The Writing Life

by David Malouf

  hands his wife to one side as gently as crockery.

  He has genuine wit, and what is rarer, genuine humour – some of it passionately black. The poems come in a stunning variety of modes: from the bush anecdote that is never mere anecdote (‘Folklore’, ‘Sergeant Forby Lectures the Cadets’), through the Bly-like lyricism of ‘Cycling in the Lake District’, to big talky poems like ‘The Action’. There is also, in the ‘Broad Bean Sermon’, with its evocation of the richness, the plurality, the oddness of the natural world, a marvellous paean of praise to the fulness of things – one of Murray’s surest expressions of his religious vision – and in ‘The Edge of the Forest’ a return to the world of ‘Evening Alone at Bunyah’ that makes us understand from inside the humanity of a situation that might seem too ordinary for poetry. And the same is true, I think, of the best poem in the book, the policeman’s monologue ‘The Breach’, which not only makes poetry out of the plainest speech but takes us movingly inside one man’s dedication to duty, and opens, with no sense of strain, into a larger subject, the problem of humanising the law. There are, of course, moments of uneasy mannerism – they are the weakness of Murray’s considerable strengths: as when what ordinary Australians call an Esky makes its appearance as ‘a styrofoam box with a handle’ and when the wit takes the form of terrible puns: ‘the shirt of nexus’. But these are small defects and Lunch and Counter Lunch is a big book.

  Les Murray’s general stance, as commentators have already noted, is conservative, and this is challenging enough to need some comment.

  Most of these poems are straightforwardly Christian: ‘Say the law’s a regent till the king comes back / if he does come.’ They are also about such unfashionable subjects as nationhood, the need for law and order, the blood tie with land, and the manly virtues: ‘Defaming the high words – honour, courage / has not stopped us. It has made us mad.’

  The book is meant to make us uncomfortable. It is the work of a highly intelligent man who distrusts our modern intelligence and whose preferred faculties, one guesses, would be intuition, psychic vision, but also the countryman’s plain commonsense and even plainer sense of decency. What I mean is that if what we have here is a conservative mind, it is a very critical and complex and flexible one – and given the current climate, to be a conservative as Murray is might be the most way-out form of radicalism. There is in these poems a feeling of going hard against the tide. It is what gives them their strong sense of energy, but also, I think, their edgy, aggressive/defensive tone.

  So then, what is the trouble?

  Quite early on in Lunch and Counter Lunch there is an important clue to what Murray is doing in this book. The poem is called ‘L’esprit de l’escalier’ and the line I am thinking of is: ‘the perfect reply you only thought of later’. Lunch and Counter Lunch is full of perfect rejoinders, brilliant refutations of fashionable opinion, and one guesses that ‘Argument and Counter Argument’ lies somewhere behind the book’s throwaway title.

  The police poems, for example, in examining the problems of law and order, speak up strongly, in human terms, for its agents (‘I am a policeman / it is easier to make me seem an oaf / than to handle the truth’) and have as well some ironic observations to make about more ‘progressive’ attitudes: ‘Reading modern stuff at times / you’d think all crime was protest, or illusion – / we should charge the victims’. ‘The Action’ seeks to humanise the world of change; it is a poem against historical necessity. ‘Sidere Mens Eadem Mutato’ while beautifully evoking the poet’s student youth in the late fifties, questions the importance now accorded to the university as a seeding-ground for a new class, the intellectual élite, and a new and more brutally conformist culture, where, as Murray has it, ‘Freud and Marx are left and right thongs in a goosestep’. ‘Aqualung Shinto’, on the whole the least attractive poem in the book, opts for the ‘one entirely native/the wisest Japanese faith’ of the poem’s title rather than the more fashionable Zen: ‘We’re all mystic intellectuals now Don nodded. But we were meant for soldiers.’ ‘Portrait of the Autist As a New World Driver’ mounts a moving defence of the automobile at the very moment when it is generally being presented as an ecological and economic monster – though as always the attitude behind the defence is complex: ‘of course we love our shells: they make the ant-heap/bearable of course the price is blood’. Murray’s general lightness of touch, and the subtle sense of paradox, is nowhere better exemplified than in the turn into that last line.

