by Clive James
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.
I never saw them casually touch,
Or show a moment’s joy in one another.
Why should this matter to me now so much?
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.
Having seen other fathers greet their sons,
I put my childish face up to be kissed
After an absence. The rebuff still stuns . . .
His mother did her best. They all did their best:
People do what they can; they were good people,
They cared for us and loved us . . .
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.
Judgement is simply trying to reject
A part of what we are because it hurts.
The living cannot call the dead collect:
They won’t accept the charge, and it reverts.
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.
All kinds of implications follow, both for McAuley and for Australian poetry in general. For him, we can hazard that here is the secret of why so much of his prose is so chillingly pale. It had to be stretched on a melodic frame before it lit up. For Australian poetry, we can say that this poem was one of the many launching points for an adventure that returned European imperialism towards its origins: what had arrived as power went back as culture. Here was a language that had nothing especially Australian about it except confidence, but this time the confidence was not assertive: it simply took itself for granted. After this the Australian poetic language was ready for anything. It was ready for the world: a fact that Australian critics and cultural commentators were slow to spot, because it had not yet occurred to them that a new nation doesn’t project itself to the world by flaunting its characteristics. It projects itself as a creative personality, which finally comes down to a tone of voice.
The paradox, or seeming paradox, of McAuley’s poetic voice is that its enchantment can’t be deduced from his personal history. It was generated only in his poems, and not always then. The less inhibited he was, the better: but he was hardly ever not inhibited. The hero in McAuley’s poetry as a whole is not the poet engaged in an exploration of himself: it is Quirôs, the world-explorer from the past who almost won the future nation for Catholicism. Reading McAuley’s works in verse right through, it is hard to shake the impression that you are trapped in a scriptorium of the Counter-Reformation. A poem like ‘Because’ is not just a breakthrough, it’s a break-out. To be so indulgent towards his own psychological needs was a rare event for a man who had given himself a national role, and pursued it with the zeal of a courier for Opus Dei.
But precisely there lay the misapprehension that Australian literature, of all the Australian arts, has been slowest to get over. A national role is the last part that a writer should want to play. The writers role is to express the interior workings of the self, and achieve results that are less national than international, and less international than universal. That being done, a national artistic achievement joins the global conversation at the only level that counts. When McAuley wrote ‘Because’ he wrote a poem fit to conquer the world, and since then it has: or at any rate the tone of voice exemplified by it has become universally recognizable, without needing to be decorated with the properties that Barry Humphries called ‘Austral’. Apart from the Sydney Morning Herald, there is nothing in the poem that would not be common property in Surbiton, or indeed Saskatoon. And this diminished dependency on local colour has gone on being true. In the poetry of Les Murray, a sandstorm could be taking place in any country that has sand.
It was a happy coincidence. Bitten in the conscience by guilt for colonialism, the Western nations were becoming one world at the very time when the Australian version of the English language had become ready to do its share in fulfilling a planetary scope. But there was also the factor of professionalism: usually the last thing that amateurs of any art want to hear about. Australian poetry after the Second World War produced a swathe of dedicated contenders, and some of them were bound to produce a few lines you could remember.
A. D. Hope, who could never count his syllables with the efficacious accuracy that McAuley found compulsory, still had an onrush to the big stanzas of his early poems that made him sound more majestic than his protégé. (Actually in the real world, Hope was the protégé: for McAuley, dominance was the default mode.) You might argue plausibly that Nan McDonald could propel a line of pentameter even more sweetly than McAuley: her poem ‘The Bus-Ride Home’ is not one that he could have written even if his sympathies for his fellow passengers had bee
n that generous.
David Campbell could talk about the women on the beach with a joyful longing that was never echoed by McAuley, who longed for them too but was too cramped to say so: his idea of letting himself go was to help cook up the Ern Malley hoax, a nasty episode which has served ever since as a dunce’s cap for the kind of critic who would rather talk about literary events than about literature. (His irascible impatience with pseudo-modernist humbug helped lead him to the foundation of Quadrant, but the wrecking of Max Harris’s career was a high price to pay: literary people should be slow to imagine that they can crucify a colleague without acquiring for themselves a lasting set of stigmata.)
