The moment when I stood awestruck in front of Trajan’s Column in the V&A in London remains etched in my memory forever. It wasn’t even the real thing, it was a copy that had been made for students of the arts and the classics – and because of the vast size of the original in Rome, the part that stopped me in my tracks was only one of two halves of it. (See here). But for me, fresh from the Antipodes on my first trip home to my birthplace after decades away, the sight of something I had show more studied in detail at university but only ever seen in books, was stunning. For any Australian who’s interested in art, there is always an unforgettable moment somewhere in Europe where the sight of the artwork known only from books is neatly summed up in the foreword* to Alan McCulloch’s Trial by Tandem:

To him, the impact of the Old World, which he previously only knew vicariously, is terrific: for the first time in his life he becomes aware of a living past; the old masters are to him the new masters, and their values suddenly become eternal and universal instead of merely local.

Alan McLeod McCulloch (1907-1992) went on to become a Very Big Deal in the world of art and wrote the magisterial Encyclopaedia of Australian Art to prove it. But in the days before he became the associate editor for Meanjin (1951-1963) and then the highly influential art critic for the Melbourne Herald (1952-1982), he had found it prudent to decamp to the US. Back in 1946 he had made more enemies than a football umpire at the Argus, because he had championed radical modernist artists like Albert Tucker. His career as an art critic which was to have released him from the drudgery of banking seemed to be over when management discovered that in the person of its art critic it had inadvertently clutched a viper to its bosom.

But fate intervened. He skipped town, found an Australian bride while he was in the US, and then departed for Europe on a tight budget, the result of which is this book. Trial by Tandem is not great literature, it is not in the inimitable style of H.V. Morton, but the book – as Sian Prior told us at a workshop where I spied on the processes of travel writing the other day – has the requisite unique ‘angle’: McCulloch and his bride Ellen traversed post-war France and Italy by tandem, and this gave him the opportunity to write with wit and humour about many things…

Here he is writing about the traffic in Paris:

It is true that the tourist, on first viewing the traffic of Paris, goes up on his toes with a hissing intake of breath. Death, it seems to him, dances impatiently on every crossroads. He sees wax-moustached chaffeurs in their taxicabs, rushing at each other at full speed, autobuses parting the lesser traffic as the prow of a battleship parts the waves, motorcycles crackling nastily to and fro, and a shoal of glittering bicycles darting about like minnows in a turbulent stream. (p.16)

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, n’est-ce pas?

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/10/29/trial-by-tandem-by-alan-mcculloch/

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fbrusca 9 reviews

Highway Forty by Alan McCulloch

Highway Forty is a lightheareted account of an Aunstralian artist hitchhiking across the United Stetes. One is never quite sure if the story is fact or fiction, nonetheless, it does provide for some entertaining reading. The title refers to the highway U.S. Route 40 which the main character follows from San Francisco to Denver.

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ddorwick3602 9 reviews

The new McCulloch's encyclopedia of Australian art by Alan McCulloch