My greatest ambition
The story is autobiographical, reflecting Lurie’s early fascination with
comics. As one of his obituaries stated, ‘Lurie was five when his father
arrived home from the factory with a huge pile of coloured American
comics that had been packed in with some machinery. The young boy had
never seen anything like it: ‘They were torn, greasy, crumpled, a mess,
but there they were, and they kept me alive.’’ As he looks back at
childhood dreams, he does so with fond amusement, mocking other
‘Dreamers!’ who have ‘their heads in the clouds’. While the young Lurie
dismisses growing up to become an ‘astronomer’ or a ‘nuclear physicist’
as dreams, his list also includes the more ordinary ‘farmers… chemists’
and ‘doctors’. However, he does not question his own desire ‘to be a
comic-strip artist.’
The significance of the comic to the young narrator is clear in the lengthy
sequence of adjectives Lurie uses – it is a ‘full length, inked-in, original,
six-page comic strip.’ It is also apparent in the list of his responses to it, as
he ‘read it through sixty or seventy times, analysed it, studied it, stared at
it, finally pronounced it ‘Not too bad’, the mixture of hyperbole and bathos
raising a smile. Yet he also emphasises that the idea of publication is
almost an accident. The artwork is stashed away, apparently abandoned
‘where my father kept his hat’ before the chance conversation with a
school friend.
The casualness of that conversation is presented in the repetition of
‘happened to mention’ – just accidental, non-consequential pieces of
conversation. However, the conversation does have consequences, not
only the ‘disciplinary action’ following ‘too much mentioning’ – again the
characteristic humour – but sparking the idea of the ‘magazine in
Melbourne’. The impact on the narrator is emphasised with the abrupt
sentence fragment: ‘Publication.’
The father is introduced as ‘a great scoffer’, so the reader is prepared for
his portrayal as a man who ridicules his son’s achievements and hopes.
Yet there is no cruelty or resentment in this characterisation; it forms
another comic aspect of the narrative. The father’s cheery dismissiveness
is taken to comic levels by the hyperbolic statement that his doubting
questions come ‘Fifty times a night, at least’. Even when the cheque
arrives, his father holds it ‘up to the light’ in order to verify it and has ‘a
field day’ when the second comic strip is returned.
In this pair of archetypal family portraits, the boy’s mother’s approach is
presented entirely differently, her pride in her son’s achievements
breaking his own boundaries. Her garrulous pride is emphasised by the
list; she has told ‘uncles, aunts, sisters, brothers’ about the Boy
Magazine telegram before he has even seen it, and when the strip is
published, is heard ‘on the phone explaining to all her friends what a
clever son she had.’
The narrator’s detachment from these stereotyped parents creates much
of the humour of the story, but the main comedy comes from his portrayal
of himself. Though the tone and language mimics the young boy, the
presentation is clearly informed by the adult retrospective view. The
phone call to the magazine’s offices forms a key part of this self-
deprecating comedy, as the boy is ‘standing on tiptoe’ to talk into the
phone, using an ‘unnecessarily loud’ voice. This idea is continued with the
use of the verbs ‘shouted’ and ‘yelled’ for his part in the conversation. On
the other end of the line, Miss Gordon is unflappable, and the narrator’s
comment that he did not refer to his age in the call confirms the reader’s
suspicion that Miss Gordon had not realised his youth; by this means,
Lurie creates anticipation for the meeting itself.
There is further humour in the choosing of the boy’s ‘Good Suit’ to wear
for the interview, and the scornful rejection of his father’s, which
hyperbolically has ‘enough material in the lapels alone to make three
suits’ and fits a man who is shorter and heavier than the narrator. Lurie
then builds up the suspense for the meeting a little more by delaying it,
necessitating another shouted call.
The image of the narrator who ‘kept jumping up from [his] seat’ on the
train reminds the reader of his youth and the first description of the office
prepares for the deflation of his hopes. Rather than his idealised
expectation of ‘neon’, ‘plate glass’ and exotic plants’, the actual
description uses the word ‘ordinary’ four times. It is also made clear in the
dialogue that the receptionist does not know who he is and is not
expecting him.
The humour of the scene arises from the sense of embarrassment at the
editors’ mistake and the narrator’s failure to grasp it. This starts when the
lady sent to fetch him ‘seemed, for some reason, quite surprised’. He
even commends her for her ‘poise’, not realising that it is his age which
has caught her off-guard. There is similar awkwardness in the meeting
itself, with the narrator’s rapid acceptance of ‘fifteen pounds’ while he
‘leaned back’ expecting to be offered a job, while the men ‘looked down
at the floor’ and ‘coughed’ to hide their amusement. While a first person
narrator often takes the reader into their confidence, often creating an
alignment, here Lurie encourages reader sympathy for the narrator at the
same time as creating a distance between their perceptions of events.
The reader picks up the awkward pauses, the correction of the spelling
and the comedy in the narrator’s face which ‘felt stiff from smiling’. There
is humour too in the narrator’s dismissal of the professional comic strip as
‘just history in pictures’ and his judgement that the ‘inking and lettering…
were just so-so’.
This attitude is similar to Lurie’s earlier joke against himself as a writer,
depicting his younger self as scornful of ‘Stories’, dismissing them as ‘a
bore’ and producing the comic stereotype of bookish readers: ‘always
taking books out of the library and sitting under trees and wearing glasses
and squinting and turning pages with licked fingers’. In the same way, he
is bored by the factory tour and patronised with an ice cream before a
somewhat demoralised journey home, now dismissing his ‘ridiculous Good
Suit.’
The coda to the story dissipates the humour and brings the inevitable let-
down, even though the comic appears in the magazine. The narrator is ‘a
hero for a day at school’ and his mother is proud of the ‘clever son’ she
has. However, the passing of ‘Weeks’ after the submission of his second
strip is an ominous sign and the ‘sickening’ sound of its return through the
letterbox is indicative. His father continues to undermine him, but the
narrator now rejects being a comic strip artist. However, he knows ‘right
from the start’ that his new ambition of being a painter is ‘no good.’ In a
neat circularity of structure, the narrative returns to the ideas of its
opening, though now admitting that the narrator too ‘had become, like
everyone else, a dreamer.’
