CHILDE UNBOUND
by Rowan Cahill
What follows is in part a review, but also a commentary, and
it benefits from the perspective of an insider. As Terry Irving notes in his Acknowledgements
to The Fatal Lure of Politics: The Life and Thought of Vere Gordon Childe (2020),
I encouraged his “political intentions for the book” and read every page ”carefully
and sympathetically”. Terry and I have been friends and comrades since when we
were amongst those who founded the radical Free University experiment in Sydney
in 1967. That said, however, I’ll
proceed by referencing him as ‘Irving’. And it helps at the outset if we grasp
the ironic nuance of the book’s title: towards the end of WWI, after a
political career in Australia, Childe privately expressed the desire to remake
himself and quit what he called ‘’the fatal lure of politics’’. As Irving’s
book demonstrates, he never could or did.
It has taken a long time for The Fatal Lure to get out
of Irving’s head and onto the shelves. All up some thirty years of research and
nine years of writing. It is a significant tome – 303 pages of text, 22 pages
of bibliography, 20 illustrations. The footnoting is detailed, properly located
at the foot of each page, and many are of what I like to call the Thompsonian
kind – where multiple sources are
referenced, much of these the fruits of original research.
Why so long in coming? Well, in a nutshell, between Irving’s
1980 classic Class Structure in Australian History (co-authored with
Raewyn Connell) and Fatal Lure there were eight other books, and a
personal life, and a professional life as a teacher and historian. In terms of research,
the book is not grounded in the ‘chained-to-the-desk/dig it up with a data base
search’ kind of research encouraged in the modern academy. As the footnotes and
bibliography make clear, the research involved trawling and deep diving in multiple
archives and holdings in Australia, the USA, the UK, and in Europe. Often these
holdings were not always rigorously catalogued, meaning Irving had to read and dig
in almost an archaeological way, fitting given Childe’s career as an archaeologist.
Moreover, Childe was a voluminous correspondent with many
contacts, and a prolific author in a public intellectual way. His work and its
paper trails are not neatly confined/contained, neither archivally nor in terms
of publications (21 books; 281 articles/chapters, 236 book reviews, in 99
periodicals). Some of Childe’s output was in publications that have been lucky
to survive the ravages of time. So Irving had to seek, search, follow leads
successfully and otherwise, and find, all time consuming processes. What we
have in Fatal Lure is a work that is the product of slow and long
research, a type which sadly the modern academy with its neoliberal bent and
fast productivity demands, neither encourages, nor facilitates.
 |
| Terry Irving |
Writing the book was no pushover, hence the long-time taken
to write it. Irving experimented numerously with form, seeking to blend
biography with intellectual history. There was a point when he was just over
half way through when he scrapped the lot and began again, salvaging some of
what he’d written and junking the rest; simply, the book was not going in the
direction he wanted, because as he wrote he came to new understandings that
demanded a different beginning. Fatal Lure is best seen as a creation,
rather than a formulaic history constructed on a generic template. Further
complicating matters was Irving’s search for his writing ‘voice’. Part of the
creative challenge, one which we aimed for in our collaboration Radical
Sydney (2010), was to write in a way that combined scholarship with
accessibility, avoiding the niche languages, styles, and assumptions of shared understandings.
These are factors that work to limit much academic writing in the humanities to
niche audiences. In Fatal Lure, Irving aimed for a wide readership beyond
scholarly confines, inviting readers, while preserving scholarship and
intellectual integrity. Luckily, In Monash Publishing he found a publisher
willing and able to produce such a book commercially and affordably. The sort
of time it took Irving to produce this book, the creativity involved, the false
starts, the experimentation, the intended audience, are all processes, and
aims, unwelcome and not encouraged in the neoliberal academy, much to its
detriment, and to those of society and culture.
So, why bother about Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957)? Well,
he was born and raised in Australia, and became radically involved in politics
as a young man. His first book, How Labour Governs: A Study of Workers’ Representatives
in Australia (1923), was the world’s first study of parliamentary
socialism. It has attracted significant discussion in Australian labour history
circles, and Irving corrects a lot of misunderstandings. Quitting Australia in
1921 Childe went on to spend most of his working life in the UK as an
archaeologist. During the first half of the twentieth century he became the
most influential prehistorian in the world, and a best-selling author. Because
he was a lefty, a gamut of security organisations and spies in Australia, the
UK, the USA, probably the USSR too as visited there professionally, kept
voluminous tabs on him. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation continued
to file reports on him post-mortem. For sociologist Raewyn Connell, Childe is a
lost leader “of Australian sociology”. For Indiana Jones in the film Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Childe is the archaeological
touchstone, advising students that if they want to understand archaeology then “consult
the works of Gordon Childe”. In modern archaeological circles, there are
scholars upon whom Childe still exercises an influence. All of which is credit
enough for Childe to warrant serious and lengthy biographical interest. In Australia
a galaxy of lesser lights have made the grade.
