Even as We Speak (36 page)

Just why Slessor has to be thought of as dropping the torch, rather than merely setting it into an iron ring against a stone wall to burn by itself once his arm was tired, is a subject Murray is
ideally equipped to treat one day, in an essay that should be a pleasure to read, even if tragic. The foundations have been laid by Geoffrey Dutton’s excellent biography, but we need an
analysis that traces the line of destruction from the personality into the poetry. Alcohol had something to do with it; and alcoholism in turn had something to do with Slessor’s
disappointment in the culture that had grown up, or failed to grow up, around him: a disappointment which had somehow been prepared for, within his estimation of himself, by his comparative failure
as a war correspondent
vis-à-vis
such stars as Alan Moorehead; and so on. But there can be no doubt about the intensity with which the torch burned while he could still run with it.
In his ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’, when he wanted to evoke the confidence that the junior officers of the
Endeavour
had in their captain’s powers of navigation, he
did it like this.

Just try forgetting that. Slessor favoured the extended, multi-part poem, but he was always epigrammatic even at his most thematically expansive. After returning to it many times over thirty or
more years, I can now see his twelve-part poem ‘The Old Play’ as a masterly set of varied tones and dictions, but his sheer power of compressed evocation is still at the heart of
it.

Otherwise an admirer of Sickert, I have always found his theatre paintings disappointingly dark: his muddy palette is meant to call up faded glory, but only the fading shows. In Slessor’s
lines you can see the glory.
Furred with a powder of corroded plush
is something better than an image: it is an attitude, regret distilled into an elixir. In his most famous multi-part
poem, ‘Five Bells’, such stellar moments gravitate together and join up: the whole effort is alive with sayability, assembled from a kit whose parts are quotations.

I have never written or even spoken about Slessor without quoting those last two lines. Precisely registering what the surfer sees on the sand beneath him when he ducks under an incoming dumper,
they were with me when I left Sydney; they were my way back to him when I later sat down to read everything he ever wrote; and perhaps, eventually, they were my way home. But Murray’s
extensive selection proves that such clean, clear, shapely, and striking simplicity – the speakable directness that many of us would like to feel is, or should be, the defining characteristic
of Australian poetry – was hard won from a deep complexity of mind and spirit, and from an inherently tortuous connection with the whole heritage of European culture. Slessor was a learned
man who knew just where and when to place his epigraphs from Heine. Natural utterance did not come naturally: it was a quiet triumph of sustained artifice. Finally our realization of the full
impact of his poetry depends on
his
realization that the search for a personal voice would have to be self-conscious, if only because the demand for a national voice had taken on a
political dimension. In this regard it is a pity that Murray did not have room to include more of Slessor’s light verse (the term was never more of a misnomer: the merest lyric drips with
melancholy) from the two collections
Darlinghurst Nights
and
Backless Betty from Bondi
, because it was those two books that most clearly pointed up the source of the dicipline
that sharpened his sense of form and loaded his line without blurring it – Tin Pan Alley. The impact of the American forces during World War II, both as comrades in arms and as what amounted
to an occupying power, decisively shifted Australia’s position in the old Empire, and Slessor not only presaged the whole event during the Depression years, he set the lingusitic limits for
it, outlining the tonal range in which an Australian poet, as an agent instead of a patient, could write about a wider world.

The other four of the Fivefathers wrote about the world before it widened. As a result they seem further back in time than Slessor does, even when their period of flowering was more recent.
Murray puts a high value on Roland Robinson, who spent a lifetime trying to incorporate the totemic properties of traditional Aboriginal poetry into his own. The same urge, less subtly realized,
inspired the Jindyworobak movement. Robinson had a wider range of tones than the Jindyworobaks, but he was still, and thus still is, limited by the assumption that a proper name from an Aboriginal
language has automatic resonance. Nobody would expect to get away with this when quoting from any other foreign language: it is always a plea by a would-be anthropologist with a political
programme, and it always stops a poem dead in its tracks.

Later on in the same poem, Geek-keek the honeyeater shows up, demanding the same good faith that his name is not a misprint, or a harassed blacktracker’s short way of saying ‘Take a
hike, honky’ to an importunate enquirer. As was bound to happen, the subsequent recovery of actual Aboriginal poetry by specialists in the original languages – a process amply drawn
upon in Murray’s Oxford anthology, and which continues – pointed up the essential wilfulness of this whole premature attempt to lend native art dignity by misappropriating its
detachable tokens. Even at the time, the general impression was of petty larceny masquerading as ethnology, like André Malraux swiping statuettes from pagodas. Later on, in retrospect, the
sad spectacle of wasted time spread like a dry lake through a generation. Robinson was an especially poignant example because he had the talent to compose thoroughly in English without having to
doll up flat language in borrowed trinkets: the Australian love poem has a sumptuous heritage, and Robinson’s ‘The Creek’ is one of the loveliest poems in it.

