by Clive James
A nurse comes in to give the drip a shot.
He opens the curtains in a moment of revelation.
The sunlight is revitalized into an opportunist
and instantly takes over the room like a brilliant virus,
filling out even the places you had never thought to look.
Your life is changed. The room is shown to you as it is,
not as it dimly appeared to you all that time ago.
You’re moving fast and yet you’re going nowhere.
And that’s the whole poem. Critics shouldn’t quote poems whole, I think. When they do, they turn themselves into anthologists. But we need to see this poem whole because otherwise we might miss the shift from the lifeless light that floods the first stanza to the brilliant, viral light that scorches the second, the light that turns out to be even more lifeless, the death light, like the white light Ivan Ilyich sees in Tolstoy’s valedictory story, the dreadful story that tries to pretend Natasha Rostova never danced and Anna Karenina never loved. Seeing that shift of intensity, we can see the grim relationship between the poem and its title. When Goethe called for ‘More light’, he’d already had his share, and more than his share. He’d had enough of everything to get sick of it, which is not at all the same thing as being sick in advance. He’d had enough of fame and celebrity, for instance; enough to arrive at the accurate judgement that they don’t add up to much. But it’s still a lot more comfortable to arrive voluntarily at that conclusion after you’ve had them than to be forced to it before.
Goethe was dying of old age, which is another way of saying to die of life. What he wanted was more of what he’d spent three quarters of a century enjoying and describing. He just didn’t want to leave. He could scarcely complain of never having arrived. Hodgins could. Hodgins was dying with most of his life unlived. Hodgins was dying of death. As it happened, the prognosis he had received when he was twenty-four, that he would live only three more years, was short by almost a decade. But when the end finally came he had still seen far too little of the light that left Goethe shouting for more after having bathed in it for a long lifetime. So behind the light that Hodgins makes so terrible in its truthful clarity there is the ordinary light of life that he had seen too little of. Most of the poems in the last section of Things Happen – the section is called ‘Urban’, and we can safely take it that every poem in it was written when he already knew he was a goner for sure – are, like ‘More Light, More Light’, terrible with the presence of the hospital’s fluorescent illumination and the hum of the sad machines. I could quote details for an hour. I could quote them until you prayed for release. That was exactly what he was doing, and the words prove it.
I watch the needle hovering over me.
It’s big. It goes in slowly and it hurts.
That’s from ‘Blood Connexions’. Even without reading the whole poem, you can see that the sexual connotations might be fully meant, thus to complete the work of turning the world upside down. Or try this, from ‘Cytotoxic Rigor’.
You vomit through surges of nausea and pain.
And when there’s nothing left to vomit you vomit again.
But here the critic, for once, ought to be an anthologist, because quoting fragments is unfair on both poet and audience. To quote fragments makes for a clumsily edited show-reel of horror, when in fact every poem is a complete film, and even when possessed by death is still full of life. The needle in ‘Blood Connexions’, for example, is wielded by a female nurse, with whom the narrator really does have a kind of blood connection, because both she and he had their origins in the same country, Ireland.
The nurse unpacks a needle and a line.
‘We’re probably related,’ she almost jokes,
but wary of which side I’m on she looks
me in the eye, just momentarily,
a look that asks, ‘Are your folks killing mine?’
One need hardly note that the poem’s conventions of a romantic meeting are gruesomely transformed by the tools of intimacy. That’s where the poem started: the dislocation was the inspiration. The nurse
Undoes my catheter, makes a new connexion
And pushes in the calming drug
But it is still a romance. It is still a determination to see the multiplicity of life, a refusal to withdraw into what would have been a very excusable solipsism, into a world bounded by the walls of a pillow when our head sinks into it. One or two of the poems in the last section don’t mention his situation at all. There are postcard memories of his last trip abroad, to Venice. He is remembering, but if we assume that he is remembering with bitter regret, it can only be an assumption. There is no bitterness on the page. The poems read as if he were remembering his first delighted response. Browning arrived in Florence with no more joy than this.
A vaporetto ducked across in front,
taking the same date and same short route
that Doges took for centuries
on their way to hear the multi-choral choirs,
while a pair of gondolas, as dark as submarines,
headed down the Grand Canal,
their prows curved up like the toes of slippers
in a Hollywood oriental musical.
Eugenio Montale’s gondolas slid in a dazzle of tar and poppies. Hodgins’ gondolas are less carefree, but they still dance. I can tell you want more of those gondolas. You shall have them, because he wanted more of them too. He was sick, he knew he was sick, but he was so hungry to look, and to register what he saw.
