Poetry Notebook

by Clive James

  Ascended over the mountains.

  The fields looked like high speed

  So new mown was the hay.

  The men in the creative writing class spot the hay laid out like a comic-book illustrator’s speed lines, but it takes one of the women present to wonder aloud what a stilted word like ‘ascended’ is doing there. My ideal teacher raises the possibility that Murray is thinking of the ascending Christ in some of the last drawings of Michelangelo. She will remember, as we all must remember, that Murray has got a lot of artistic history in his head. He doesn’t have to dial it up. It goes with him. Art, however, or let it be the knowledge of art, never clogs the basic work of perception, as unblunted with him as with an autistic child – burdened with family reasons for treating that subject, he is blessed with the ability to do so – or with a bat. (In one of my dreamings about Murray, a cave full of bats have a book club and study ‘Bats’ Ultrasound’ on a continuous basis. This guy, they squeal, gets it.)

  The bats see with sound. Murray sees so keenly that even his most attentive readers can forget he sometimes works a trick – or, to speak more grandly, points out a connection – with sound alone. In ‘Nursing Home’ the clinching benediction of the last line comes purely through noise,

  As bees summarise the garden.

  You could call such an effect a nucleus in Murray’s total atomic effort. He starts small. But the speed of expansion can spread sonic precision to a whole topic. In ‘Eucalyptus for Exile’, the dangerously combustible propensities of Australia’s most globally popular tree are all there in a single word, ‘craquelure’. You don’t even have to look it up: just savour it, while wondering whether it was ever really a good idea to restore the English garden around your house to its native state.

  Standing around among shed limbs

  And loose craquelure of bark

  Is home-country stuff

  But fire is ingrained.

  They explode the mansions of Malibu

  Because to be eucalypts

  They have to shower sometimes in Hell.

  A lecture about Murray’s politics could start with that stanza. He is too much of a man of the bush ever to favour a Green ideology. In one of the many classic moments of his earlier poetry, the felled tree that dropped along its own shadow was earning a living for the loggers. Like almost all agrarian writers, Murray retains an element of conservatism that no amount of bien pensant gush from his readers can ever wish away. (Too long to quote here, and needing to be quoted in its entirety, ‘The 41st Year of 1968’ is a sharp rebuke to ageing hippies who imagine themselves to be in sympathy with Gaia.) Mainly the steady show of recalcitrant realism – not the purpose of his total effort, but nearly always its undertone – springs from the fact that the poet, like all the people mentioned in his poems, works for a living. Luckily for his box office figures, he doesn’t make the business of observation sound always like hard yakka. Even when close to home in the bush, you can sometimes, as in ‘The Cowladder Stanzas’, just look.

  Not from a weather direction

  Black cockatoos come crying over

  Unflapping as Bleriot monoplanes

  To crash in pine tops for the cones.

  The monoplanes were in at the start of the transportation revolution that would give the Australian poets the world for an oyster. Famous for having never left home, Murray has left home over and over, piling up the languages and the air-miles in a quietly successful quest for world citizenship. He might not have any money in Switzerland, but during the long flight he knows which leg to sleep on when ‘Visiting Geneva’.

  I arrived in spring when

  The Ferraris came out.

  Some day soon perhaps, a jet will take him to Stockholm. Only occasionally changing its personnel and never changing its dark suits, the Nobel Prize committee has seldom been a good judge of poetry, but once in a blue moon they get it right, and Murray’s world currency is hard to miss. The question of why this should be so is always worth asking. There are poets, even Australian poets, as universal in their scope and even more learned: Peter Porter is only one of them. But Murray’s international appeal works on the assumption that he speaks a lingua franca. The assumption is not quite so absurd as it might at first seem. When you get right down to it, he does. The perceptions and connections would show up in any language that could find the verbal equivalents. The trick, from the Stockholm angle, lies in the translation. The translator needs not only to be a master of his own language, he needs to be terrific in English. One can imagine Murray’s Japanese translator consumed for a full year – the time needed to anneal the blade of a good sword – in finding the equivalent for that half line in ‘The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ when the ibises, having arrived at their place of work, get busy.

  Pronging the earth, they make little socket noises.

  But it could be done, because first and foremost so much of Murray’s inventive force is antecedent to language. Seeing the shape or hearing the sound of one thing in another, he finds forms. A world of forms is what Picasso inhabited, and when he started painting the pictures to prove it, he left the world of immediate charm. Murray has never done that, although lately he has shown signs. There are poems in this book that are hard to figure out, which isn’t like him. For all his career, close reading has been rewarded with meaning. The implication that meaning might be beyond reach is rare for him, and really something new. Perhaps he’s getting ready to start again. Perhaps the Versailles-Hermitage was only a shed, and now he wants to build the real palace. There might not appear to be much time, but he wrote Fredy Neptune in no time at all. Nevertheless it’s hard to abandon the idea that one of the great merits of his outstanding body of achievement is its intelligibility. To make its first impact on the new reader, it doesn’t really need a preliminary lecture, or an essay, or even the ideal teacher. It just needs you, the visitor to the ‘Southern Hemisphere Gardens’, ready to wait patiently while the beauty comes welling up.