On the whole, McAuley’s poetry was a joy-free zone. But we have to remember that when we are talking about a nation’s ‘poetry’ in general, or about somebody’s ‘poetry’ in particular, we are talking shorthand, and have not yet reached the point. The point that matters is not poetry, but the poem. It’s the poem that makes the impact, and gets remembered, even if only in pieces. For at least one reader, ‘Because’ still has its impact now.
And the impact resonates, as a voice in the head: a language. In another poem, ‘Terra Australis’, McAuley said that your Australia is within you, as a land of imagination: ‘There you come home’. Armed with that language, you are always coming home, even when you stay away. A treasure more important than nationalism, a fully developed poetic language is the essence of the only patriotism that matters. It can do without red-back spiders and crocodiles, although those are nice too. What it can’t do without, what it embodies, is a way of speaking about freedom and justice both at once. Not just by luck but by thought and endeavour, Australia is well placed to do that: so well placed that it often forgets its importance to the world, and thinks it has to go on proving itself, when the proof is already known to all. That important place was as much built as found; and McAuley’s little poem was one of the things that built it.
Interlude
If you pick up an anthology of modern Australian verse and don’t find McAuley’s ‘Because’ in the list of contents, you will know that the anthologist is short of budget, if not short of brains. In the following chapter there are several anthologies mentioned, but perhaps I should here take a separate opportunity to say why I have always found anthologies a vital aid to study. They tend to get looked down on as if they were a short cut to profundity, a kind of mental K-ration. But really they are better thought of as a benevolent filtration system. In the editor’s mind, at least, if in nobody else’s, the poems in the book will be the outstanding works of his chosen authors. He is unlikely to be completely wrong about that, because there will be the pressure of opinion from his colleagues and friends to reinforce his instinctive choice. If the choice merely reflects a fashion, it will at least typify its time. But even at their least inspired, anthologies help to offset the most threatening fact about poetry: there are too many poems. This might not seem true of the far past, but any hint of a controlled output happened only because so much dull stuff got left out of the anthologies and miscellanies, thus leaving us with the illusion that a silver age once shone, or even a golden one. It is certainly true, however, of today. Sometimes you pray for a new generation of anthologists to set about stemming the tide, and you groan when the anthologists themselves turn out to be enthusiastic dullards or crazed theorists. But really the filtering has already begun, because the chosen poems were accepted for print in magazines, whereas all those others weren’t, and vanished immediately into oblivion. In the age of the web, alas, every poem in the world will be ‘out there’. I don’t know what to say about that, except that I’d rather be in here.
INTERIOR MUSIC
An unusually successful example of that most easily mangled of verse genres, the philosophical disquisition made fully poetic, Robert Conquest’s intricately argued poem ‘A Problem’ is in The Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse, an anthology that was always with me in the last few years before I left Australia in the early sixties. It’s a long time ago now but I can still remember the thrill of reading, for the first time, the line that sums up what he was really after in that poem. On the face of it he takes a painterly approach, meticulously registering all the nuances of the Ligurian landscape, and how the light falls on it from the sky: falls and alters. But he also says that the shifting patterns of light are ‘Like the complex, simple movement of great verse.’
We can call this prose if we like, but only if we wish that our own prose were as neatly suggestive, as rich in implication as it is authoritative in form – in other words, as complex yet simple, simple yet complex. The mere fact, however, that you have to say the same thing from two different directions is already proof that there is nothing dumb about the idea. Combined into a single oxymoronic phrase, the two words ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ not only collide, they explode. Once they touch and go off, each is riddled with the other’s particular shrapnel. You can’t have one without the other.
