My first ‘brush’ with Slessor was when I was an articled clerk. One of the solicitors came back from a day in court. ‘We have been cross-examining one of the most arrogant and cold-blooded men I have ever come across – Kenneth Slessor’, he said. Our client was Slessor’s ex-wife, Pauline, in a custody battle over their son, Paul. Despite his ‘arrogance’, more probably reticence, Slessor obtained custody of Paul, which was unusual for a man in that era.
At the Writers’ Retreat, a year or so after his review of The Ilex Tree, I set eyes on Ken for the first time. I’m not sure if he was wearing his green tweed coat and red bow tie with white polka dots, but this is the picture in my mind, his face pearly pink, with a high-domed shiny forehead. Economical as ever with effort, his talk on the Australian poets Kendall and Gordon was recycled from a lecture given to the University of Sydney eleven years earlier – something I realised when I read his prose collection Bread and Wine.
Judith Wright was still recovering from the death of her husband Jack McKinney and it had been rumoured she would not be coming. Finally to meet Wright was a thrilling experience. Talking to a group of young writers in her room, her hand shook as she poured herself a small glass of whisky. She had a hearing aid and spoke with a loud musical voice, clearing her throat from time to time. Her thick-lensed spectacles gave her eyes a fish-tank look. Poor vision at a young age meant ‘I broke just about every bone in my body. Horse riding. I couldn’t see what I was riding into.’ She demonstrated one remarkable knack. She could wriggle her ears up and down in an amazing way.
I was bowled over by Judith. A friend later reported back to me that Judith thought I was ‘an odd sort of person, but you get used to him’.
The night Les and I strolled through the cloisters with Ken, doing our countertenor rendition of the Purcell aria, Ken sheepishly made a joking reference to ‘the widow McKinney’ and laughed at his own crassness.
As part of the Retreat, Derek Whitelock organised a visit to an old goldmine. As Les and I were walking up out of the abandoned valley beside Ken, he turned to us: ‘I think I may write a poem about that one day’. Ken had maintained a stoic and notorious poetic silence for almost thirty years. Les and I exchanged significant glances. Forty years later, preparing Australian Poetry Since 1788 with Robert Gray, I realised why this poem was never written. Slessor’s father was a German mining engineer. A poem about an old goldmine would involve Slessor writing about his father and himself. The Slessor who did not tell a frequent drinking companion he was a poet may have hesitated about discarding the anonymous voice that was one of his strengths.
At a poetry reading towards the end of the Retreat, Slessor announced he was amazed by the quality and range of the work:
‘This should not be called a Writers’ Retreat, but a Writers’ Advance’. John Manifold jumped up: ‘I hereby nominate Ken for the first ambassadorial post of a free, republican Australia’. I was yet to become friendly with Manifold, a Communist who remained loyal to the Moscow line all his life, and later stayed at my house once in the early 1970s.
I next met Ken at an afternoon party in a house Christopher and Irene Koch were renting in Woolloomooloo. Afterwards I gave Ken a lift home and he waited patiently in the passenger seat of my VW beetle as I changed a flat tyre on the approach to the Harbour Bridge. In the last few years of his life Slessor went back to live in his mother’s old house at Chatswood, an ugly liver-coloured brick two-storey house with a pocket-handkerchief front lawn and hundreds of cars passing every hour on the Pacific Highway. The site is now a Toyota car yard. Ken is remembered by a half-acre park, ‘Kenneth Slessor Park’, with hoop pines and date palms, just down from where his house stood. At the park’s opening, the state member for the electorate, a local councillor and I spoke to about fifteen local people.
My first visit to Ken’s house was in the early evening. We parked off the highway in his small front garden, lit by sodium street lights. He was living in the downstairs flat. The walls were pale green, the carpet was green and the fabric of the lounge suite was green. There were one or two splendid glass ash trays which may have been a different colour. I doubt he had a particular fondness for antiseptic green – making everything green was the easy way out. But he was particular about books, wine and his dinner parties. Ken used to light the candles of a fine silver candelabrum in the middle of an elegant table, and with modest pride would present a saddle of roast beef, rare in the centre. He offered horseradish sauce as a garnish.
