessary for a fair and full presentation of the whole story – and put them violently into apposition as a sample of the whole calculated to disturb the after dinner complacency of the unlettered pater-familias. The same could be done with most great writers.
If one could ascribe this attitude to the blind and dense unreason of a Minister’s intelligence, it would not be so bad. Ministers come and go. It is much worse than that. Not only is the Government behind it, but in effect the whole Parliament of Australia. Censorship procedure of the kind we have suffered from would not be possible if there were in Parliament even a solid minority of people acutely conscious of the ridiculous futility of the Censor’s antics. It is abundantly clear that there is not, – that with hardly an exception our representatives do not care … It is this attitude towards the intelligence of the country which spells the breakdown of democracy and opens the road to the worst excesses of either Nazism or Bolshevism.
Eyeless in Gaza was not banned. The retreat on book censorship began the following year. Brave New World was unbanned.[22]
Giblin did not only lift his pen to defend art, but also to advance it; not so much as defender, but as patron and benefactor.
The Jindyworobaks were a poetic movement of the late 1930s and 1940s, stirred by Rex Ingamells (1913-1955). The movement has been judged to amount to a resurgence of the literary nationalism of the 1890s, but distinguished by a ‘novel attempt to mine aboriginal culture for inspiration’ (Bennett 1988).[23] Giblin appears to have been the earliest of several patrons of Ingamells. It seems that he had brought Ingamells to the attention of John Masefield – the popular Poet Laureate, and generous patron of young talent (FUL p. 11) – when Masefield visited Melbourne in 1934 for the centenary of European settlement.[24] And he provided Ingamells with a contact for Bunny Garnett.
Giblin also provided the opening ‘manifesto’ for the Jindyworobaks, in a foreword to Ingamell’s first collection of poetry, Gumtops. There Giblin makes a bare and brave call for Australian poetry to shun the English literary tradition, which distracts the native poet from the necessary ‘direct reaction’ to the Australian environment.
Some individuality of character and habit have developed in Australia in the last 150 years, and the face of nature has always had a unique distinction. But this individuality and distinction are not at all adequately on record in letters or any other art … The contrast with older countries is very marked. In England, of nature and man, the record is so adequate as to raise the familiar doubt as to which came first. The English rustic is shaped in the tradition of Shakespeare and Hardy; rain-clouds on the southern hills have obviously read their Meredith; beeches and wych-elms know all there is to know of Gothic architecture; and the poplars round Cambridge raise their heads in conscious rivalry with King’s College Chapel … Our Australian poetry is in striking contrast, and enrichment must be slow and laborious. The problem of even naming the common birds and beasts, trees and flowers, needs the inspiration of a new Adam. Our fathers, in despair at their strange surroundings, and clutching at some pathetic shred of similarity to familiar things, peopled the bush with a dozen different oaks, ashes, myrtles, pears, cherries. A true story is impossible in these terms. (Giblin 1935).
Australian poets, wrote Giblin, ‘must forget all they have learned of the poetry of other lands; shut their ears to all the familiar, captivating echoes, and try to give us their first-hand, direct reaction to nature and man as they find them in Australia’.[25]
Gumtops, with Giblin’s foreword, was sent to P. R. Stephensen, the doyen of Australian literary nationalism of the 1930s. He declined to publish. The spirit and thought of Giblin’s foreword is undeniably similar to Stephensen’s nationalist credo, Foundations of Australian culture, published in July 1935. The insistence on creation being a matter of first-hand direct reaction, and the implications of this for Australian literature, is common to both. Stephensen is commonly recorded as a ‘profound influence’ on the twenty-two-year-old Ingamells. The chronology would suggest that Giblin might be more deserving of that judgement.
Giblin recommended Ingamells for a Rhodes Scholarship. But his letter commented:
It is a queer quality, this power or incipient power, of making poetry. It does not correlate with other abilities. The Committee will find his responses on personal contact disappointing, a little crude. (UMA LFG 27 October 1936).
It appears that Giblin’s ‘disappointment’ became more pungent over the years. He ‘drifted into a defensive disinterest’ about the ‘Jindys’. Twelve years later Giblin wrote to Ingamells to explain ‘on why I have kept aloof from your enterprise’.
2.10.48
Dear Rex
… the deciding factor was the adoption of the word ‘jindyworobak’. It seemed to me to be a very perverse choice – academic in the worst sense. You seem to have exercised a perverse ingenuity in picking out a word with all the [undecipherable] that any word in any language could have … that was my state of mind when I became a victim of the pruning knife. (FUL LFG 2 October 1948).
‘I am bound to admit now that I was wrong in thinking you would get nowhere’. But there was little other show of concession in his letter. Giblin judges a recent Jindy collection to contain ‘some very poor stuff … General impression was of a poor ability to write English’. A week later he seems to have felt some regret at sending this cool, hard letter, and wrote again. ‘I think the criticism of my last letter may suggest hostility to you’ (FUL LFG 7 October 1948).
At bottom of his estrangement from the Jindyworobaks is a difference over truth as an artistic value. To Giblin truth was a central artistic value. He wanted ‘a true story’. Art was a form of reporting. And when he read one of the Jindys infelicitously compare the cry of a certain bird with a ‘chortle’, he was ‘roused to a fury of scornful protest’.[26]