Poetry Notebook (20 page)

Donaghy was not immediately famous as a critic in Britain, whose citadels fall slowly. But he was immediately understood: the broad sympathy of his view travelled well. Especially he was
understood by his young admirers, to whom he gave, by his guidance of their reading, the modern American poetry that matters. Indeed he gave them America, with the result that some of the best
poems about America in recent years were composed in Britain by young writers who had got their standards for highly charged and musically cadenced language from him. We all enjoy such a coup as
Frank O’Hara’s poem about Lana Turner, and even those of us who think that John Ashbery has turned into a factory get a kick out of his classic poem about Daffy Duck. But not even
O’Hara or Ashbery ever wrote anything quite as good about American popular culture as John Stammers’s poem ‘The Other Dozier’. Once it would have been a sign of cultural
subjection for Britain to claim that some of the best American poetry is written here. Now it sounds more like a simple claim to truth: the Atlantic has become an exchange of energy, and Donaghy is
partly responsible.

He was also responsible, and more than partly, for ensuring that some of the best American criticism would be written here. He might have found it harder to write it at home, where any critic
who publishes a limiting judgement is thought to be an assassin. In a previous generation, the same had been thought of Randall Jarrell, but in fact Jarrell could be adventurous and generous in his
praise: nobody, not even Galway Kinnell when introducing his indispensable selection from Whitman, could do a better job than Jarrell of showing why the best lines and phrases from
Leaves of
Grass
defied belittlement even at their most naive. Jarrell’s strength as an appreciator, however, depended on his powers of discrimination, and that dependency will always be regarded
with suspicion in America, where a critic sins against democracy if he finds some poets more valuable than others. Donaghy, who had already committed the same offence, probably did well to head for
less tolerant climes. And after all, he brought the best American criticism with him, just as he brought the best American poetry. Donaghy the great quoter always paid his fellow American critics
the tribute, with due acknowledgement, of reproducing their best lines. Thus we came to hear Dana Gioia’s opinion that ideas in the poetry of Ashbery are ‘like the melodies in some jazz
improvisation where the musicians have left out the original tune to avoid paying royalties’. Donaghy knew he couldn’t beat that, so he quoted it. But there were many occasions on which
he matched it. He could deliver judgements in a way that people remembered, and for anyone who is capable of doing that, it really matters if he is right or wrong.

In his theoretical work it mattered less. Quite a lot of Donaghy’s writing on psychology is included here. The incidental remarks are frequently valuable, but in the end there is no
settling some of the conundrums about the functioning of the brain: or anyway, if they ever are settled, it probably won’t be by a poet. Perhaps partly because of the traditional nostalgia of
the lapsed PhD, science always fascinated him. He not only admired Coleridge, he emulated him, producing pages of text in which various parts of the argument go on in various frames, rather as
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
grew annotations in the margin. But such pretensions to complex simultaneity weren’t what made Coleridge a genius, they were what ensured his genius
would never be coherent. Donaghy was in no such danger, because he knew what came first: the sayable, memorable, living poem, and his living response to it. Science didn’t even come second.
His repudiated but never forgotten Catholicism would have a better claim to the silver medal. When he talks about poetic truth, he just can’t help mentioning the Elevation of the Host. Ritual
was deeply embedded in him, like music. They were formal resources. But every resource of his mind and memory was in service to language, of which, both creatively and critically, he was a master.
Had he lived, he would surely have done such great things that he would have been universally recognized as one the voices of his time, not only in poetry but in the understanding of it. Some of
the reasons we can be so sure are in this book.

Like his predecessor T. S. Eliot, Michael Donaghy was an American literary figure in London, but unlike Eliot he felt no compulsion to blend in. For the Americans who changed
countries, it was always a big decision whether or not to go native. For the Australians, the decision was less momentous, perhaps because the locals cared less; the British don’t feel
usurped when an Australian takes over the store. In the years between the wars, the Australian man of letters W. J. Turner established himself in London with such thoroughness that, by the time I
came to hear of him, I didn’t realize that he had ever been Australian at all. My friend Peter Porter never tried to disguise his origins, and often used them in his poetry; but he made it
clear that his mental map was European. Treating even Britain as a mere province of Christendom, he was as much at home in a Florentine church as he had ever been in a Brisbane pub. In the earlier
part of his London career, Australian critics tended to regard him a traitor because he went, and British critics as a carpetbagger because he stayed. Porter’s way of being uncaring was to be
equally impatient about nationalist pressure from either side, but it added up to what looked like nonchalance, and I was pleased to emulate it when I could. I was careful, though, to remember my
poetic origins. A. D. Hope’s commanding use of the argued formal stanza remained a model, and even in Cambridge I went on collecting his books, although in his later work he was seldom at his
best. Having lost control of his line, he debarred himself from writing anything like Auden’s poem ‘The Shield of Achilles’, which sums up a technical mastery developed through
decades. Having ruled out his own life as a subject, Hope would have been unable to contemplate a truly mature work such as Thom Gunn’s ‘The Man with Night Sweats’, even had his
sexuality permitted the topic. When he was young, he attracted press attention by writing poems in which he featured as quite the stud, but afterwards he went respectable. The typical late poem by
Hope features minor characters from the classical catalogue acting out scenarios hard to identify even from Bulfinch or Lemprière.

