Even as We Speak (37 page)

Webb was Murray’s predecessor in guessing that an efflorescent culture would set the challenge of studying it without ceasing to love it. With music and painting, both of which flourish in
Australia as if the molecules of the air had been redesigned specifically to nourish them, it is easy to keep passion pure: when the orchestra strikes up, the commentary must cease, and in the art
gallery you can always neglect to hire the earphones. But when the academic age dawned it became chasteningly clear that poetry would be hard to separate from its parasitic buzz. One of the
penalties for success was a proliferation of middle-men, and eventually, as feminism institutionalized itself, middle-women. The new
Oxford Book of Australian Women’s Verse
, however,
is a welcome sign that the essentials are being remembered. Unlike the notorious
Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets
of 1987, Susan Lever’s anthology is unburdened by didactic
jargon and makes commendably little fuss about the necessarily agonizing problem of getting everybody in without leaving too many good poems out. Fledgling feminists will receive an encouraging
message about self-realization growing with time. Those of us who have always taken the importance of women poets in Australia for granted (in the fifties we were male chauvinist pigs almost to a
man, but none of us was going to argue with Gwen Harwood or Judith Wright) will be left free to detect a more edifying progression. Presumably it must apply to the men as well, although perhaps the
women – careful now – were always more likely to register its effects: anyway, in this verse chronicle, as the century wears on, the poets become more, instead of less, precise about
domestic detail, until nowadays, against all expectation, the housewife tradition looks unbreakably strong.

One of the great strengths of the generation that included Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood lay in the harsh fact that they had no time to be careerists: they wrote from necessity, in the exiguous
spare time left over from looking after their men. You would think that the new freedoms would have led to a plunge back into time, a local re-run of the
rentier
aesthetic leisure once
enjoyed by the bluestockings of Britain and America, an inexorable push towards the free bohemian status of Edna St Vincent Millay: that the ethereal would beckon. But not on this showing. It was
once uniquely Gwen Harwood’s way to write about music and philosophy as if they were the bread of life she had brought home from the shops. But here is the proof that it has since become
standard practice, thus helping to create, for the Australian reader, perhaps the least alienated and divisive literary culture on earth. Try this, from Susan Hampton’s ‘Ode to a Car
Radio’.

Ms Hampton was one of the hectoring editors of the aforementioned Penguin anthology but I forgive her, as long as she goes on writing like that. Prokofiev gets into the poem unquestioned, which
is exactly the way things ought to be, because Australia is a place where classical music is in the air. It didn’t happen by accident. Australia became a clever country because clever people,
many of them refugees from harsh political experience in Europe, were wise enough not to accept unquestioned the prevalent intellectual assumptions about the necessary divorce between democracy and
art. For the poets of the pre-academic generation, art was in their lives as sustenance and salvation. Their successors have caught the habit, in the only tradition worth taking the trouble to
define, the handing on of a copious view. One of my favourite poems in this book is by Vicki Raymond, whose work I will seek out from now on. Talking about static electricity in the office, she
brings off a quietly tremendous coup worthy of the poet whose name she invokes.

According to the notes, Vicki Raymond is an an expatriate who has lived in Lodon since 1981. Well, it’s an Australian poem wherever it was written. The expatriates are part of all this
too, but if put to the question they would have to admit that the vitality grown at home in their absence has come to form the core of the total astonishment, generating the power behind what makes
a small country recognizable to the world in the only way that matters – its voice, the sound of freedom.

TLS
, 5 July, 1996

George Russell is a great teacher and I was the worst student he ever had. It could be argued that the opinion of a bad student ought not to be allowed to count for much in the
assessment of a teacher’s quality. But George Russell’s eminence as a teacher is not in doubt. Too many star students would willingly give testimony about his influence on their lives.
What might perhaps add an extra, unexpected dimension to the eulogistic chorus is the testimony of a student whose biological resistance to being taught was a phenomenon of immunology. If George
Russell could influence even me, there must have been something uncanny about him.

Having, to nobody’s surprise greater than my own, conned my way into the English Honours school after two undistinguished years of the ordinary pass course, I joined George’s
high-powered class in Anglo-Saxon, opened my newly purchased textbook for the first time, and sat there as if staring at a cobra. Until that moment I had had no idea that Anglo-Saxon was a foreign
language. My petrified gaze must somehow have aroused George’s sympathy, not normally a commodity that he made freely available to dolts. George could be pretty cutting with anybody whose
unpreparedness or plaintive outcry disturbed the rhythm of the class. ‘Thank you very much,’ he once publicly told a girl who had nowhere near finished protesting about the difficulty
of a term exam, ‘I think we’ve heard enough of your piping treble.’

But at least she, like all her classmates except one, had attempted to decode the set text. George knew exactly which one of the students sitting at the desks in front of him was trying to bluff
his way through the whole course by memorizing the translations. That he took me under his wing instead of booting me back to the pass class can possibly be explained with reference to his
religion. No doubt it imposed on him some form of spiritual mortification. I was his hair shirt.

The woman to whom I am now married was at that time a fellow student – the sort of student that every teacher dreams of teaching. Her presence by my side must have made up for the fact
that I was the sort of student every teacher dreams of getting rid of, because together we were invited by George and his wife Isabel to dinner at their house in Pennant Hills. George picked us up
in his car at Pennant Hills station. The visit became a regular thing; which says a lot for Isabel’s tolerance, because for someone who drank George’s wine as if it was water I got a
great deal of talking done. My companion, needless to say, was the soul of moderation, possessing the judicious self-assessment appropriate to an academic record unblemished by any grade lower than
A or honour other than first. She delighted the Russells.

