Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland
October 5, 2007
The Age Company Limited
 
Courage is a virtue that distinguishes itself with its moral ambivalence, discovers Jeff Sparrow as he reads a remarkable blend of philosophy and autobiography.
 
STRUCTURING A meditation on courage as a memoir, so that your university life, motherhood and marriage nestle alongside stories from the Nazi death camps might seem in and of itself a brave decision, in the Humphrey Appleby sense of the phrase.
 
Maria Tumarkin acknowledges that risk but, in Courage, plunges on regardless. She includes her own story and her own dilemmas, she says, because she wants to focus on everyday virtues, "the ideas and practices of courage stripped of all rhetorical 'bling' ".
 
In any case, there's less to learn, in some respects at least, from extreme narratives of suffering and resilience, precisely because of their extremity. If I jab you with a hot poker, I'm pretty confident about how you will react, whereas your response to a tickle is less predictable and more interesting.
 
So Tumarkin alternates between the feather and the branding iron. She begins with her family's emigration from the Soviet Union, making clear that nothing in particular distinguished their actions from that of thousands of others.
 
"We were tiny squashed particles in what is known as a wave of migration," she writes, "neither the substance of its crests nor its troughs."
 
The old regime did funny things to heroism and cowardice. Many emigrants found it easier - and thus less brave - to explain their departure in the abstract phrases the outside world liked (the need for freedom, the horror of totalitarianism and so on) rather than articulating their actual, more prosaic reasons.
 
Tumarkin quotes a dissident much-lauded in the West who, tiring of regurgitating the requisite narrative, eventually blurted out, "I emigrated because of sausages: in Russia there are no sausages" - and promptly lost his audience.
 
Sometimes ordinary life takes more guts than the grand gesture. Tumarkin's story of struggling with an awkward foreign language ("wanker" was the first Australian word she learned; "bludger" the second) in an awkward foreign country illustrates an excerpt from Rosa Cappiello, an Italian immigrant of the '70s, who noted that by coming to Australia, "we had ordered ourselves a fine funeral for our identities".
 
I haven't read Cappiello's Oh Lucky Country - but will now seek it out. That's part of the pleasure of Tumarkin's text, a plum-pudding book stuffed with unexpected ingredients.
 
In one passage, the French philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch explains how courage cannot be hoarded but must be practised daily; a few pages further on, Little Red Riding Hood faces up to the Wolf in Roald Dahl's version of the fable ("The small girl smiles./ One eyelid flickers./ She whips a pistol from her knickers").
 
Yes, Tumarkin has a sense of humour.
 
"Places with a high concentration of people who take themselves seriously emit a particular kind of toxicity," she explains, before concluding that Melbourne Uni, where she obtained her PhD, resembles "a toxic dump".
 
At the same time, she eschews the boorish anti-intellectualism that comes so naturally to Australian writers, riffing as confidently on the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre as on the Crocodile Hunter.
 
"If," she says, "we are prepared to classify (Steve Irwin's) interaction with animals as heroic, we are, I am convinced, in a great deal of trouble."
 
She dissects the varied and various subjects spread out on her pages with the rigour of a surgeon, while displaying the underlying compassion a decent doctor possesses.
 
In 1996, the South African writer Mark Behr, acclaimed for his exploration of apartheid in his novel The Smell of Apples, delivered the keynote address at a conference on reconciliation. To the astonishment of the audience, he began with a confession: "It is with the profoundest imaginable regret that I acknowledge that as a university student I worked as an agent of the South African security establishment."
 
Was Behr cowardly to pimp for the apartheid state? Perhaps, but then courage distinguishes itself from other virtues by its profound moral ambivalence. Spying on your friends may not be good but necessarily involves a fair degree of guts.
 
Was it brave for Behr to own up? Maybe but, for many, Behr's admissions sounded too mannered to ring true. Tumarkin, though never entirely unsympathetic to Behr's plight, suggests that he confessed with "sentences so polished not a hair was sticking out. Maybe that's what was off, the way in which beautiful words and elaborate sentences were woven together like a fence of barbed wire".
 
Tumarkin writes beautifully, too, but rather than fencing her readers in, she guides us into fields we might not have otherwise found and then encourages us to wander. The hybridity of Courage does, in places, create structural problems, with the autobiography sometimes overpowering the philosophy, and vice versa. Nevertheless, the situations Tumarkin describes, in her life and the lives of others, linger after the book is closed. Courage matters, she says, it matters tremendously. And we believe her.
 
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