Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  I most admired a sequence called ‘Aspects of the Moon’:

  I Selene on Latmos

  Late through the suburbs wandered the blonde moon

  With disenchanted gaze, a little wild,

  And lonely gentlemen most courteously

  Saluted her. She only shook her head.

  ‘Ah, not this evening, my dear’, and smiled.

  But at the silent house she paused and cast

  Her brilliant nubile glance within. In vain.

  The unsleeping figure turned towards the wall

  And did not hear the whisper through its pain.

  II Hecate

  Now from the crossroads of the heart

  Softly the dead arise.

  Who then is she that from above

  Looks down and lifts their eyes?

  Ah, Lady Hecate! Must you steal

  Another’s form for show?

  Those eyes, those lips were never yours:

  I kissed them long ago.

  III Honey Moon

  His Majesty the Golden Moidore

  Conducts his court with cheerful grace

  Nor is his dignity impaired

  By twigs that scratch the royal face.

  His sovereign sway illumines all

  When Mrs with her man conjoins,

  Defies connubial attitudes

  And summons vigour to the loins.

  ‘J. Mc’ were the initials of James McAuley. At the end of first term I squeezed into a spare seat in a small balcony up near the film projector to watch McAuley in his role of pianist in the orchestra at the student revue. The tobacco smoke was as thick as at a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, and beery shouts drowned much of the dialogue (in which the principal laugh lines were to shout ‘bugger’ or ‘bastard’), but I kept him in the corner of my eye for most of the revue. He was placed below the stage, in a dinner jacket, playing the piano, undulating up and down on his seat with the rhythm, his fair hair caught by the stage lighting. I had gone to the revue mainly to see McAuley, and I left with the same urge I had felt towards Anderson: I must know this man.

  McAuley was known to Fraser1 as Jimmy, and he was the central figure in her reconstruction to me of the University’s golden days – one really lived then – gone these two years. Jimmy was now twenty-two and although memories of him were still lustrous enough to light up Fraser’s sadder moods as we spoke softly over the coffee cups, the bright gilt of Jimmy’s youth had now faded. Nevertheless Fraser rebuilt for me the romance of Jimmy the jazz pianist – at bottle parties, playing ‘St James Infirmary’, cigarette in mouth, hair falling over his forehead, glass of neat gin on top of the piano, perhaps playing blues and jazz for hours, but stopping before dawn to sit and smoke beside the grey window and talk softly. After a party he had once gone on to the University and played ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ on the carillon. Jarring bells clashed sardonically while suburban people woke up to eat their breakfast cereals. He was gay, and sad, and sardonic – and also a great charmer, an enlivener. Fraser still talked of his greatest University love, its heyday, its fall, little incidents still remembered, as of the dead. There was Jimmy for whom parties went on too long, and there was ‘J.Mc’, a genius whose brilliance shone for me like the sun.

  Jimmy was now away on a country property, tutor to the son of some landed gentleman, an inadequate ending. Fraser spoke about the lonely rooms he had lived in, how he sometimes spent the hours before dawn at the cafeteria on Central Railway Station, waiting for the first train. He had written a piece of ‘prose’ in Hermes in which the railway cafeteria was the setting for a meaningless re-encounter with a past love, so I stayed up all one night to see what things were like at the railway cafeteria. After going to the pictures I got there at midnight and waited till dawn, filling in the time by drinking sludgy coffee, smoking cigarettes, sometimes walking around the big, cold empty station at which we once used to arrive with great excitement from Muswellbrook eager for good times in Sydney. I imagined that I was Jimmy McAuley, for whom parties went on too long. I took notes – on the prostitutes eating fish and chips, on the sailors who boasted about beating up a homosexual who had accosted them in the lavatory, on the ordinary people who sat in front of their empty cups and saucers, waiting for a train. On the back of my notes I wrote a poem. It began with the lines The suddenness of seeing this before: that melancholy ever walks without its breeches, stark against the dawn, that doubt proceeds from tray to tray and out the door and ended The matchstick down the urinal is tossed, for roses grey from dung, the story said.

