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his delivery as he opened up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for us, still glowing with the shock of the new.
    I was entering not one realm but two. After a chance encounter up at the shops, when I was acknowledged, as a queen might a subject, I forced myself into a public phone booth, inhaled its stuffy metallic smells with some calming deep breathing, and dialled Valerie’s number, praying I wouldn’t get her terrifying Major-General father. Saved: Valerie answered. My suggestion we see Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky at the New Theatre was met with a pause (puzzlement? incredulity?) and then ‘okay’.
    Though it sounded like grudging agreement, I pressed on, and on the Saturday night I penetrated the G— living room in an ill-fitting gabardine overcoat, and faced the parents, who seemed to start back slightly, as if I were from another planet (I was).
    We bussed it into town—my offhandedness a pretence, hers looking like the real thing. Would Eisenstein bond us? I’d seen Alexander Nevsky at the university, and told her it was the greatest film ever made, but when the Teutonic Knights advanced over the ice to Prokofiev’s music, she laughed. I was offended, and she was bored. The evening was a failure. ‘What?’ said Dick Hughes afterwards. ‘You didn’t even get to two?’ I’d escorted Valerie to her front gate, it was a moonlit night, and I hadn’t even got to two.
    Still, there was always the other realm, which gave itself to me at once. Thanks to my university tutors, the doors of the Great Hall of Literature were opened, and after a few preliminary struggles with syntax, I felt completely at home. Yeats was easy, Hopkins and Eliot more difficult. But once their codes were cracked and their meanings broken into, the effort made the pleasure even greater.
    It was wonderful to listen to the poets, but the supreme music came from James Joyce. If the Portrait gleamed with newness, what could Ulysses possibly be like? I hurried into Cheshire’s bookshop one Saturday morning and there it was, not long unbanned, between bare green wartime-economy edition boards. I can still remember taking it home on the red bus. It seemed to give off heat, like new-baked bread.
    Unguided by introduction or commentary, I sailed through it in wonderment, missing much but getting the free-flowing gist. The old language had been turned into a new language, the old style smelted with something strange and the old respectability opened above and below. A skylight had appeared over the house of fiction, and underneath the literary drawing room a trapdoor gave on to a cellar where instinct and ribaldry ruled.
    Ulysses is probably responsible for more bad prose than any other novel, and a modest portion of it was mine. Stream-of-consciousness short stories were speedily sent off to Melbourne University Magazine , and just as speedily sent back. All now lost and forgotten, save for one surviving shard: ‘ He looked past Luna Park with its writhing switchbacks, past the oriental domes of the baths, to the spire-prick and chimney-poke of Melbourne city. ’
    If Joyce was leading a literary revolution, Marxists were attempting the same in university politics. There were rousing lunchtime speeches from Labor Club luminaries like Ian Turner and Ken Gott, warning of the class war to come because of the immiseration of the proletariat—who, in the real world, seemed to be doing quite well.
    The novelist Frank Hardy, notorious for his crudely carpentered Power Without Glory , was once brought in for extra munition. He put on a fiery performance. ‘It’s people like you lot,’ he shouted up at the students ranged around him, ‘who’ll be the first to go.’ That was his thesis and we had the antithesis—a shower of orange peel and paper aeroplanes. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
    The Labor Club’s noise eventually reached the