  The nankeen heron has moved to Japan

  But ink-blue waterhens preen long feet

  Or, flashing undertail

  Like feathers of the queen protea, run

  Each other round the brimming rain dam

  Where inner sky is black below shine

  As if Space were closer, down.

  Even before you look up ‘protea’, you know for sure where this is that he’s taken you. It’s heaven, for which Space is just another name, another word.

  TALKING TO POSTERITY: PETER PORTER 1929–2010

  If the eternal life in which Peter Porter did not believe had granted him permission to look down and check out the action shortly after his demise, he would have been interested in his obituaries. Self-deprecation having been his characteristic mode both in his art and in his life, he was always reluctant to claim a victory even when weighed down by the arrival of yet another van-load of laurels. But he might have been pleased to see how, in both Britain and Australia, those deputed in the media to lament his passing nearly all hailed him not just as an Australian poet, but as a poet of the English language. With his two nationalities blending into a global significance, a matter of contention had finally been settled, simply because he had spent so long being the man and artist that he was. His early poetry was so brilliant that the argument should have been over immediately, but sometimes the obvious answer can take a lifetime to become common wisdom.

  He had spent much of his career caught in a fork, punished in Australia for trying to please the Poms, and punished in the UK for being an Aussie expatriate with a frame of reference above his station. Later on, he won acceptance in both camps, and by the time of his death he was a living example of the old country’s culture reinforcing itself with the energy of the new, and of the new country’s culture gaining scope from an expanded context. From the Australian viewpoint, if Les Murray was still the king of the stay-at-homes, Peter Porter was the king of the stay-aways, the position of expatriate artist having at last come to
be seen as a contribution rather than a betrayal. For the British, his work and stature added up to a powerful reminder that the old Empire lived on as an intellectual event. In both countries, after his death, those who wrote about him awarded him so much admiration that even he would have been obliged to believe it, although undoubtedly he would have described it as part of a scheme to have his estate taxed twice.

  Born in Queensland to a family in reduced circumstances, the young Peter was shunted off to a boot-camp boarding school just to get him out of the way, and was denied any university education because in those days if your father couldn’t pay, you couldn’t go. (A bit later on, the often mocked conservative prime minister R. G. Menzies changed all that with the Commonwealth Scholarship scheme, but too late to save Peter from discovering Brisbane’s shortcomings as a cosmopolitan metropolis.) His upbringing was scarcely the blacking factory, but he couldn’t be blamed for looking back on it as a non-event. To a painful extent, his character was shaped by what didn’t happen: nobody, as he later complained, was ever kissed less often. From that experience, or lack of it, grew his strange conviction that women found him negligible. (He was notorious for saying that there really were two nations, but they were the attractive and the unattractive.) He was too nice to notice that women found him adorable. At several stages in his life, before the advent of his second wife, Christine, removed his credibility as a victim of deprivation, I knew plenty of women who complained that they would have very much liked to kiss him but he wouldn’t stop telling them about Scarlatti.

  Thus habituated from his earliest years to believing that even his good luck must be bad luck in disguise, Peter, established in London, had the grace to turn his own mental disposition into a joke, and many of us who knew him were glad to join in, sometimes making stuff up to boost the legend. He would come back to London from some Australian literary festival and recount how the Australian headliner poet had been given the luxury hotel’s penthouse suite with resident chef and dancing girls, whereas he, Porter, had been allotted a motel room on the fringe of town with one towel and a stale cheese sandwich. Glad to be at the same rocking table, we evoked, with his delighted participation, what would happen when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Instead of receiving it from the hands of King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm, he would be asked to pick it up from Sweden’s assistant cultural attaché in the car park of Stevenage railway station.

  Possibly he took too much pleasure in running himself down. When you are speaking to the media, the trouble with modesty is that the reporters tend to agree with it, just as, when someone has a high opinion of himself, the reporters tend to agree with that. As I tried to tell him by way of a parable, a certain famous writer who wore dark glasses indoors did the right thing when he assured a journalist it was because his nervous system was so sensitive. The famous writer’s putative sensitivity had been the first characteristic discussed in any profile written about him ever since. A lover of literary gossip, Peter revelled in this information, but did not change his ways. Speaking to an interviewer concerned with the eternal non-question of which of his two nations he felt nationalistic about, Peter said ‘patriotism and allegiance are small matters in comparison with my egotism’. He was lucky that ‘Aussie Poet Admits Ego’ was not the headline of the piece.