Is this seemingly simple notion – but so complex when you unpack it – really an appropriate measure for great verse? In those first years of mine as an appreciator of poetry, I found myself asking that very question when I started reading the later poems of Yeats. In Sydney I had already absorbed – or thought I had absorbed – Pound, Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, and Cummings, plus dozens of others among the avowedly modern – but with them I could always say, when I ran into a difficulty: well, that’s modern art, complex and difficult. I could understand Henry Reed’s ‘Lessons of the War’ perfectly, and thought they added up to a great work. I could understand the poems in Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge’ only intermittently, and thought they might add up to an even greater work, for that very reason. I could scarcely have been more receptive to a dash of obscurity Tending to underrate intelligibility, I looked upon it as the poet’s fallback position; a true simplicity with nothing complex about it: a life of ease that he might slip back into if he stopped trying. It never occurred to me then that an achieved clarity might be the apex of the craft; and might act as a vehicle for everything that the poet could not fully explain, just so long as he was clear about the fact that he couldn’t. But in laying out the possibilities of choice like this – as if I had seen the choices but just hadn’t yet done any choosing – I might appear to be retroactively giving myself credit for more acumen than I had at the time.
On the ship to England I took my first crack at the later Yeats. I sailed off for the territory beyond such earlier showstoppers as ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and got myself into the territory where it seemed that the ageing wizard wanted to be plain as much as he wanted to be poetic. I caught on most quickly to the poems whose prose statements I knew I wasn’t supposed to understand completely at first reading. Such lines as ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed’ were obviously meant to be clearer than their context. Byzantium was a destination in the mind, like the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee. None of it was supposed to check out: only to resonate. What threw me, and was to go on throwing me for years, was his use of the perfectly plain, apparently ordinary prose statement. Apart from its biblical rhythm and repetition, was the following moment poetic in any way at all?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?
But the musical momentum of those words made them into an extraordinary statement anyway. And actually there was a lot more to say, and the reader, by trying to say it, must eventually arrive at the conclusion that this seemingly simple statement is complex in the extreme. First of all, man is quite likely to vanish before the thing he loves vanishes. If the thing he loves is a person – say, a beautiful woman – she will certainly vanish one day, but if the beautiful woman is painted by Botticelli, she won’t. One can go on teasing out an argument endlessly, and this same attribute applies to almost every apparently plain statement that the fully mature Yeats ever made. Right up until the end, the simpler he sounds, the more complex he gets. So Conquest’s formula is not invalidated: far from it.
That famous motto about the evanescence of man’s love is an extreme case, but really a lot of Yeats’s later work is like that. Some of the mystical rigmarole of the early work continues into the later work: there is no escaping ‘the gyres! the gyres!’. But his big poems, such as ‘Among School Children’ and ‘All Souls’ Night’, can mainly be read almost as if they were prose: it’s one of their characteristics. The characteristic is deceptive because it can lead even the most acute critic into the delusion that Yeats in his advanced years was writing rhetoric rather than poetry. He didn’t. What he did was to trim down the number of complicating factors. Sometimes there was little imagery and often there was none at all: just an argument. But even the most straightforward argument was made musical by the way it moved. In his spellbinder of a short poem ‘The Cold Heaven’, the ‘rook-delighting heaven’ is first of all a syntactically compressed way of saying that the sky delights the crows. But it is also a peal of music. (One night at a feast in King’s College, Cambridge, when the late Frank Kermode was already older than I am now, he recited the poem to me in his soft voice, and I was breathless at the beauty of its switches and turns, its smooth linking of pause and glide.) To fill the straightforward with implication – to make the simple complex – brought Yeats to the height of his technique.
Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made.
– from ‘Under Ben Bulben’
In the early work there is frequent mention of mystical inspiration, but in the later work he is more likely to put the explicit emphasis on craft. We can be sure that he didn’t think of craft as the lesser thing. It was the larger thing, embracing all the other mental activities going on in the mind of the artist.