Alex Miller's memoir pays a debt of gratitude and love

Memoir
Max
Alex Miller
Allen & Unwin, $29.99

Max Blatt was more than a friend to Alex Miller and, by extension, more than a friend to the literature of his adopted homeland, Australia. It was Max Blatt who enabled Miller to find the iron in his soul that has led to a writing career spanning 40 years or more. He was able to reach beyond Miller’s diffidence to inspire him to take his craft as seriously.

The result has been a dozen superb novels each with a distinct voice: ruminative, flinty, wondering, soulful, astute, insightful. You know you are in the grip of a Miller novel when you start to see the world in an astringently compassionate way. His compassion never comes cheap. That is what makes it so real.

Alex Miller has written a memoir that is haunted by devastating insights.Credit:

Max is Miller’s first work of extended non-fiction, a book that has been brewing in Miller, now in his eighties, for a long time. It is such an important story to Miller that he has been prepared to wait, perhaps worried that telling it the wrong way might compound the injustice that forced Blatt out of Europe during World War II. Miller’s relationship with Blatt is the spine that holds together Miller’s exquisite novel The Passage of Love, a fictional autobiography. In that book, the protagonist, called Robert Crofts, is initially encountered as a lost young man in self-exile from England.

Max is called Martin and comes into the life of Crofts through the auspices of Crofts’ first wife. Martin doesn’t say very much. But on their first meeting he gives Crofts a copy of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, an implied invitation for the young man to push out into deeper water. Martin tells Crofts the story that leads, in the mid-’70s, to the publication of his first fiction. He is more than a companion. He is a living question mark, the provocation for the writer’s quest.

The Passage of Love carries a weight of pain with beautiful dignity. It often put a lump in my throat, as when Crofts, now married, encounters his parents on a return to London. Or when his wife suffers mental illness and terminates a pregnancy.

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Max reveals how close The Passage of Love is to the facts. Miller underlines the fact that ‘‘it was Max who encouraged me, he who convinced me that the purpose of a writer could be a noble one’’. But this book is not going to be about Miller who still feels grief for his inability to have attended the funeral of either Max or his wife Ruth.

He now wants to uncover the personal story of which his friend spoke only in snatches, sharing the occasional shard of memory as he sat with Miller by the fire at his property in the Araluen Valley. Martin is a figure of stillness, a figure who understands loss. The central figure of Max is always on the move.

Blatt’s story is not easy to piece together after so long and the epigraph for the book by Joseph Roth, ‘‘The shard outlives the pot’’, provides a hint that we are going to be left with gaps and unanswered questions. Miller is perfectly candid about the elusive nature of his task.

Max Blatt was born in Poland and started life as Moses. In 1933, he was imprisoned and tortured by the forerunner of the Gestapo, for his activities in the resistance. He found his way to China, where he met Ruth, and then to Australia. He embodies the very breadth of culture and strength of mind that Nazism tried to destroy. At one stage, Miller wonders if The Passage of Love ought not to have been called The Passage of Love and Death.

Through persistence, and a little good fortune, Miller, helped by his wife Stephanie, is able to trace records of Max and eventually connect with relatives surviving in Israel, including Max’s niece, Liat. Max highlights the fine web of connections that make healing and memory possible. It discovers some wonderful fellow celebrants in Europe and Israel and relishes the experience of a community of memory in Australia. Fellow writers Carmel Bird, Arnold Zable and Jacob Rosenberg all play significant roles. Zable asks Miller to visit the grave in Poland of Marek Edelman, the last leader of the Warsaw Ghetto to pass away.

Max is haunted by devastating insights. Blatt told Miller that the hardest part of torture was the realisation that the torturer was also your brother. It is the same generosity that makes Max such a compelling argument against narrowness and division. Blatt’s life has deep and wide ramifications. Miller’s intelligent love has created a tale for the ages.

Michael McGirr is the author of Books that saved My Life (Text).

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