But I think it fair to say that it was I who fascinated them. Wide-eyed behind his glasses, George watched enthralled while the contents of his cellar vanished inside me. I think he took a
scientific interest in seeing if one of the finer things of life could work its civilizing influence even on someone who was throwing it in a high curve over the taste buds so that it didn’t
touch flesh until it hit the back of the throat. When my powers of monologue flagged, he would put one of the pearls of his impressive collection of classical records on the radiogram. Here again I
proved a hard nut to crack, and here again he proved strangely forbearing. I can remember his laughing appreciatively, instead of in derision, when I compared Brahms to oxtail soup. When it became
clear that a classical recital was to be a regular after-dinner feature, I started to retaliate by bringing along some Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker LPs. George generously tapped his feet to
‘’Round Midnight’ and ‘Salt Peanuts’ while I made faces at Monteverdi. If he construed my grimaces as a sign that the great music was striking deep into my unwilling
soul, he was prescient, because there was to be little manifest evidence until many years later. Without giving too much of the game away, however, I might confide at this point that I am today no
longer disposed to compare Brahms with oxtail soup, and that I could bore you pretty thoroughly with my opinions about what Emil Gilels gets out of the two piano concertos that Rubinstein
doesn’t, and about how Karajan drags the tempo in the Fourth symphony. Then, though, I was apparently impermeable, partly because paralytic. At the end of the evening, George drove us all the
way back to town, to obviate the possibility of my boarding the electric train and falling out of the opposite door on to the track. Though I am assured that he invariably drove us all the way to
Town Hall, today I can’t remember us having even once crossed the Harbour Bridge. It must mean that I was unconscious every time.

In class I stayed awake but it didn’t make much difference. For the Union Revue I adapted an Anglo-Saxon text about the Battle of Maldon into a sketch in which two warriors from each team
faced off across a very small river and pronounced incomprehensible war-cries. The sketch was a big hit with those members of the audience who were familiar with Old English texts. This was as
close as I came to any kind of rapport with our ancestral tongue. Less forgivable was how I remained impervious even to George’s special seminars in which he touched upon a wider field, the
Middle Ages in Europe. Unfortunately I had no Latin and it didn’t occur to me at that time to acquire any, busy as I was with such important matters as editing the literary page of the
student newspaper
Honi Soit
. But I can remember now being impressed even at the time by George’s grave humility as he introduced a discussion of
European Literature and the Latin
Middle Ages
, by Ernst Robert Curtius. ‘This,’ said George, his hands poised above the volume as if he were about to break bread, ‘is a great book.’ Then he opened it.
It hardly needs saying that I had neither the preparation nor the spare time to corroborate his opinion, but the moment stayed with me.

Only the rare teacher is as fond of his promising young writers as he is of his promising young scholars. Christian Gauss of Princeton knew that Edmund Wilson was an outstanding student, but he
was equally proud of his class dunce, Scott Fitzgerald. Gauss realized that Fitzgerald’s divine gift for the rhythmic sentence was the cause of his immaturity: facility outran understanding,
and would do so until experience provided a measure of resistance, something solid to be carved. In a teacher it takes more than brains, it takes clairvoyance, to realize that a callow chump might
be carrying the seeds of literary life. I don’t suggest that I had it in me to write
This Side of Paradise
, but I certainly had a startling capacity to talk fluent tosh. George
listened tolerantly as I informed him of my plans to spend five years in Europe doing odd jobs while looting the area for its cultural wealth and composing poetic masterpieces by night, before
returning to take my rightful place as an Australian man of letters, position and political influence. He heard me out with a patience aided by cold beer. Somewhere between the University and
Redfern station there was a pub where we sometimes met at the end of the working day when George was on his way home by train and I, after two hours in Fisher Library sleeping off the effects of a
long lunchtime in the Forest Lodge, was preparing for a hard evening’s dissipation in the Royal George, the headquarters of the Downtown Push. Sipping reflectively, George ventured the
suggestion that in the unlikely event of my scheme’s failing to reach immediate fruition I might drop him a line, because if the necessity ever arose for me to take refuge once again in a
university, he had a certain amount of pull at his old Cambridge college. Grandly I let him know that the possibility would never arise: the place of the artist was not in the cloisters, but in the
world.

The place of this artist turned out to be in the soup. As I write this note, the second volume of my unreliable memoirs is about to be published, whereupon the full story of how I failed to
ignite the Thames will be edifyingly available for any reader still harbouring the delusion that all the Australians who sailed for England in the early Sixties achieved instant success. I, for
one, achieved a depth of oblivion from which I could see to climb out only by the light of my lucky stars. George, as ever conscientious beyond the call of duty, or perhaps once again impelled by
the self-mortifying requirements of his lay religious order, wrote me fulsome references by air-letter so that I might apply for jobs which a glance must have told him had a dead end. Finally, when
I had at last concurred with the otherwise universal opinion that I was unemployable, he wrote the letter which secured me a place at Cambridge.

Safe inside the oak doors of his old college, Pembroke, I immediately set about betraying his trust by giving my principal attention to Footlights. What reading I found time for was off the
course. On one of George’s visits to London I met him for a drink and gave him an account of my progress that was probably the real reason for the sour look which at the time I put down to
the unspeakable English beer. My degree was obtained more by turn of phrase that by proof of diligence and I must have been the only graduate in memory who got himself registered as a Ph.D.
candidate merely so that he might become president of a dramatic society. Mine was scarcely an academic record. It was almost a police record. Always I read any book except the one specified. But I
never stopped reading. Nor did I ever stop listening to music or looking at paintings. In George’s house I had somehow got the idea, more by osmosis than observation, that an education was
something you went on acquiring all your life. Perhaps I got the idea too well, and too often postponed what I should have tackled early. But I got the idea.