  … And then, as if by getting drunk we had performed the ritual that would cause the godhead to manifest itself, Jimmy McAuley, back from the country, came walking down the Quad, walking up to us, joining Fraser, meeting me, and shaking my hand. I was too talkative and my vision was too selective to register much more than a pair of very steady eyes, but when I arrived at the University the next morning Fraser told me that I had made an impression on McAuley and that, if he seemed sad, it was only because my happiness reminded him of his lost youth. I was so pleased with myself that I got a party together and we all went off to the little parlour at Myrtle Street again. Before lunch I was again drunk.

  Walls rushed by and the floor sagged. Talk was just clatter, along with the rumble of blood rushing through my head like an underground train. In the lavatory when I vomited I spattered my clothes. Pretending nothing had happened, I tried to drink again, then again hurried off to the lavatory. Fraser walked me round and round the block to sober me up. As the houses hurried past I made her a speech about how the slums must be ripped down and replaced by ‘decent homes’. When we got back to the parlour she said: ‘Young Donald wants to start a slum clearance programme’. There was a Stalinist there, and he seemed as amused as the others. I was ashamed of my error. I had forgotten that slum clearance was mere social amelioration. I had revealed myself as a Repressed Humanitarian.

  Like someone at a party who without apology leaves the group he has been talking with and hurries across the room to join the more interesting guests who have just arrived, in the next few weeks I spent little time with Pritchett and other old friends in the Quad, delighting instead in being taken up by my new friends – but I was afraid that they might drop me as quickly as they had taken me up. When McAuley or one of the others appeared at the far end of the Quad, walking towards the cloisters, it was as if the lattice gate had clicked at Denbigh after tea on a Sunday night, or there had been a knock on the front door at Muswellbrook; with a visitor everything was about to come to life. My new patrons called me ‘Young Donald’ and I re-enacted young promise surrounded by its elders. I spoke softly, even more out of the side of my mouth, and I tried to confine myself to witticisms. If I amused them they might let me stay.

  Just as once I had developed a simple, caricature sense of the ‘characters’ of my relations, I now developed a simple, caricature sense of the ‘characters’ of the chief of my friends, although I did not waste much time on their hangers-on. McAuley had some of the mannerisms of a hypnotist – a careful but slight gesture, sometimes nothing more than a significant stiffening of his long pianist’s fingers, would emphasise a point, or he would lower his eyelids, then suddenly raise them, confronting me from beneath blond eyelashes with a piercing stare, his face muscles well controlled to register significant emotion. There were times when his whole body would seem to stiffen and expand, erectile, as if to strike. Like Fraser, but even more pointedly, when he spoke the words would bunch up, quick and monotonous, then there would be the briefest of pauses before the key words struck out, slowly stressed. This was ‘J.Mc’, who wrote verse. Jimmy the jazz pianist was golden-haired, laughing, sometimes frenzied, but behind even the frenzy there was a resilient toughness, a kind of rhythmic control. Metre seemed to be built into his body …

  Where in the World was Kenneth Slessor?

  David Malouf

  A personal view of the Tribute to Kenneth Slessor, Sydney poet and journalist (19
01–1971), at the 1974 Adelaide Writers’ Week (from Southerly, 2/1974)

  The difficulty was to get the true measure of the occasion, to discover what it was that was being presented. A Tribute to Kenneth Slessor. Yes, that seems simple enough, and the large stage at the Scott Theatre with its lectern and six empty armchairs might for a moment remain a space that Slessor’s poetry could fill. But when the speakers filed on, and those empty armchairs were occupied by two readers and by Beatrice Davis, Douglas Stewart, Leonie Kramer and Geoffrey Lehmann it seemed to me that we were already being presented with something to which Slessor’s poetry, however strongly evoked, could be little more than an addition. The stage was already too powerfully populated, the signs set up were too strident, to allow poetry a place.