  What I find worrying in all this is not the attitudes – Murray is on the whole more caring, more human, than his antagonists – but the fact that in being replies, however brilliant, they have their source outside the poet: they are points in a public debate, they belong to the world of opinion, assertion, controversy; they spring, one wants to say, from the world of journalism and have the shape, and sometimes even the tone, of a newspaper column by a journalist who always takes an opposing line and largely relies on the exploitation of his own public personality. It is the tone I find most worrying of all. It is too often preachily rhetorical and condescending, too pleased with its own cleverness; and it results too often in a sort of dumpy deadness in the rhythm. But in objecting to what I have called the tone I am really objecting to something further back in the poem’s conception that creates the tone.

  For all its surprising twists and turns, Murray’s creative intelligence doesn’t seem quite free in this book. In making his ‘brilliant replies’ he has, in many ways, accepted limits that are posed for him, by assertions from ‘out there’. Lunch and Counter Lunch strikes me as the work of a poet who is, at the midpoint of his career, very much in search of a subject that will be fully expressive of his gifts.

  In earlier books one had the feeling that Murray’s subjects were found – and so close at hand that he had merely to reach out and give them shape. The subjects in Lunch and Counter Lunch seem taken up, and they are, to this extent, gratuitous, vehicles for the intelligence and verbal flair of a man who can write well on anything. Only very occasionally do they have that ring of the personal that we associate with the best poetry: notably here in ‘The Edge of the Forest’ and more darkly in ‘Rostered Duty’.

  What is also clear is that the earlier material is now exhausted. There is no way back. ‘Their Cities, Their Universities’, despite some striking details, is for me one of Murray’s least convincing performances. What was easy in the earlier poems is mannered, almost baroque here, the energy seems worked up. And this despite a conclusion that is one of the best things in the book: ‘we are going to the cause / not coming from it’.

  There is no doubt about Murray’s stature. He is a powerful poet, with all the gifts, one might want to assert, of a potentially great one. This new book reveals him at a point of crisis. Whichever way he now turns, it will be the key work in his career.

  Poetry Australia, 1974

  THE BOOK OF SAINTS: PATRICK WHITE’S RIDERS IN THE CHARIOT

  IN APRIL 1958, SHORTLY after the appearance of Voss, Patrick White published a non-fiction piece in a new journal, Australian Letters.

  Ten years earlier, after more than two decades away, he had returned with his partner, Manoly Lascaris, to the world of his Australian childhood and ‘the stimulation’ as he hoped ‘of time remembered’. He had been stimulated, wonderfully so, The Tree of Man (1955) and Voss (1957) attest to that, but what ‘The Prodigal Son’ attests to is his bitter disappointment with the country to which, like a latter-day convict, he felt he had been ‘transported’, and ‘for life’.

  In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions, in which the rich man is the important man, in which the schoolmaster and the journalist rule what intellectual roost there is, in which beautiful youths and girls stare at life through blind blue eyes, in which teeth fall like autumn leaves, the buttocks of cars grow hourly glassier, food means steak and cake, muscles prevail, and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver fr
om the average nerves. It was the exaltation of the ‘average’ that made me panic …

  In 1964, James Stern, the most enthusiastic of White’s American reviewers, wrote to him expressing disappointment at what seemed a move away from the larger vision of the earlier books towards something darker and more angrily judgemental. White defended himself:

  Unfortunately we live in black times, with less and less that may be called good. I must reflect on the blackness of those times. I tried to write a book about saints, but saints are few and far between. If I were a saint myself I could project my saintliness, perhaps, endlessly in what I write. But I am a sensual and irritable human being. Certainly the longer I live the less I see I like in human beings of whom I am one.

  The ‘book of saints’ was Riders in the Chariot, the third of the novels of his return and the first to deal with a contemporary Australia of mass migration and post-war boom. The book marks a new form of engagement in his work and much of what he lists in ‘The Prodigal Son’ finds a place there.

