by Clive James
until it melted off quickly like boiling rubber
and flowed through a stretch of dry grass
with the sound of the grass beginning to burn
From here until his final phase in hospital, you just have to get used to being astonished. Les Murray, himself the convener and consolidator of the post-World War II movement that surrounded Australian poetry with the vocabulary of the working land, as opposed to using the land for a mere backdrop, was clearly right to salute Hodgins as a pastoral poet without equal. The only way to evoke what Hodgins did would be to invoke it all: to become such an anthologist that one would quote almost the whole of the central hundred pages of New Selected Poems, which would include nearly everything in the twin touchstone single volumes of Hodgins’ main manner, the booklets called Animal Warmth and Up On All Fours. There is poetry here in such abundance and intensity that the word ‘great’ is not out of place: in fact it refuses to be excluded. Moments of incandescent registration are so stellar in their profusion that he gives the impression of having held constellations in his hands.
Some limiting statements can be made, and if they can they should: Hodgins himself, after all, had no love for dreamland. When Hodgins rhymed solidly, he gained from it. But he seems to have found solid rhyming meretriciously neat. Deciding that, he should have avoided near-rhymes. They draw too much attention to their rattling fit even in song lyrics, and on the page, in poems, they hurt the eye along with the ear. With reference to the longest of his longer poems, the verse novel presents difficulties which make titanic demands on the poet. Murray set the fashion for the form with The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, and brought it to a peak with Fredy Neptune. He made it an Australian form, in fact: by now it is part of our literary landscape. But no amount of tactical diversion can disguise the fact that in a verse novel the characters are all saturated with the poet’s mental acuity, and so all end up thinking like him, no matter how unsophisticated they are made to sound. Hodgins’ verse novel, Dispossessed, was written at about the same time as Fredy Neptune but was nothing like as developed in its internal action. As much as all the others of Hodgins’ rural poems put together, Dispossessed concentrates attention on the physical existence of the rural life that is on its way out of the world. But nothing can stop all the characters turning into poets, simply because there is so much poetic perception going on around them. Nor does the blank verse do enough to mark the local outbreaks of poetry as parts of a single poem. The book would work just as well, just as poetically, if it were prose, and I seriously suggest that somebody one day might take the dare and print it that way.
More heretically still, let me suggest that Hodgins’ terza rima mini-epic ‘The Way Things Were’, one of the two big showpieces of his first great central collection Animal Warmth, suffers the same fate as MacNeice’s Autumn Sequel. Marvellous though it is in its remembered observations, ‘The Way Things Were’ drags its feet – as, indeed, does its companion piece ‘Second Thoughts on the Georgics’, which like Dispossessed is cast in a blank verse all too blank. But ‘Second Thoughts on the Georgics’, whose poet can be commended for getting his hands far dirtier than Virgil ever did, merely makes too much of getting along: it doesn’t irritate while doing so. ‘The Way Things Were’, I am afraid, does. Even MacNeice, the supreme verse technician, gave up on the idea of sustaining the terza rima in English with solid rhymes. But instead of reverting to the dextrously mixed and switched classical metres of its masterly predecessor Autumn Journal, he pushed on with the terza rima just to be different, and used half-rhymes just to sustain it. The result, Autumn Sequel, seems like a structure only to the eye, and Hodgins’ rhymes in his terza rima piece have the same fault compounded, because they are even more loose than MacNeice’s. Often a single consonant is the only thing that a triad of rhyming words have in common. I was quite a way into the poem before I realized that a gesture was being made at the terza rima. I thought he wasn’t rhyming at all.