James McAuley, another Australian poet whose example loomed over my desk from the beginning, was just as eager as Hope to devote his later career to pious generalities. Where Hope’s were
about mythology, McAuley’s were about Catholicism; but they were equally bloodless. McAuley, however, never let go of his technical skill, and on at least one occasion, making a rare
reference to his personal history, he created a poem in which true candour and delicious music blended impeccably. His work wasn’t always that attractive, but with poetry our memories play an
unfair trick that works out well: the outstanding becomes the typical.

One of Australia’s great artistic treasures, James McAuley’s poem ‘Because’ is only a slight thing physically. Ten spare quatrains in total, swinging
lithely along on a lattice of conversational iambic pentameter, it is over almost as soon as begun. Yet for some of us Australians who were born and raised while the poet was still alive, his
miniature masterpiece, during the ensuing decades, has done the work that the tiny Amalienburg pavilion at Nymphenburg does for anyone who lingers in its network of reflections for a while –
for as long as possible, usually – and then goes away reassured that there is an eternal value in perfect making. It’s the way the poem is built, indeed, that transmits its aesthetic
charge.

The poem’s actual argument – if it could be reduced to its bare prosaic bones, we would find the poet blaming his unhappiness on his parents – I have always found to be as
depressingly bleak as McAuley’s brand of Catholicism: a convert’s brand which had a way of condemning his own weaknesses while leaving him free to pursue them, just as long as he
sounded strict enough. McAuley’s devotedly anti-communist politics were useful at the time, but this tinge of Jesuit worldliness was never attractive, no matter how winningly he may have
played a honky-tonk piano after dark. (In Australia in those wowser-ridden days, it was often the Jesuits who had read
Ulysses
: after all, they travelled.) Two of Australia’s best
critical minds, Leonie Kramer and Peter Coleman, later devoted slim volumes to McAuley without even once making you like him. I myself, in my Sydney University days, saw him deliver a lecture about
the newly published
Doctor Zhivago
and wondered ever afterwards how he could have been so alkaline on such a vital topic. From his dress and manner I would have said he was an accountant,
except that he wasn’t having enough fun. But if you look at ‘Because’ long enough you start to wonder if he didn’t have the kind of personality, not to say intellect, that
depended on form for its focus.

The poem, a late work, starts off by being about his dead parents. In the first stanza we are already led to suspect that this is a soul-curdling subject for him. The phrase ‘a kind of
love’ gives us the evidence straight away: a valuable lesson in dramatic tactics, because very few poets ever learn to start the action early, as soon as the finger has been inserted in the
listener’s buttonhole.

And they’re racing at Randwick: the traditional Australian radio announcer’s way of saying that the game’s afoot. Since we already know that there was
something wrong with the way his parents were united, the first three lines of the second stanza come as no surprise. But the third line gives us another lesson, in how to expand an argument by
internalizing it – by bringing it home to the soul.

Any trainee poet amongst his readership would have been impressed by the boldness of this démarche, where the story suddenly turns into a rhetorical question. (It matters
so much, we soon find, because the father who could not show love to his mother couldn’t show much of it to him either.) But the trainee poet would have been floored already, by the
technique, which even down at the level of the single word is setting a high standard. I can well remember putting aside all feelings of self-congratulation about how far I had got with forming
regular quatrains when I saw what McAuley could do when filling a strict form with free rhythms. Auden could do it too, of course: the big story, technically, of Australia’s ‘Great
Generation’ of poets wasn’t about what they recovered from their studies of Australia’s literary heritage, it was about what they felt bound to emulate in the heat of
international literary competition. But Auden was in America. Seeing McAuley do this kind of thing right there in one’s homeland was like watching a world champion high diver at the local
baths. (In fact I first read this particular poem after I had sailed for London, but the best things in his earlier career had prepared me for its neatness, if not for its full coherence.) The way,
in the first line of the stanza, that the word
casually
stretches three syllables over two stresses is the purest lyricism – try saying it without singing it – and the stress on
moment’s
in the second line imbues a loose line of conversation with all the disciplined metrical strictness of English literary history. Later on, in England, when I saw the same kind
of structures in the poetry of Philip Larkin, I thought always of this line: an example of how your receptivity, by example, gets imprinted early on with a range of possibilities.

So there are two dramas going on here, even this early in the poem. There is the story of the lack of love between his parents, with the consequence (as he sees it) of an emotional stunting for
a child not often enough picked up.

His mother did her best. They all did their best:

And then there is the second story, the story of the poem building itself before your eyes. The sad first story having been told, McAuley begins the wind-up to the poem with
another question: ‘How can I judge without ingratitude?’

With this question placed adroitly near the end, a poem that was already flying brings in the second stage of its supercharger. The narrative is put aside – there was nothing more to be
wrung out of it – and the tone suddenly becomes declarative. Young writers who were still learning about the freedoms that verse could allow them could learn from the poem’s penultimate
stanza that if you had got the build-up well enough detailed then you could form a climax out of generalities and sound sonorous instead of ponderous.

A delicately paced wind-down follows, but the real work has already been done. The story of his upbringing has culminated in a great concentration of aphoristic summary. But it
couldn’t have done so without the second story, which is the story told by the poem’s perfect construction. Whatever the childhood deprivation was, it helped bring him to this: a
lyricism all the more musical for being free from any hint of standard beautification. In that regard, the poem is prosaic: its poetics are without poeticism. But a simpler way of putting it would
be to say this is a poem made up out of the fullest possible intensity of prose. Good prose is an arrangement, and a great poem makes the arrangement part of the subject.