  But what signs?

  Well, the powerful conjunction, first, of Beatrice Davis and Douglas Stewart, two important figures in recent Australian writing; not so long ago, the chief editors of poetry and prose at Angus & Robertson and the makers, between them, of the most impressive body of published work in our literature from, say, the early 1940s to 1973 – and the fact that they have both recently broken with Angus & Robertson made the conjunction on this occasion all the more expressive. Slessor had been their friend, and the brightest luminary in a world they had largely created. ‘Australian Literature’ was, till very recently, virtually synonymous with what they chose to present. Beside them on the platform was the Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney and a younger poet who has developed in the shadow of Slessor and Stewart, sharing with them a passion for Sydney and a debt to Norman Lindsay as the founding father of a great ‘school’. From the ghost of Slessor to the rather awkward and endearing presence of Geoffrey Lehmann we had three generations of the Sydney School. And it was this, rather than Slessor’s poetry, that we had gathered to pay tribute to. Certainly it was the Sydney ‘style’ that determined the afternoon’s proceedings.

  Beatrice Davis was a cool and commanding chairwoman. Tall, elegant, sharp – one caught in her quick intelligence a hint of how she would use the red pencil – but utterly sociable. Like a good hostess she put us at ease, she invited us in, she offered to share with us some of the secrets of that close circle of friends and colleagues who had known Slessor and shared his work. But in doing so she remained, for all her graciousness, just a little proprietorial. One was given the clear sense that however well we might have known Slessor from our reading, we hadn’t known him as the platform did. We were outsiders. If we were to pay homage it wasn’t to be paid, on this occasion, to the poet we knew but to the man they knew. Miss Davis introduced the speakers, explained the format and surrendered the lectern to Professor Kramer.

  I heard Professor Kramer’s address criticised later that day as lightweight, perfunctory. In fact it was perfectly adapted to the occasion, and those who found it lacking in critical acuteness were, it seems to me, less alive to the true nature of the Tribute than Professor Kramer herself. There was no place here for high-powered criticism or scholarly expertise. Instead we were reminded of Slessor’s virtues as a light poet, some of his more striking images were evoked, controversy was mentioned but kept politely at bay, and Professor Kramer made an elegant transition to Douglas Stewart’s following address by quoting the first two stanzas of his memorial poem on Slessor’s death:

  Hang it all, Slessor, as Pound once said to Browning,

  Why have you sailed so untimely out on the water,

  To vanish up in a cloud or down by drowning

  Whichever it was? You should have died hereafter.

  For though you’ve left your verse to make amends

  And so it does, as much as verse can do,

  You were a man who liked to meet his friends

  And here we are but where in the world are you?

  Douglas Stewart’s brief was to introduce us to some of Slessor’s prose, and he did this by recounting, in a relaxed and humorous manner, the method by which he, as an editor with A & R, had jollied Slessor into the making of Bread and Wine.

  A lunch at the Wentworth, with whiskeys, a couple of bottles of red, brandy etc., was followed at regular intervals over the next year or so by many similar occasions – but the book failed to progress. Finally a deadline was resorted to, and Slessor appeared at last with a vast bag of papers, which Stewart (with the sort of dedication that went, one feels, into many similar projects) then sorted and assembled into the present collection.

  One got through all this an endearing picture of the triumph of a carefully preserved amateurism over its own weakness. There was Slessor’s original inability to deliver the goods out of the suitcase of jumbled papers he kept under his bed; the wasted afternoons (wasted for editorial work, that is) at the Wentworth; and George Ferguson’s tentative question, when the book was underway, whether it would actually have readers. What Stewart was evoking for us was less the quality of Slessor’s prose than the world out of which it was born: exuberantly talented but unwilling author, publisher dedicated to the furthering of Australian literature but not too commercially concerned with what happened to the books once they were produced; a general atmosphere of good conversation, good wine, a gentlemanly lack of professionalism and push. It was a picture I found rather moving, especially in Stewart’s affectionate and low-keyed evocation of it, and all the more so because it has so completely disappeared. But it was a picture that left some difficult questions unanswered. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, unasked.