And in that case it would have been better if he hadn’t. The truth was that he hardly needed to. Most poets lose out when they abandon overt form but Hodgins was one of the lucky few that gain. His ear was so sound that he could develop a seductively articulated texture of echo over any group of unrhymed lines. His villanelles and other systematically repetitive forms got in the road of this quality, and suggested that their main value was to help the poem get done. Flatness in Hodgins would not be so obvious if his peaks weren’t so numerous: put in geographical terms, his main output would look like one of those Chinese landscape paintings in which the multiple upsurge of pointed mountains looks too extravagant to believe, until someone who has been there tells you it’s all true. Anything in Hodgins that sounds willed, or manufactured to a template, is competing with poems like ‘Rabbit Trap’. But the only poems like ‘Rabbit Trap’ are his. ‘Rabbit Trap’ comes from heaven. Listen to how the last stanza starts in wit and proceeds through a Montaigne-like detached sadness into a sadness no more detached than that of St Francis of Assisi.
So sensitive and yet it is unfeeling,
always reacting badly to slightest
pressure on the blood-stained centre plate,
the stage where little tragedies are played out
while back in some warm spot the mother’s young
stare out as the world closes in on them.
Almost demanding to go unnoticed in the middle of that sumptuous progression is the linking of the trap’s centre plate to a theatrical stage. Pause for a moment and you will see the trap’s laid-out surrounding jaws as an auditorium. But he moves you to the next moment. Giving you more than you can dwell on at the time is one of the ways that the master poet declares himself. But I could quote from Animal Warmth and Up On All Fours until the cows come home. I could quote until the cows came home about the cows not coming home. In the Australian countryside according to Hodgins every brutal thing that can happen to an animal happens on the page. Clearly most of this uncooked vividness was remembered from childhood, but in his mature years, with the needle of nemesis always at the edge of his vision, he reinforced his memories with plenty of hands-on experience. As his football poems remind us, his illness didn’t stop him being intensely physical: or anyway, that’s the way he makes it sound. In the poems, he stabs pigs, dispatches wounded rabbits, watches the calf being born from an inch away. He watches afterbirth being eaten and practically gives you a taste. Except for the squeal of the boiling yabbie – there is a PhD to be written about the role of the yabbie in the poetry of Philip Hodgins, so let’s hope nobody ever writes it – nothing turns his stomach. Brutality is the price of authenticity. The price of country produce that tastes of something is that an inescapable violence occurs behind it. There is violence even in the milk.
The sweetest milk
was lucerne in the spring
But if the cows eat the wrong stuff they bloat, and they don’t come home.
It’s always a blow to lose a cow that way –
squeezed to death from the inside,
hugely rounded with legs jutting everywhere
like some washed-up unexploded mine.
Those lines are from ‘Second Thoughts on the Georgics’, which I just finished saying made slow progress in its narrative drive. So it does, but one of the reasons is that it is packed with observations as good as that. The reader has to deal with almost a monotony of quality. In Hodgins’ poetry about the land, you must get used to the way he brings everything out in high relief, a democracy of vividness as if the truth-telling particularity of a painter like, say, Menzel had been carried out with the fantastic allure of the Douanier Rousseau. The narrator is always going where you don’t particularly want to look, and looking hard: into the guts of a rotting sheep, into the penile lustre of a rutting bull. Not even the quality of the expression can make most of this delightful. But it is made valuable. These are tougher laws than the ones we live by in the denatured urban world. The country is a world with its own
rules, and the rules are severe: even the people can die like the animals. In one poem a little boy disappears into a grain silo.
The question will always remain, now, of whether, when the little boy is sucked to his death amongst the nourishing grain, we are meant to think of the author, arbitrarily expunged in the midst of life. Was he thinking of himself? How could he not be? And yet surely the mark of his main poetry is that he is not asking for a biographical interpretation: that he is doing everything he can to avoid it. He is trying to say that real life, country life, is like this anyway; you don’t have to be fatally ill to find it unsentimental and ruthless; it has those characteristics by its nature, because it is close to nature. This quarrel will go on. If I am afraid of anything in Hodgins’ future, it is that he might be as much debated over as enjoyed. But he won’t be more debated over than enjoyed, because there is too much to enjoy, and the enjoyment is too intense. It will be his immediate appeal that will lead to the annotated editions for future use in colleges across the English-speaking world. There will be footnotes to explain that ‘galvo’ was once Australian short-hand for galvanized iron, and the generation after next might need to be told that a ‘ute’ was the SUV of the past, when there were dirt roads. But Hodgins’ poetry will say what the dirt roads were, and how they sounded through the floor of the vehicle.
and there is the sound of a quarrel
beneath you.