All of this bush detail is easily recognizable and appreciated by any Australian and none of it would be made more poetic if it were to be substituted for by an aboriginal word: indeed the
opposite effect would be achieved, to the detriment not only of English but of the aboriginal language as well, which would be made to sound as the Jindyworobaks invariably made it sound –
like a formula for boredom. But there was nothing shameful about their doomed fight. It was part of an impulse to make a new nation conscious of the awkward fact that it had existed as a country
long before its colonial history began: a fact which it was in the interests of its bourgeoisie to overlook, and of its powerful squattocracy to deny.

For all practical purposes, ‘squatter’ was the Australian word for the creole or the sabra in his most self-confident form: the squatters inherited the earth and it would have been
no surprise if whole generations of the landed families had grown up thinking of nothing except their own interests. Australia has yet another reason to bless its luck that so many of its landed
gentry cultivated the arts and sciences as well as the soil. However close their connection with ‘home’, meaning England, they did a disproportionate amount to form the character of the
country they were born in – endowing its art galleries, enriching its universities, setting a humane course for its cultural institutions. David Campbell, Murray’s third Fivefather, was
a glistening example of a type that filled the Australian social pages only a generation ago: the MacArthur-Onslows, the Bonythons. They are still there, but nowadays keep a lower profile.
Campbell’s profile filled the sky. While at Cambridge before the war he played rugby for England. In the RAAF he won two DFCs. He would have made such a perfect husband for Princess Margaret
that the joy his poetry takes in his colonial background – seemingly exultant that his background is in the foreground – acquires overtones of heroism.

For daring young men like Campbell, the arts they practised with such confident grace seemed just another part of
noblesse oblige
, and all the more daunting for their seeming ease. Like
the black bullock’s horns mounted on the grille of the returned Mosquito pilot Kym Bonython’s white Bristol sports saloon, Campbell’s poems were the bagatelles of a dandy. But the
successful throwaway gesture is fated to live, and Campbell’s perfect little poem ‘Mothers and Daughters’ is remembered today by men who, when they were young, got no closer to
the incandescent women it describes than the social pages of
Pix
and
Women’s Weekly
, leafed through at the barber’s in sullen envy.

For the sons of the squatters, at home anywhere in the world where there were country houses, turning up breezily at Buckingham Palace to collect their gongs, Australian cultural isolation was a
non-problem. To James McAuley, Fivefather number four, it was a burning issue, and he eventually reached the conclusion that there was no salvation outside the church. For McAuley in the late
– some might say the sclerotic – phase of his conservatism, the Catholic church was not just the symbol but the living presence of the international order he thought his country needed
to be part of, or it would have no standards except its own. There was a paradox in his position, because the church stood behind and above the heritage of Irish immigration that gave the Labor
party its electoral strength and provincialism its abiding force. Luckily he thrived on paradoxes. They appealed to his sense of symmetry. He had a formal gift that comes singing out of this
anthology with the chamfered and inlaid neatness of a Van Eyck angel’s spinet. In stanzas lusciously sonorous he evoked austerity as if thirsting for a vinegar-soaked sponge.

Since free was exactly what the independent men
did
call themselves, McAuley could not expect to be popular for taking this position, but he didn’t care. A local Ortega relishing
his role as a fastidious rebel against the mass-market future, he was fated to embrace austerity all too successfully – the later epic poetry was thought tedious even by lifelong admirers
– but he never lost his unmatched capacity to conduct a prose argument through a poetic form: ‘Because’, a lament for his parents and the love he never got from them or could give
back, is one of the great modern Australian poems and would be worth acquiring this book for just on its own.

The same might be said for several of the poems in the selection from the last of the Fivefathers, Francis Webb, whose fitting task is not to fit into this book or any other except those
entirely his. Even at the time, Webb was a one-off, an El Greco-style stylistic maverick: making an entirely unexpected appearance in a tradition, he could be seen to have emerged from it, but he
distorted the whole thing. Webb was a clinical case, a schizophrenic who spent a lot of time in hospital and eventually disintegrated, but Murray, with typical penetration, has never fallen for the
easy notion that Webb’s poetry is psycho in itself. The answer to the biologist’s trick question of whether there was something wrong with El Greco’s eyes is no, because if there
had been he would have compensated for it. Similarly Webb’s poetry is the way it is because of his inner vision, not because of scrambled perceptions. If his cognitive apparatus had been
muddled he would have attempted simplicities. As things were and are, his synaesthetic effects have to be compared with Baudelaire, Rimbaud and the hallucinatory extravaganzas that the British
Apocalyptic poets of the forties aimed for without achieving. The guarantee of Webb’s urge to transcendental integration was the purity of his fragments. Wherever two or three of his admirers
are gathered together, you will hear these particles flying. (My own favourite hemistitch, from a poem omitted here, is ‘Sunset hails a rising’: one day I’m going to call a book
that and lay the beautiful ghost of an idea that must have come to him in one of his fevers, like a cooling drop of sweat.) In the enforced retreats of his hospitals and the injected lucidities of
his drugs, there might well have been something prophetic about Webb. Certainly he guessed that the Australian poets would become a success story, and feared the consequences.