I could not match Ken’s courtly decorum when I returned his hospitality at the Sutherland Street house. At that time I was cooking my way through Robert Carrier’s Great Dishes of the World. The spine of my Robert Carrier had split and the pages were splotched with food stains. Ken must have tolerated my cooking, because he used to invite me back.
When Douglas Stewart and his wife Margaret Cohen were at Ken’s dinner parties, the conversation always included talk of Norman Lindsay. Were Lindsay’s oils too oily? I ventured this opinion, which I had heard from Lloyd Rees. Anything that remotely smacked of criticism of Lindsay did not go down well with Stewart. Slessor was more open to a variety of opinions. ‘Ah, yes’, Slessor responded, ‘but he was a master water colourist!’ He showed us a deft small Lindsay watercolour in his bedroom – a nude with turquoise glass slippers poised on a glassy floor. I noticed Ken’s bed (probably it had a coverlet which was his trademark antiseptic green) near the doorway. The bed was the narrow bed of a monk or schoolboy (perhaps Ken’s childhood bed). Ken had given up.
When he came to dinner at Paddington, I sometimes played Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera with Lotte Lenya singing the Bertolt Brecht libretto. Ken bought himself this recording and began playing it at his own dinner parties. Douglas Stewart recounts in A Man of Sydney: An appreciation of Kenneth Slessor (1977) the silent tortures Stewart endured listening to this music at Slessor’s house, referring to its words as ‘largely incomprehensible’ and the music as ‘fearful sounds’.
Stewart failed to mention that Slessor himself was sometimes subjected to ‘fearful sounds’ at his own dinner parties – I recall Doug and his wife Margaret were both present – when his son Paul insisted on playing Bob Dylan. Ken hated Bob Dylan. He complained bitterly while the music was playing. But he did allow the record to play right through – such was his affection for Paul.
One evening we came to dinner and there was a woman in the flat. She was introduced as Pauline, his ex-wife. I had not met her when she was a client of the firm where I was articled. She was blonde, and still attractive, but nervously unsure, perhaps feeling out of her depth. While she was out of the room, busy in the kitchen, Ken came back and whispered to apologise for her presence. ‘I have her here for Paul’s sake. He needs to see a bit of his mother.’
We said, ‘Don’t worry, Ken. Pauline’s fine. We were all just saying how we like her.’ This remark seemed to dismay Ken and he whispered more apologies for inflicting Pauline on us. At the dinner table she took an active role in the conversation and this caused Ken to become agitated and withdrawn.
Ken was impressed by the large black-and-white linoleum tiles Stephen Wilson had laid out in a chess board pattern on the kitchen floor at Sutherland Street. A couple of years later he moved into the top storey of the Chatswood house and his brother Robin (I think) took over the bottom half. When I went to dinner there and Ken opened the door, I noticed the interior was Ken’s trademark antiseptic green. He whisked me through the rooms and proudly displayed the floor of his new kitchen: black-and-white linoleum like a chessboard!
In 1968 I was standing in the corridor of Angus & Robertson’s editorial offices in lower George Street talking to Stewart. I asked how I could make money from writing. ‘Publish a lot of books’, was his reply. He added as an afterthought, ‘Would you like to edit an anthology of Australian comic verse?’ I did not know much about Australian comic verse or any comic verse, but immediately agreed.
At Slessor’s dinner parties we often discussed t
he anthology. Ken was devoted to John Farrell’s almost forgotten, macabre 512-line ‘My Sundowner’, which I included in full. Ken also loved the nineteenth century Australian light verse writer, WT Goodge. ‘As good as WS Gilbert’ was Ken’s verdict.
The three short pieces of George Wallace which I antholo-gised were as Slessor recollected them. My favourite is:
Rhapsody Over Ben Hur
O to be in ancient Rome
Watching the gladioli galloping their carrots around the aroma!
This ‘poem’ was probably never set down on paper and may have been merely something Slessor remembered from a radio show. Another of the George Wallace ‘poems’ recollected by Slessor was:
The Waiter
‘What will you have?’ asked the waiter, reflectively picking his nose.
‘Two boiled eggs, you bastard. You can’t put your fingers in those.’