  In truth, he had very little egotism, and might have been better off if he’d had more. Instead, at the heart of his nature was generosity, to the extent that it sometimes threatened to be his undoing. Though his financial position was always parlous and could scarcely be saved by his industry as a first-string critic for the TLS, the Observer and the BBC – only a culture gets enriched by that kind of effort, not the contributor – he would give time he didn’t have to any demands from the poetic world, immolating his energies in symposia, conferences and doomed readings in the upstairs rooms of penniless literary societies. This particular form of generosity would often extend to inviting Australian poets visiting London to billet themselves in his flat. Apart from judging a poetry competition, I myself couldn’t think of anything more likely to ruin the concentration necessary to write poetry. Peter, however, didn’t think that way. He had no idea of rationing his energies, and anyway, as his prolific output of verse proved, he didn’t believe in the jealous nurturing of a few fine things, Flaubert-style. Indeed his role models weren’t from literature at all: they were from music. He was fond of saying that Bach’s cantatas would have been no more marvellous had there been fewer of them.

  Peter already knew a lot about classical music before he first left home and he wasn’t far into his London residency before he had learned everything. The geology of the flat in Cleveland Square altered in recent years when the ranks and banks of LPs were supplemented by rows of CDs. But though he often told interviewers that he rated music above literature, it is important, once again, for us to watch his words. He loved literature as much as anyone can who takes pains in adding to it. At our last meeting, during that strange period when the sky was silent and we were all ruled by the moods of an Icelandic volcano, he was typically eloquent about the arts, about which he had always had the rare gift of speaking with unapologetic enthusiasm. He was frail, and sometimes his speech came slowly, but we still had our usual fight about the later Wallace Stevens, whom Peter revered and I find suspect, and somewhere in the conversation, casually but strikingly, he let slip the remark that he thought nothing could beat the feeling of writing a poem at that moment when the poem takes over and starts to write itself.

  Even though there would clearly be not much more of it, this was magic talk of the kind that I, like all his friends, had grown so used to over the years that we tended to take it for granted. I often had to remind myself that hardly anyone could speak like this. Alive a long time and active all over the cultural map, Peter joined several literary groups together, but in one of them I was lucky enough to be included, and when the gang now known as the Friday Lunch used to meet each week, often he and I would be the last two left at the end, and the subject of the conversation was almost always the arts. He was a walking university, except that you rarely encounter that kind of range in a university. As time went by I got better at playing feed-man in a routine that I could see was a stage-show in the making. This was proved true one year at the Melbourne Festival, when, at short notice, Peter and I were pushed on stage by the tridents of the organizers, having been told to improvise an hour’s conversation. As usual we both quoted reams of poetry from memory. It caused a sensation among the young people in the audience, not because what we remembered was so unusual, but because for them it was so unusual to find someone remembering anything.

  The ABC arts producer Jill Kitson was in the audience and she suggested that we might, when we got back to London, go into the ABC’s studio in Great Portland Street and record a set of six broadcasts along the same lines. Eventually there were six seasons of them recorded at the rate of one season a year, and in Australia they became a staple of arts broadcasting, with Peter’s knowledge and easy eloquence remarked on by thousands of listeners. Though he never knew, in my opinion, how to read his own poetry aloud, Peter was an ace broadcaster from a script. But he was even better off the cuff, and in those shows he is at his dazzling best, as fluent and entertaining as he was in real life. On behalf of his reputation, if not of mine, I might suggest that it would be good if the BBC could pick them up. They are all on my website (an enterprise he rather approved of, because it took endless labour and made no money, a pattern he recognized) but his contribution deserves a far wider audience that that.

  The forthcoming book of selected poems, The Rest on the Flight, will doubtless provide the core of his heritage. I hope it will sell the way Larkin’s Collected Poems did, like snow-cones in the Sahara. Wedded to tumultuous simultaneity and sometimes, it seemed to me, to outright obscurity, Peter was rarely as approachable as Larkin, but he shared the gift of the phrase that lodged in the reader’s head. At its best, his poetry spoke the way he did. �
��Auden didn’t love God, he just found him attractive.’ I can hear him saying it now. In the broadcasts, he proved that he could say things like that all the time. Dr Johnson might have talked for victory, but Peter seemed to talk for posterity.

  When we last met, it was the only thing I said that was good enough to match him. Complaining away as hilariously as usual about the injustice of the literary world, he said he didn’t care about posterity. ‘You don’t have to,’ I said. ‘For you, it’s already here.’ Surely I was right for once. While he yet lived, so many people thought he was great that not even he could have believed they were in league to do him down. But he could never have played the hero, because for him it was creativity itself that had the heroic status, beyond politics, beyond patriotism, beyond even personal happiness. It’s the reason why his work is like that. His poetry, so wonderful when it is really flying, isn’t trying to tell you how much he knows. It’s giving thanks for how much there is to be known.

  ELEGANCE IN OVERALLS: THE AMERICAN PASTORAL OF CHRISTIAN WIMAN

  Not yet fifty years old, the American poet Christian Wiman has recently been stricken with a serious illness. At the moment his doctors say that he is likely to survive it, but for anyone in doubt about the magnitude of the possible loss, one glance at his latest collection, Every Riven Thing, should serve to state the case. In a poem called ‘Sitting Down to Breakfast Alone’ he remembers the Longhorn Diner:

  steam spiriting out of black coffee,

  the scorched pores of toast, a bowl

  of apple butter like edible soil,

  bald cloth, knifelight, the lip of a glass,

  my plate’s gleaming, teeming emptiness.