  Set at Castle Hill (Sarsaparilla, White calls it) on the outskirts of Sydney, it chronicles the lives of four characters who, like most Australians, find themselves by an accident of fate in unlikely contact with one another: Mordecai Himmelfarb, a scholar of the Jewish mystics and an Auschwitz survivor, ‘the blackfellow, or half-caste’ painter, Alf Dubbo, that ‘angel of solid light’ the English migrant and evangelical washerwoman, Ruth Godbold, and the owner of Xanadu, and last offshoot of a ruined colonial family, mad Miss Hare. What these characters have in common is that they have all known ‘ecstasy’ and are members of the small band of the just who in each generation are the redeemers of the earth.

  Ranged against them in the novel are the upholders of the ‘average’ at Sarsaparilla: Mrs Flack, Mrs Jolley, whose blue eyes ‘see just so far and no farther’, and that beautiful torso and spoiled, toothless head – the ‘Antinoüs of the suburbs’ White calls him – Mrs Flack’s nephew, Blue, who fills the role of Himmelfarb’s young tormentor at Rosetree’s Brighta Bicycle Lamps workshop at Barranugli (White’s way with cod aboriginal place names is typical of his sometimes broad humour), and the instigator, at the climax of the novel, of his ‘crucifixion’.

  White had set out in his two previous novels to uncover ‘the mystery and poetry which alone’, he feels, ‘can make bearable the lives of ordinary men and women’, but also to replace with a rich inwardness the obsession with material possessions – ‘the texture-brick home, the streamlined glass car, the advanced shrubs, the grandfather clock with the Westminster chimes, the walnut-veneer radiogram, the washing-machine, and the Mixmaster’ – with which the Rosetrees and others, out of terminal anxiety at their own emptiness and inauthenticity, fill the void of their days. He had also written in ‘The Prodigal Son’ of his determination to show that the Australian novel ‘is not necessarily the dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism’ – or, he might have added, considering his immediate contemporaries, of rose-coloured Socialist Realism. ‘I would like,’ he writes, ‘to give my book the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint.’

  Of all White’s novels, Riders is the one that most aspires to the condition of music – its interweaving voices barely connect at the level of the actual – but it also aspires to the condition of theatre. In the eighteen months after its completion White produced three plays, two of them set, like the novel, in Sarsaparilla and its surroundings.

  White had always been drawn to the theatre, and especially to the revue, that very British mix of satire, comic turns and sometimes outrageous camp. Riders, in the emblematic names of its characters, in the choric voice of Sarsaparilla – the voice of ‘native cynicism’ and ‘derision’ as it is embodied in Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack – has more than a little of the old morality play, where high spiritual drama is intermingled, as here, with slapstick or burlesque. Even Himmelfarb, under direction of his ‘fate’, sees the Seder table he has prepared for Passover as so much a ‘property table’ that ‘it would not have been illogical if, in the course of the farce he was elaborating, a Hanswurst had risen through the floor’. His Bosch-like crucifixion when it comes is suggested to his tormentors by the passing of a circus parade, in which a clown, a Petrushka in fact, goes through a mock hanging: ‘Those who had longed for a show wondered whether they were appeased, for the clown was surely more or less a puppet, when they had been hoping for a man.’

  The mock crucifixion that follows is passed off by the factory foreman, Ernie Theobalds, as good-humoured horseplay, larrikin high spirits, but Himmelfarb recognises it at once for what it is: the same mob fury and resentment of what is different that is behind every pogrom or massacre or ritual killing. He has rejected the real Promised Land only to find himself in a less promising one where carnivalesque misrule appears as mere loutishness, and ‘history’ is regularly reenacted as farce.

  White, here as elsewhere, is at his most characteristic when the noble and the shameful are in violent but comic collision. In Himmelfarb’s appearance, an unwelcome Elijah, at the Rosetrees’ Seder, or the Dostoevskian scene at Mrs Khalil’s where, while an outraged Mr Hoggett waits for one of the ‘juicy’ Khalil girls to become available, Mrs Godbold ministers to a drunken Alf Dubbo. It is on this occasion that Ruth Godbold’s capacity for forgiveness – White is merciless here – becomes more at last than her husband, Tom, can bear. Most extraordinary of all is the travesty of the four riders that Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack present as they ‘drench the room in the moth-colours of their one mind’, which would have been ‘the perfect communion of souls, if, at the same time, it had not suggested perfect collusion’.