Most of it is muffled and deep-throated
but there is also a top register
of small sharp stones
pinging off the metal as they shoot up.
You don’t get this variety with a sealed surface.
No, you don’t. On behalf of his country upbringing, Hodgins defied, as Les Murray did, the inexorable expansion of the sealed surface. There is a connection between agrarian conservatism and peeled-eyed poetic realism that can be traced through Prussia, the American south and Argentina all the way into recent times. A last-ditch stand by literati who know how to dig the ditch themselves, it has little to do with the traditional opposition of left and right. Agrarian poets, indeed, are likely to find an even bigger enemy on the right than on the left, because it is the capitalist imperative of industrial efficiency that denatures the country. And it does, after all, make life in the country more bearable for the few who remain to work their land. Most of the inventions that brought the efficiency about were devised by their forefathers, who, even when not yet dispossessed by the global reach of improvement, were already worn to a frazzle by the rigours of the life and wanted something better for their children. (One of the reasons I would like to see Dispossessed restored to the status of a current book is that it so bravely tells the sad truth about how a losing battle can breed narrow minds.) Something better came, but it was more bland. When everybody has enough to eat, hardly anybody cares any more about how the food gets to the table. The salt loseth its savour. Wherewith shall it be salted? From an historic dilemma comes an artistic question. It is an historic force that Hodgins’ sort of poetry braces itself against.
Hence, perhaps, some of the poetic strength. But in his case the fighting courage goes immeasurably deeper, and it is at this point that I must switch into that comfortable mode of peroration by which I get the centre of attention away from him and back to me. His courage I can’t measure or even identify. All I can do is comfort myself that it was only one of the factors in the recognition that came to him before his death. If valour, whether moral or physical – and his, of course, was both – were the sole criterion for recognition, most of us would have to give up on the idea, and stick with what celebrity we can get. I hasten to add that I haven’t quite given up on celebrity either. It can help. Perhaps I would have had a lot more trouble getting my poems published if I had not had my face on television. It always seemed to me that it scarcely helped at all, but I might have thought that because, with being published as with being in love, rejection is more memorable than acceptance.
It isn’t always to the worthless that celebrity draws attention. The world of mass enthusiasm is much more like a pure market than like a public relations campaign. In Britain, a touchingly vulnerable creature called Posh Spice has defied our expectations by remaining married to the footballer David Beckham for all these months, but she hasn’t defied the law of supply and demand: she will always sell more newspapers than records, because the public, although it will read anything about a permanently pouting young woman with the voice of a moth, refuses to be fooled about the music it listens to. Completely to manage the public’s taste is an ambition open only to totalitarian societies, not to free ones, and in fact not even classical communism could manage it: the Beatles still broke through. There was something I might have said about Madonna earlier on that I must say now, merely to be just: she once really got the youngsters excited, and might even have done some good. A friend recently sent me a collection of French songs sung by Carla Bruni, who is apparently celebrated for being the sort of well-connected and well-constructed young supermodel that Mick Jagger spends hours on the treadmill in order to pursue successfully. Well, good luck to him, because he would certainly be right in her case. She sings beautiful songs beautifully. If she hadn’t first been a celebrity, I might never have recognized that, so the two things are bound together.
