Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  I make my camp beside you, a dove-grey

  deep pool fretting its fronds and tangled

  flowers. Waratahs burn above you. You

  give me billyfuls of rainwater wine, a

  bright wing-case, a boronia petal, a white

  rose tinted tea-tree star.

  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.

  Here’s to Sydney by the summer!

  Body-surfing down a comber

  Where the girls are three a gallon

  To a beach of yellow pollen . . .

  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.

  The cruel girls we loved

  Are over forty,

  Their subtle daughters

  Have stolen their beauty;

  And with a blue stare

  Of cruel surprise

  They mock their anxious mothers

  With their mother’s eyes.

  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.

  Where once was a sea is now a salty sunken desert,

  A futile heart within a fair periphery;

  The people are hard-eyed, kindly, with nothing inside them,

  The men are independent but you could not call them free.

  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.

  Now yours is the grand power, great for good or evil:

  The schoolboy (poor devil!) will be told off to study you . . .

  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 r
eceive 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’.

  My right eye leaking blood coming home

  from Casualty, patched, pirate view, & changing gears

  past Rooms to Let $12 p.w. beside Surry Hills Smash Repairs

  & a beer gut emerging from a pub door at ten, well,

  you can picture the general scene

  & click! clear as glass, the flute opening

  to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, cool & sweet

  as a parkful of wet trees.

  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.

  You can even feel it through your clothes,

  which crackle lightly like tinfoil.

  It’s as though you were turning into

  something not right, but strange; your hair

  floats out like Coleridge’s

  after he’d swallowed honeydew.

  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: A REMINISCENCE

  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 t
he 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.