Clark - Making Priscilla

by Bob Ellis

In the ten years I have known him Al Clark has never failed, at any hour, to speak with wit and searching eloquence of what has happened to him lately or to me, or to others present in sentences not precrafted but sifted out of many other alternative sentences available to him, editing as he speaks. A consummate conversationalist yet never, like Samuel Johnson or E.G. Whitlam, an ego-swollen soliloquist he does not impose on the table what is to be the topic but responds to what is offered with humour and warmth and civility, and shapes and ices and (as it were) blow-dries it as it passes through his mind and the refining mill of his language. He is one of my favourite people and I see too little of him, perhaps because I am horrible company. But enough of me.

Al is a Scot raised in provincial Spain (he speaks a disarming rough-peasant version of that dramatic language to startled Iberian throngs at festivals) and in a Scottish boarding school of which he does not like to speak, and an English university, Birmingham, where he graduated, with an appealing dogged circularity, in Spanish. His Englishness, Scottishness and Spanishness form a continuing tension in him I think, each one held in check with difficulty by the others, each one secretly planning to take over his inner world and being nightly beaten back in battle by wave after wave of blood-stained mental infantry, back into proportion, told to heel, sit, calm down, good dog, stay, good dog.

The English part of him is a supreme observer, one of those desert-loving English that Prince Feisal with justice moaned about in LawrenceofArabia. Such Englishmen, handy at a dance, and invaluable in a shipwreck, manage crisis with a coolness born of the knowledge that nothing that might happen could be worse than boarding school, which makes them ideal film producers and production managers and stunt men in the filthy outposts of empire in time of monsoon, sandstorm, earthquake and the arrival of the completion guarantor. The Scottish part of him is an intrepid jigsaw constructor able, as was the nation that gave us the Tay Bridge and television and the Titanic, to put together money and music and rights and legals and lenses and cameras and wigs and false bosoms and star names from across the known world, yet keep the movie exactly what it should be, nationally and culturally and musically. The Spanish part of him hungers (of course) for the dramatic, for foreign adventure and flamboyant complication, to be rowing up the Amazon at night unsure of the size of bird, or the lethalness of serpent, that will drop down upon him next in a squawk or a hissing or a slimy tangling later to be recalled in calm over caffe latte in a restaurant on Bondi Beach, if he survives the encounter, as of course he might not. To live in the present tense, yet always taking notes for the future, with a stifled wild rumour of glad carnage and romance in his heart, is Als preferred way I think, but he would of course deny this for fear of alarming his investors.

In Priscilla he found the project that suited all his ethnic tendencies and, in the sweet and sumptuous bawdy chronicle of its making, fit canvas for his talent, both as adjutant general and cool reviewing Suetonius. This elegant commemorative tapestry of hectic adventure in three continents and rather more genders is a certain small classic (along with Picture and FinalCut and the journals of Simon Gray and Richard E. Grant, and Mrs Coppolas crisp annulment valentine NotesOntheMakingofApocalypseNow) in the literature of heady and hellish times remembered when the world was young, laddie, comrade, kid, about six months ago.

Al, of course, would deny this ability to maintain a decorous distance during his ever-more-gothic adventures, an ability akin to imagining a python roasted and under glass while the snake is alive and coming at you with fangs and forking tongue. Experience and observation, he says mildly, its all the same thing, isnt it? The unfazed prim clarity with which he recalls, like the dimmer heroes of Evelyn Waugh, a malignant universe out to get him and most other things with a pulse, is therefore pretty beguiling I think; or disquieting, or alarming, as you choose.

For here in one short book are gothic horrors enough to glut any soused and chundering Petronius time-travelling on the Santa Monica freeway in a toga stained with Australian red and Californian sperm and wind-blown desert sand. Uluru and the Big Apple. The worst Los Angeles earthquake. Hollywood moguls and Hollywood rough cuts and Hollywood previews and coarse American crowds in the cinema darkness howling Fast forward! Fast forward! French film festival multitudes and noisome critics and red carpets and searchlights and the yachts of the rich and ego trips with hard landings of the mentally bruised and the stark mad. Macho British film stars in high heels and stockings. A tidal wave of San Francisco drag queens uprearing in rouged and pouting and somehow murderous approval. Tony Curtis and Michael Hutchence and Liberace. Vaginal ping-pong balls and inflated condoms that serve as breasts. The preserved turds of Abba. And the mateship, and friendship, and comradeship, that makes all even.

And, oh yes, the desert, and the desert sunset, and panoramas gorgeously twilit enough to please even David Lean, and Aboriginal quarrels over secret ritual and sacred site, and the unmixed mysteries of the night, deep night among sandhills, with good companions, beneath a gibbous moon. To read it is to experience it, as in all good travel and novel writing, and this is prose that would not disgrace Bruce Chatwin or Robert Byron or Mark Twain, or those different British public-school men Lytton Strachey and Raymond Chandler, or those vivider Americans Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. ORourke, or that master-monster of memorious travelling venom, Evelyn Waugh, who once said memorably that a book may be many things but in the final reckoning is one thing only, an adventure in language. Al makes this our adventure too, and I would kill a few of my relatives, particularly those of Murwillumbah, to be able to write like this, with such charged and virgin plainness on the page to bestride in one paragraph the enormities of human existence while picking out with golden eagle eyes the tiny particularities down there miles beneath: the bits of glitter and human struggle that escape less caring eyes. I would kill a few of my editors too, and most of my producers but Al, who understands what it is in the end a writer goes through. For he has been there, and is there, always deftly, searchingly, limpidly, finding the right word.