Most of the more off-putting aspects of the abundant West arise from its freedoms. The first thing we can be sure of about a free society is that it will be teeming and throbbing with things we don’t like. We live in Luna Park, not Plato’s Republic, and artists should be grateful that they have been given such variety to be creative about. There have been, and always will be, plenty of despots ready to give them a lot less. So welcome to the crazy house. But it does become more and more apparent that we will have to reinforce the foundations even as the edifice shakes with the urgent vigour of its productivity. It might be as difficult as getting new reinforcing rods into concrete that is being squeezed from within by the expansive oxidization of the old ones. Recognition is just such a reinforcing rod. Unequivocally, recognition is a proper aim in life. But just because it is so obviously worthy, there is no reason to think the young won’t get the point. Already they find it cool to know the name that everybody else doesn’t know, and there would be no credibility in that unless the unknown names were good for something, even if only for an even more unintelligible version of gangsta rap. What I did to get this medal with Philip Hodgins’ name on it – this outstanding emblem of recognition in a country which has so spontaneously developed an outstanding literature – never made me famous while I was doing it. As a poet, I spent two thirds of my career without even a reputation. Receiving this award, I feel like someone who has run the whole race invisible and popped into sight at the finishing line. Well, that fits. To be recognized means to be reassured that you were right to pursue a course that had no immediate rewards, and got in the road of activities that had. Poetry is something I gave at least part of my life to: a fact on which I often preened myself, at least in private. Now, to remind me that I had things easy, I have been honoured in the name of a man who gave his whole life to it, and his death as well. So the honour seems disproportionate; but I suppose an honour ought to. When a Roman general returning from his conquests abroad was awarded a triumph, a special herald rode in the chariot with him through the cheering city to whisper in his ear and remind him that he was made of dust and shadows. The occasional general no doubt said: ‘Bugger off, I’ve had this coming for years.’ At least with this triumph, with a name like Philip Hodgins on the laurel wreath, no recipient is in danger of saying that.
Australian Book Review, September 2003
Postscript
Australia figures large in this collection, and not just because, as I grow older, the country of my birth becomes steadily more important in my memory. Australia figures large because Australia is getting larger. Measured by population, it is a far smaller country than it looks on the map, but no country of its size has a comparable
cultural influence on the international scale. Because Australia’s busy expatriates get an unfair amount of journalistic attention, it becomes harder to remember that it’s the creativity within the nation’s borders that counts most, and provides the basis for everything achieved abroad. Joan Sutherland learned to sing in Sydney, and the post-war expatriate writers have done well because they were well schooled before they sailed. For decades I harboured the delusion that Sydney Technical High School had never taught me anything technical, until I at last realized that the enforced inculcation of English grammar and syntax had given me a set of constructional skills fit to annihilate twelve thousand miles of distance, and thus help me to build a career in Britain in the same way that British engineers once built bridges in Africa. Welcome to Australia’s share of cultural imperialism, the imperialism that really works. In that regard, it was a duty as well as an honour to pay tribute to Philip Hodgins, whose poetry will probably never be published ‘overseas’ – the word that used to haunt Australian cultural life but which is now, thankfully, sinking into a long overdue neutrality of use. All serious readers of the English language, if they can, will come to Australia eventually, and when they do, they can read him there. Otherwise they can order his wonderful New Selected Poems from Amazon, and it will bring his hot landscape to where they live even if their windows look out on nothing but frozen tundra.
Exporting the culturally adventurous and importing them on the plane back, Australia is now joined to the world in the best possible way, by what it admires and by what is admired about it – a reciprocal contact that makes isolation a thing of the rapidly retreating past. With Australian Wagnerians visiting Bayreuth and German Wagnerians visiting Adelaide, there is no longer any cultural border worth bothering about. Which doesn’t mean that a political border is without importance. On the contrary: the more the nation prospers, the more rancour it is likely to arouse, even within itself. Rancour from within, by a familiar process, is too often ready to excuse rancour from without. Australian intellectuals, taken as a class, have a tendency to blame their own country for being targeted for destruction by every disaffected person in the world who suspects that his own compatriots might like to live there. But on the whole the Australian population would prefer to elect the kind of government that will ask transients to unpack any luggage that presents a suspect silhouette to the airport scanning machine. On the way back to England, my cabin-baggage holdall did. Informed that I was carrying an unidentifiable oval metal object, I didn’t know what the security officer was talking about. Had somebody planted a bomb on me? When I unpacked the bag, the mysterious article lay revealed. It was the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal.