Poetry Notebook (26 page)

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,

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.