  Mrs Jolley, bearer of ‘the virtues’ to Xanadu, protectress of the home and the Hoover, for whom ‘all was sanctified by cake’, is one of the great comic monsters of modern fiction.

  Introduced ‘feeling the way with her teeth’, and with a voice with ‘the clang’ of a Melbourne tram in it, she shares something – her ferocious propriety but also perhaps her literary past as a Panto Dame – with Barry Humphries’ Edna Everage (Average) when she was still just a Melbourne matron; that is, before she had become, in rivalry with Joan Sutherland (‘La Stupenda’), Dame Edna Superstar. Verbally, Mrs Jolley is created almost exclusively in terms of the material objects she so passionately believes in.

  White’s language world is full of the capacity of objects to transmute and fetishise themselves as aspects of the human. It is what gives such vivid and disturbing life to the writing, and a fantastic and sometimes lurid quality to its most ordinary moments. It is also what creates the poetry of occasions when what might otherwise be inexpressible is made wonderfully substantial to us ‘in all the sensuousness of paint’. When the plum tree, for example, under which Miss Hare goes through her mystic marriage with Himmelfarb, becomes an oriental canopy where shadows lie ‘curled like heavy animals, spotted and striped with tawny light’, or ‘the ‘ball of friendship’ that appears as a ‘golden sphere’ that hangs briefly, ‘lovely and luminous to see’, between Himmelfarb and Mrs Godbold.

  If Himmelfarb’s pre-war life, tour de force though it is, seems a little stiff in the narration, too panoramic in movement, and in detail too phantasmagoric to be more than sketchily there, it is because the rest is so dense with observed detail, so full of what Mrs Godbold sees as ‘the commotion of life’ – though one should add that the train-journey to Auschwitz, and the unforgettable Lady from Czernowitz, are among the finest things White was ever to write. Early in the book Miss Hare worries that ‘so many of the things she told died on coming to the surface, when their life, to say nothing of their after life in her mind, could be such a shining one’.

  How to communicate what they have seen without killing it in the telling is a torment to a good many of White’s characters, even those who see nothing much. It is what drives some of them to violence.

  White too puts more value on what is inexpressible than on what can too easily be expressed, but what he brings to the surface do
es shine. There are whole pages here that, once they have become part of what he has made visible to us, once we have experienced them through the texture of his peculiar music, live on in our mind as if they had been our own shining experience to tell.

  Towards the end of Riders, White delivers one of his most savage sermons on the ugly, characterless fibro homes that have replaced the grand folly of Xanadu. Two pages later, in the beautiful coda to the book, Mrs Godbold looks at these same houses and, with her ‘very centre … touched by the wings of love and charity’, sees something quite different.

  Mrs Godbold could not help admiring the houses for their signs of life: for the children coming home from school, for a row of young cauliflowers, for a convalescent woman, who had stepped outside in her dressing gown to gather a late rose.

  Only the greatest masters can stand aside and allow themselves to be admonished by one of their creations, whose vision, by some miracle of autonomy, is larger than their own.

  Introduction to Riders in the Chariot,

  New York Review Books, 2002

  CHRISTINA STEAD AT EIGHTY

  I FIRST READ For Love Alone, the Stead novel that deals directly with her Australian experience, twelve years ago. Like so many of her books it begins as a fairytale (she is essentially a teller of tales – monstrous ones) but soon becomes the richest picture we have of an Australian family and of the making within it of an individual sensibility – the more striking for its being, in this case, that of a passionate and courageous girl. Teresa Hawkins has a strong sense of personal honour (‘I would kill anyone who offends my honour,’ she says, and means by that just what a man would mean) and is determined, in the face of poverty, provincialism and a charming but selfish father who lives off the attention of females, to find a full life for herself, somewhere and with someone. This being a Stead novel, she does.