Stewart discussed this piece in his Slessor book and related his argument with Slessor about what the diner said to the waiter. Stewart preferred ‘Two hard boiled eggs, you bastard!’, for metrical reasons and because this made them ‘more impenetrable’. Slessor preferred ‘Two boiled eggs’ as this was enough.
I plumped for Slessor’s preference for two reasons: less is best, and it would be unusual to order hard-boiled eggs. This difference of opinion illustrates why one of them was a great poet, and the other was not, although a very good poet.
Ken sometimes fondly mentioned the memoirs of William Hickey, the subject of his poem ‘The Nabob’. On the strength of Slessor’s recommendation I bought this book. When I finally read it, long after his death, it was a shock. The drunken promiscuity of eighteenth century gentry, most of them teenagers, and their women, who had only just reached puberty, made the Push seem like a Sunday School picnic. Stewart refers to Hickey with distaste as ‘that scapegrace attorney of India’, but Ken revelled in the memoirs, as (I am afraid) I did.
After the dessert he would make coffee in an electric percolator. This had two almost spherical glass bowls, one on top of the other. An electric coil glowed bright red in the softly lit room and heated the water in the bottom bowl. Ken used to hover about it while it took an age before the water started bubbling and coughing up through the coffee grounds, and a dense black pool formed in the top bowl. Only then were Ken and his guests able to relax. The red glow of Ken’s coffee percolator reminded me of the red glow of Christopher Brennan’s beaker of claret over a flame. The young Slessor met the older poet at least once.
After a night on the town, Ken was too late for the North Shore ferry across the harbour, so he stayed overnight in a Woolloomooloo boarding house run by Christopher Brennan’s daughter. This was probably Anne, a prostitute of whom Jack Lindsay (Norman’s son) wrote, ‘Everybody was in love with her’. Coming downstairs for breakfast, Ken found Brennan’s daughter cooking breakfast. The kitchen window was open. A light sprinkle of rain was falling on a courtyard where two drunken figures were sprawled on an iron double bed. The two men were her father (the great poet) and his brother. ‘I’ll wake those bastards up!’ she announced to young Ken and sent a fried egg flying through the window in the direction of the drunkards.
In ‘My Kings Cross’ (his prose collection), Ken painted a verbal picture of another bohemian poet of that era, Geoffrey Cumine ‘with his blue beret, pea-green shirt and brass ear-rings and a butterfly tattooed on his face’. Slessor said Cumine was one of the few in Australia who shared his enthusiasm for the Pound– Eliot poetic revolution. He also told me the story of Cumine’s love affair with a married woman, which was cut short when the husband castrated Cumine.
Ken recited a quatrain of Cumine’s. I wrote it down and included it in Comic Australian Verse.
Elegy for Dame Nellie Melba
Melba stormed up to Heaven. What d’you think she said?
‘How very droll, to think that I am dead:
Remove the fishermen about the throne –
I wish to see the Manager, alone.’
I am unaware of any published source. The quatrain Ken happened to remember is now Cumine’s most frequently cited poem on the internet.
Ken once explained why he had not become a novelist. ‘I gave it a go once. I had got to about page fifty describing the hair in people’s nostrils and the shine on pores of skin and details like that, but I’d got nowhere with the plot. So I decided I was not cut out to be a novelist and gave it away.’
Ken departed one evening from his customary roast beef. He announced he had brought in Chinese takeaway (such as duck in black bean sauce). We all agreed this was an inspired idea and congratulated him at the end of the meal. He served the pre-cooked Chinese meats with gusto, and was very pleased with himself – particularly that he had so cleverly avoided the chores of the kitchen. As we said goodbye I wondered whether I was the only guest disappointed by the lukewarm food.
This may have been the last time I ate at his Chatswood house. I somehow assumed Ken had another ten years of dinner parties left in him. The silver candelabrum would always light up the mahogany table, the smiling pink face would appear with the saddle of beef and Douglas Stewart would continue to be silently tortured by The Threepenny Opera (unknown to Ken and his other guests) – a martyrdom of good manners.
