Apocalyptic Hedonism and the Origins of Postmodernism*

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chapter 4 On the Beach: Apocalyptic Hedonism and the Origins of Postmodernism*

During 1990 and 1991 Mandarin Paperbacks released a new edition of the nov- els of Nevil Shute. Among the first lot of six titles was On the Beach,1 the front cover of which proudly proclaimed it ‘The Great Australian Novel of Our Time’. This is a judgement which finds very little echo in university English Literature departments, whether in Australia or in England. And yet there is an important sense in which it asserts little more than a commonplace: when judged by the criteria of the marketplace, On the Beach is indeed precisely the great Australian novel of our time. It was first published in 1957, by Heinemann simultaneously in Melbourne, London and Toronto,2 and by Morrow in New York. The novel had two printings in 1957, a third in 1958 and a fourth in 1959. Subsequent reprintings followed regularly, the title remaining more or less con- tinuously in print thereafter. The Mandarin edition was itself reprinted in 1992. In 1984 there had even been a large print edition.3 In 1978, the UNESCO Stat- istical Yearbook would show Shute as the 133rd most translated author in the world: there had been 96 translations of his work during the period 1961–5 and 22 in 1973 alone.4 The vast majority of these must have been of either A Town Like Alice5 or On the Beach. Certainly, the first full-length study of Shute’s work, written with the active cooperation of his family, records that On the Beach ‘quickly became his greatest financial and critical success’.6 The United Artists film version, a ‘solid prestige job’,7 appeared in 1959. Directed by Stan- ley Kramer, it ran for over two hours (134 minutes!) and starred Gregory Peck as Dwight Towers, the commander of the American submarine, the USS Scor- pion, and Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire somewhat improbably as the main

* This chapter has been published previously in Australian Studies, Vol. 7, pp. 190–204, 1993. 1 Shute 1990. 2 Shute 1957. 3 Shute 1984. 4 UNESCO 1978, p. 915. 5 Shute 1950. 6 Smith 1976, p. 133. 7 Walker 1991, p. 815.

Australian characters, Moira Davidson and John Osborne. Filming actually began near Shute’s home at Langwarrin, about thirty miles south of Melbourne, and continued in or near Melbourne during the spring of 1958. At a time when the Australian cinema industry had itself fallen into near-complete decrep- itude, ‘the presence of a major motion picture company spending millions of dollars was a sensation generating … massive public curiosity’.8 The film was widely perceived as the most important thing to happen to Melbourne since the Olympic Games, and some might add that it still appears thus. In short, On the Beach became a major local and international cultural event, what we might today term a ‘blockbuster’. Set largely in and around Melbourne during the second year after a full- scale nuclear war, the novel’s subject matter was nothing less than the slow extinction of the last affluent remains of the human race. When Shute had first broached with Heinemann the matter of a cover design, he had suggested ‘a scene of the main four or five characters standing together quite cheerfully highlighted on a shadowy beach of a shadowy river – the Styx’.9 Sophistic- ated critical theory has long since given up on idle speculation about authorial intentions. But were we so to indulge, we might well find in this juxtaposition between light and shade, cheerfulness and death, a concise and economical representation of what Shute himself had apparently intended as a central organising principle of the novel: On the Beach derives much of its power from what I will term its ‘apocalyptic hedonism’, that is, from the peculiar frisson of a textual erotics deriving from the simultaneous juxtaposition of the ter- rors of imminent extinction and the delights of hedonistic affluence. The novel opens with a young Australian naval officer, Peter Holmes, still sore from a day spent partly on the beach and partly sailing, drowsily recalling the Christ- mas barbecue of two days earlier.10 The ‘short, bewildering war … of which no history … ever would be written’11 is introduced into this almost quintessen- tially Australian idyll at exactly the moment when Holmes and his wife, Mary, are planning to meet at their club and to go on for a swim.12 It closes with Towers and Davidson, he aboard the Scorpion heading south from the Heads, she ashore near Port Lonsdale, and an analogous, though now much darker juxtaposition, that between the bottle of brandy and the Government-issue sui-

8 Smith 1976, p. 138. 9 Smith 1976, p. 129. 10 Shute 1990, p. 7. 11 Shute 1990, pp. 9–10. 12 Shute 1990, p. 9.