  George Ferguson’s laissez-faire attitude to publishing has its own charm, of course, and the world to which it belongs (and I don’t mean the world of the sixties) was preferable to the hard-hitting commercial world of publishing today. But one wonders how much of the crisis in Australian publishing at this moment is attributable to the sort of amateurism Stewart describes, the urbane inefficiency his story illustrates at both the editorial and the publishing level. And how much of Slessor’s reluctance to produce the book is related to that same failure of interest (is it?) in both himself and in literature that caused him to give up poetry when he was barely forty? Slessor, Stewart reminded us, had spent the greater part of his later career writing leaders for the Telegraph, producing them, we were told, at the very last minute so that they couldn’t be censored by Sir Frank Packer or whoever. One chuckled. But the ugliness of so many of those leaders, their coarseness, their brutality even, is difficult to get past, whether he wrote them as exercises or as genuine expressions of his own beliefs. What was our best poet doing writing leaders for a paper like the Telegraph? And such leaders! If everything a man writes is an expression of him and of his work as a whole, how are we to place the Telegraph leaders beside the poems, what is the connection between them? And if there is no connection, what sort of division in Slessor’s work, in his sensibility, produced the one and the other? These are uncomfortable questions, and it would be charitable, perhaps, not to ask them. But they are not impertinent questions, and one asks them now out of a genuine concern for the nature of our culture and because one believes in the necessity for wholeness. Geoffrey Lehmann was later to praise Slessor’s criticism in the Telegraph for its modesty: Slessor was so keenly aware of his power, Geoffrey Lehmann told us, that he seldom wrote of anyone in terms other than ‘good’, ‘very good’ or ‘brilliant’. But such terms hardly suggest critical responsibility. And Judith Wright, from something like the same position, was not afraid to write splendidly incisive pieces in the Bulletin. My chief memory of Slessor’s newspaper criticism (admittedly in the very last years of his life) was of small-minded petulance and a strong appeal, under the cloak of a plain man’s honesty, to the reader’s plain man’s philistinism. Slessor’s ultimate condition, one feels, was boredom, a failure to believe that things matter, that they are connected, that one is ultimately responsible, that life is somehow whole.

  The relationship (or lack of it) between exuberant young poet in love with language and the senses, bon vivant and leader-writer for the
Telegraph is, one suspects, the real key to the Slessor mystery; but it was no more in question on this occasion than it had been when the poet was alive. Instead we had the brilliant but rather empty description of the harbour. ‘Slessor’s harbour’ as Geoffrey Lehmann has called it – thereby turning that stunning bit of geography into another adjunct of our ‘literary heritage’:

  The water is like silk, like pewter, like blood, like a leopard’s skin, and occasionally merely like water. Its pigments run through themselves, from amber and aquamarine through cobalt to the deep and tranquil molasses of a summer midnight. Sometimes it dances with flakes of fire, sometimes it is blank and anonymous with fog, sometimes it shouts as joyously as a mirror. Flights and volleys of yachts drift over it continuously, scattered like the fragments of a white flower, yet forming in the end into the helter-skelter pattern of a race. (Bread and Wine, click here)

  This is heady stuff, fantastic, full of verve and with a spanking pace, but one wonders finally what it is all for. One smiles, as the author does, a little patronisingly, over that odd admission: ‘and occasionally merely like water’, then rebels. Ultimately such prose is self-admiring. What it invites us to respond to is not the harbour itself but the writer’s skill in turning it into something other than itself; and the style of that, its obsession with local effects of language (‘Molasses!’ we are meant to exclaim, ‘flakes of fire!’), its avoidance of anything complex or difficult, its charm, its self-admiration, was very much the style of the occasion as a whole.