Slessor’s death seemed premature, unfair to the one or two people who were dependent on him – his son Paul had only recently left school. When Ken died, as I entered the crematorium chapel, I had a premonition I would see him standing there, watching his own funeral service. Instead, I saw his facsimile, his younger brother Robin quietly watching at the back of the chapel.
A bizarre enclave of streets in Glenmore Park near Regentville Public School may be continuing these dinner table conversations. Kenneth Slessor Drive is joined by Harwood Circuit to Lehmann Avenue and within shouting distance are FitzGerald Place – incorrectly spelled ‘Fitzgerald’ on Google maps – Stewart Place, Richardson Place, Banjo Paterson Close, Manifold Crescent and Harpur Close. Does the talk between the streets become more animated when one of their writers dies? Only one is still alive.
In 1940 a New Zealander in his mid-twenties, too unfit to be drafted into the army, became the editor of the Bulletin’s literary pages (they began on the weekly’s pink inside cover and were known as the ‘Red Page’). With Douglas Stewart as literary editor for twenty years the Bulletin regained its status as Australia’s most important literary publication.
Stewart himself wrote in rhyming verses, but he published Bill Hart-Smith’s free verse. He was the earliest champion of Francis Webb’s knotty, violent language, which was a long way from Stewart’s own practice. Judith Wright, David Campbell and John Blight were among the many poets whose work he promoted in the Bulletin. He regularly published the naive or ‘primitive’ poet ‘Bellerive’ in the ‘Answers to Correspondents’ column and ensured he was paid.
As a fifteen- and sixteen-year-old I was put off by the fustian appearance of the Bulletin. It looked (and smelled) like the 1920s. But it was the first place I sent my poems to.
In 1961 Stewart’s reign at the ‘Red Page’ ended after Frank Packer’s Australian Consolidated Press bought the Bulletin and Vincent Buckley became the poetry editor. Buckley wrote poetry of high seriousness and a seigneurial detachment as a committed Catholic, such as his ‘Eleven Political Poems’. (When his Catholicism later lapsed it was replaced by a passionate involvement in Ireland and a barely disguised admiration for IRA terrorists.)
Stewart recovered from this palace revolution and became a ‘literary adviser’ to the most significant locally owned publisher, Angus & Robertson. He published editions of many of his Bulletin poets, consolidating his achievement at the Bulletin. In 1964 he edited the Angus & Robertson Modern Australian Verse. He wrote to me saying he would include ‘The Last Campaign’, if I removed a line where the horsemen ‘wiped snot on their saddles’. I changed this to ‘stared hard through the twilight haze’, and was the youngest poet in the book.
Stewart�
�s detestation of Kurt Weill’s music was comical, but his limitations were his strength. His poems had a purity of language missing in the type of poetry Buckley promoted, which ran the risk of becoming self-righteous. Stewart’s benign scepticism about religion and politics may have seemed shallow to poets of a committed generation, but the three decades from 1940 to 1970 when Stewart was Australia’s literary arbiter were relatively faction-free.
David Campbell was one of Stewart’s closest friends. I first met Campbell one evening in the bar of the Newcastle Hotel. He was a tall handsome man with a broken nose and golden hair. He was wearing a striped, vivid green silk tie. Stewart wrote a sonnet for David Campbell, ‘Familiars’, in which he likens himself to a ‘humble ant-eater … clumsy and prickly’ and Campbell to the ‘biggest reddest fox I ever saw’. These were two animals the friends encountered on one of their fishing trips along small rivers on the western edge of the Great Dividing Range.
At about the time he wrote this sonnet I was talking to Doug – that was what we called him. A glazed expression on his face, he told me of Campbell hosting a dinner for friends in Canberra, and his misgivings as David (at his own cost) insisted on ordering the most expensive wines, bottle after bottle.
When David’s marriage to Bonnie broke up, he lost his grazing property. He became a Vietnam War opponent and reinvented his poetic style. Unlike his friend Campbell, Stewart was unable to reinvent himself. After publishing his Collected Poems 1936–1967 at age fifty-four, Stewart lost his characteristic assurance and ability to surprise. Doug once asked me if I would like some of his Australian orchids: ‘I’ve written all the poems I want to write about them’.
Leeward Page 26