Below our window to the left
about a dozen more of them
were swaying in between thin crooked poles,
neatly unattended and exposed,
reminding me how some religions in the east
expect that people entering a shrine
should leave their shoes outside,
as a mark of their respect.
From that, you would think he was going to live forever; or anyway you would think he thought so. And in fact we can stay in the same book, and merely go back a bit beyond the final section, to find magnificent poems that either fail to mention his fatal disease or else, even more remarkably, mention it as if he hadn’t got it. A startling example on this point is ‘A House in the Country’, one of the boldest things he ever did, a poem that puts a house into world literature the way Pushkin did when he described the lights going out in the soul of Lensky. At the risk of rampant intertextuality, I’ll quote the stanza presaging his final use of a further quotation that we now know he would forever make his own. But notice also what the stanza does not presage. Notice the effect that it could have employed but didn’t. When we notice that, it will lead us to the most amazing thing about him. It has already been established, before this stanza unfolds, that the house is riddled by a subversive presence.
I gazed at this miniature apocalypse
of countless termites writhing in exposure,
no doubt programmed to crave the opposite
of Goethe, who had cried ‘More light! More light!’
and as the seconds dropped away as small
and uniform as termites a feeling burrowed
into me as bad as if I had cancer.
One ‘as’ after another, linked like a little chain of worry beads. How can he, of all people, be so definite about being indefinite? As if I had cancer. Well, we can be reasonably sure that the house has it. In the last line of the poem, the narrator is worried that for the house there might be no cure.
I set off at a fast walk, worried about
what was going on underneath my feet.
The house has it, but an intergalactic literary critic who stepped off a spaceship could be excused for deducing that the poet himself does not have it, or he would have written a different way. The intergalactic critic, however, would be deducing the wrong thing. At one stage I was myself the intergalactic critic, and I can remember all too well how, with regard to Hodgins’ career as a poet, I got things exactly backwards.
Stuck in my study in London, a long way from the Australian poetic action, I first noticed him in a little poem about a dam in the country. The poem popped up somewhere in the international poetic world: the New Yorker or some anthology. (If you’re serious about poetry, it’s probably the best way of finding out what’s really going on: when a poem hits you between the eyes even though you don’t know anything about the person who wrote it, the chances are better that the person in question is the genuine article.) The rim of the dam featured a pair of ibises.
Two ibises stand on the rim like taps.
Immediately I reached the correct conclusion that Philip Hodgins had the talent to write anything. It was the only correct conclusion I was to reach for some time. By the time I read about Hodgins at length, in an essay by Les Murray now included in A Working Forest, Hodgins was nearing death. When I started to read Hodgins himself at length, I started in the middle and somehow convinced myself that his illness had snuck up on him, and had become a subject only towards the end, when he became aware of the threat. This was a conclusion easily reached from the seemingly untroubled richness of his central work. But it was the wrong conclusion in the biggest possible way. For a student of literature, the advantage of living abroad is that he is less likely to have his judgment pre-empted by gossip. The disadvantage is that there is always some gossip he ought to hear. Knowing about Hodgins’ possible death sentence earlier wouldn’t have altered my estimation of his qualities, but it would have drastically affected my appreciation of the way he brought them into action. Hodgins had known about his condition right from the beginning of his career as a poet. He had known that some periods of remission were the most he could hope for. That he had not made this his principal subject, or anyway the ostensible centreline of his viewpoint, was an act of choice. This act of choice, I believe, must be called heroic, but before we call it that we should look at some of the results, as they are manifested in what he left behind at the start, and then in what he passed through before he returned to what he left behind, in a curving journey which contains a world.
His first volume, Blood and Bone, came out in 1986 and contained not only ‘The Dam’, which I had seen in isolation, but a cluster of poems less contemplative. In the long run, the dam and its tap-like ibises, with their effect of an Egyptian fresco discovered by flashlight, would set the poised tone for his central pastoralism. But in the first volume they were as uncharacteristic as an embrace in the middle of a battle. Most of the first poems were anguished reactions to the news the doctors had given him; news about his blood; news that gave him a new measure of time. The last three of the five tiny stanzas that make up the poem ‘Room 1 Ward 10 West 23/11/83’ give us a summary.
I am attached
to a dark
bag of blood
leaking near me
I have time
to choose the words
I am
likely to need
At twenty-four
there are many words
and this one
death
Though Hodgins probably did not mean us to, it is impossible for us not to think of the girl who gave her age in disbelief to the German engineer at Babi Yar as she was driven naked towards the pit. What is happening here is a wartime atrocity. Wartime atrocities happen in peacetime. Chance behaves like a homicidal maniac. It is one of Hodgins’ messages, and it could have been his only message for the rest of his short career. He had the power of language to make it stick. His first book is full of moments like that. In ‘Ontology’ – a resonant title for someone whose existence has just been put into question – he collapses, or seems to collapse, into an inconsolable solipsism.
The universe
is going cold, there is no God,
and thoughts of death have taken root
in my intensifying bones.
He knows this is self-pity. He calls it that. He called a poem that, ‘Self-pity’, and put into it the pure expression of a purely personal emotion, thereby letting the rest of us taste its tears, if we dare to.
But happiness has been serendipity. It
happened in the ambulance on the way back
from centrifuge. I sat up like a child
and smiled at dying young, at all
love’s awfulness.
In the first line of ‘The Cause of Death’, a deadly wit got into his range of effects. ‘Suddenly I am waiting for slow death’. Like the sudden sitting up and childish smile, the wit was a hint that he would find a kind of liberation in this prison. (Though Rilke was always pretty careful to keep his living conditions as comfortable as possible, the liberating prison was an idea he was fond of, so it is not strange that Hodgins was fond of Rilke, and cited him often.) But first Hodgins had to conjure the prison’s stone walls and iron bars, and he went on doing it over and over. In ‘Trip Cancelled’ (and between the title and the first stanza we have already guessed why the trip was cancelled) he says:
The words for death are all too clear.
I write the poem dumb with fear.
How could he write the poem at all? And how could the poems be different from each other? In ‘From County Down’ he seemed to wonder that himself.
My bad luck is to write the same poem every time.
A sort of postcard poem
from the rookery. Timor mortis conturbat me.
I never wanted this.
We can be sure of that. But we can equally be sure that he’d seen a possibility. We might not have done, and this time by ‘we’ I mean I. To the extent that I know myself, I’m fairly sure that I would have given up. But Hodgins seems already to have had an inkling that he might have been handed a way back to his deepest memories if only he could keep concentrating. There are hints of this awareness even in ‘Question Time’, a poem that takes it for granted the clock will soon stop.
No-one can say when.
It’s a bit like flying standby.
But there’s the wit already, and at the end of the same poem is the hope that persists on surfacing through despair: the hope that something might be achieved even now.
What you knew began with wonder
on your father’s farm
and though it wouldn’t be that good again
you could have gone on so easily.
He never went on easily, but he did go on, into the great central period of his achievement that we can already see as one of the glories of late-twentieth-century Australian poetry. To a large extent generated by the rise of Australia to the position of an interconnected communications metropolis, a component of the global artistic hypermarket, one of the most remarkable multiple creative outbursts of modern times had the poetry of Philip Hodgins as part of its central cluster of events, and his poetry was much more pastoral than urban: it almost always had something to do with the farm. It was about a vanishing world, and it was written by a vanishing man. But in both cases, he found a way to keep the loss. One of the death poems, ‘Walking Through the Crop’, starts like a renunciation.
It doesn’t matter any more
the way the wheat is shivering
on such a beautiful hot day
late in the afternoon, in Spring.
But it does matter, or he wouldn’t be saying so. It’s the writerly paradox that lies at the base of all poetry about despair, and in that paradox the young Hodgins has just received the most intense possible education. The death poems went on into his second volume, brilliantly called Down The Lake With Half A Chook: I say ‘brilliantly’ because there could have been no more economical commitment to the Vernacular Republic than to give a book of verse a title so echt Australian that it would need to be translated even into English. ‘The Drip’ is the most terrible of all the needle poems. It registers what happens when the needle comes out during the night: damage to the damage.
The tape and gauze
across my inside arm
are lying there
like dirty clouds,
and what
is underneath
is like a gorgeous sunrise.
This is beauty as dearly bought as it can get. It would have been no surprise if Hodgins had stuck to these themes until the end, no matter how long the end might have been postponed by remissions. Most artists don’t know what a winning streak is when they are on it. A few know how to follow where it leads, and only a very few, the great ones, knowing exactly what it is, get out early and look for something else. Somewhere about the time that his projected three years were up and he found himself still alive, Hodgins expanded his range into the unexpected, and began talking as if his memories of his upbringing on the farms were going to accompany him into his old age. He knew they couldn’t, but he talked as if they would. ‘A Farm in the High Country’ is typical of his poems in this manner: typical, that is, in being pretty much a masterpiece.
And it was easy not to notice that black snake
sunning itself on top of some worn-out tyres