Biographically it is usual practice to treat Childe as
though he were two people – the Australian socialist radical, and the later
UK-based academic prehistorian/archaeologist. It is as though once he quit
Australia and went to the UK, Childe underwent some sort of complete sea change
and transformation. The beauty of Irving’s study is to convincingly demonstrate
that these two Childes were/are in fact one. He carefully puts the divided-Childe-self
back together, showing the continuities and linking threads in the life and
work of ‘both’. This is achieved by exhaustive biographical research, and by
careful reading of Childe’s private and public writings. The linking key is How
Labour Governs, which Irving places contextually in the cauldron of late 19th
and early 20th century Australian radical democratic politics in
which Childe was a participant observer. The book was written in Australia, about
Australia, but published in the UK in the context of radical socialist debate
there; it was part of that debate, and Childe was again a participant observer.
In Sydney, well before the Bolshevik revolution, Childe became aware of Marx.
In the UK, as Irving shows, Childe became an early participant in the development
of Western Marxism. He forensically demonstrates Childe’s understanding of
materialism and shows how this threads through Childe’s total corpus. Simply, Childe
never escaped the ”fatal lure of politics”. In a sense the ”life and thought” in
Irving’s title is an inversion of what is present in Fatal Lure. Irving
gives primacy to Childe’s thought, grounding it in social, political and
cultural contexts, with Childe’s biographical life the spring and ferment from
which it developed. That said, Irving details more biographical material re
Childe than exists anywhere else to date.
People familiar with Childe’s life knows how it ends – with
his retirement from academia in the UK in 1956, his return to Australia in
1957, and later that year his lonely death in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
The coroner at the time concluded it was
death occasioned by a fall, and there has been much speculation and nonsense
written since about this. Irving documents instead death by a carefully and
rationally planned suicide, presenting a case watertight enough to satisfy any
coroner, drawing on material not available in 1957. It is in this latter part
of Fatal Lure that the voice of the book subtly changes, and Irving creates
its most moving part. In a sense he abandons the careful narrative/historian
distance he has maintained throughout the book, and sort of biographically
enters the book himself, as if Childe and Irving share a common voice.
Fatal Lure now poses big questions: What is the
meaning of life? In particular, what is the meaning, of a
scholarly/intellectual life? What is the role of ideas in human society? And if
one comes to believe that one’s work is done, and that an empty and
dehumanising future awaits, is it rational and right to call it a day and check
out? While the early parts of Fatal Lure could have been written by a
young(er) person, the latter part could only have been written by a person who,
like Irving, is close to his own use-by-date (Irving is in his early 80s) and
has given serious thought to his own mortality and also asked the questions
Childe was asking towards the end of his life. It also helps, as Irving has, to
have led a productive and full life as a scholar/intellectual.
Irving sets the stage for Childe to have the last say. And
what Childe concluded back in those Cold War end-days is a view of scholarly/academic/intellectual life
totally at odds with that currently framed, taught, imposed on modern intellectual/academic
life in the neoliberal academy, with its emphasis on citation measurements, the
zealous ego-career-driven me/mine ownership of ideas, and the religious veneration
of niche academic publishing. But it will be familiar to those who have some understanding
of the democracy of an intellectual commons. As Irving shows, for Childe in his
end days the work of an intellectual/scholar is to create ideas and set them
free in society, independent of ownership and personal ego, where they can
variously make their way, becoming part of an otherness independent of the
materiality of the creator, achieving in the process a sort of immortality that
lives beyond and independent of the creator’s physical being/remains. It helps
immensely, of course, if the ideas-creator works in ways that deliberately seek
to liberate ideas into society, as Childe did, rather than consistently work, as
modern academic/scholars tend to, in niche ways in niche publications, adhering
to the notion of a cultural trickle-down effect into society at large – which
only serves to keep academic knowledge confined to academic ghettoes. If the
trickle-down effect is a nonsense in the world of economics, so too is its
cultural running mate in academia.
Overall, Irving’s study of Childe and his thought is a
mature, moving, and major biographical intervention. In short a finely crafted
tour de force, and in one word, outstanding.
Rowan Cahill
14 April 2020
