by John Clarke
And so it was that Greg Turner and Frank Nobilo went out and beat Mark O’Meara and David Duvall who were ranked second and third in the world. Greg’s brother Brian and his wife and I had followed them around the course and as Greg came off the eighteenth we considered the prospect of lunch. ‘No,’ said Greg, who was pretty pumped at the time. ‘Let’s go out to the eighth and cheer Ernie and Vijay through. If we can get away to a start today we might get amongst it.’
So we walked out to the eighth and at about driving length on the eighth fairway, sitting on his own with his feet up on the dashboard of a buggy with ‘Presidents Cup Captain’ written on it, was Peter.
‘Hello, Greg,’ said Peter. ‘You and Frank played very well. I thought you two might do that. Good on you.’
‘Yes. It was good,’ said Greg. ‘I don’t think you’ve met my brother Brian and his wife Barbara.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Peter.
As they said hello, Brian congratulated Peter on his excellent speech at the opening ceremony the previous evening.
‘Thanks,’ said Peter. ‘That’s very kind of you.’
Brian is the senior Turner brother. He’s a fine poet, a mountain man and a wily judge of sport. He captained the New Zealand hockey team, caddied for Greg and plenty of others on the tour and he sometimes tosses up between a cup of tea and a bike ride around the South Island.
‘Yes, I thought your speech was excellent,’ continued Brian, warming to the task. ‘Telling the Americans they were the greatest assembly of golfing talent ever to come to this country. That was brilliant.’
‘Thank you, Brian,’ said Peter. ‘I’ve actually just been sitting here thinking about what I might say at the closing ceremony.’
‘Have you worked it out?’ asked Brian.
‘Yes,’ said Peter. ‘I thought I might thank them for coming.’
Writers and Artists
Seamus Heaney
(Review: Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, Dennis O’Driscoll, Faber, 2009)
When Seamus Heaney came to Melbourne in 1994, he had not yet won the Nobel Prize and could still play an away game. He participated in three memorable events and was responsible for deep enjoyment among those present. As he talked and read from his poetry, its themes opened up and the tone of his voice provided a sense of the weave and heft of his writing.
‘When you write,’ Heaney says in Stepping Stones, ‘the main thing is to feel you are rising to your own occasion’. Marshalling the strength, memory, belief, shyness, humour and philosophy required to do this, is what Stepping Stones is about. A roughly chronological record of Heaney’s life and work, the book takes the form of a series of interviews conducted with fellow poet and friend Dennis O’Driscoll, whose excellent map of the territory gives the book its structure. Most of the questions, responses and exchanges were written rather than spoken and there has been some criticism of this from the Lilliputian cavalry on the basis that Heaney could have been put under more pressure by direct confrontation. Pay no attention. Heaney has long needed to find safe ground for open, relaxed and generous discourse. And incidentally, even when putting the shutters up, Seamus will go very nicely. At a full house session in Melbourne he was asked how he would define religious poetry. He leant into the microphone as if he were at the House of Un-American Activities hearings and explained, ‘Religious poetry is that poetry in which the exclamatory particle “O” figures considerably.’ No trouble.
Seamus Heaney was the eldest of nine children in a nationalist Catholic Ulster farming family. At the age of eleven he won a scholarship, which took him away to boarding school and by twenty-two he had a first-class honours degree. The farm that had given him his bearings was behind him and the pull of home was moving from his life to his poetry. He writes of this realisation in an early poem, ‘Digging’:
But I’ve no spade to follow men like that.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Heaney’s beautifully remembered South Derry childhood nevertheless provides the historical nucleus of his life and work. In ‘Digging’ we hear the tribal vernacular he has kept in an inside pocket at all times. The circumference of his life has since widened to embrace other languages, work at Berkeley and Harvard, acclaim at home and abroad. But he still holds a poetry book the way a farmer holds an almanac of cattle prices and crop yields. He is practical, friendly and weather-wise and when amused, as he often is, his eyes close with pleasure. The Heaney nucleus also features an instinct for the resolving chord in things; for finding the balance in words and ideas. In another early poem he sees the military disparity of the 1798 Irish Rebellion, in which the French arrived too late to help and were given an ice cream by the English and sent home, while the Irish rebels were slaughtered. Still in his twenties, Heaney’s impulse was not to rail against injustice; that would be rhetorical. It was to find, in the real story, an image which was as sure as the rhythm of the seasons. The Irish soldiers, ill equipped and hungry, were given a handful of barley to put in the pockets of their greatcoats.
Heaney’s first Faber book of poems, Death of a Naturalist (1966), was an immediate success. He was twenty-seven and working as a teacher. His next books were also successful and he was increasingly sought as a speaker, lecturer and professor. In 1972 Clive James recognised the power in Heaney’s verse and in 1975 Robert Lowell described him as ‘the best Irish poet since W. B. Yeats.’ He was hailed, feted and wreathed in prizes. This led to the usual trouble. It was all happening to him too early, some said. It would fade, they predicted. ‘Famous Seamus’ they joked. He couldn’t keep it up, they agreed. The next book would be a dud, they reasoned. But they were not really talking about Heaney. He did not heap these garlands upon himself. And it wasn’t happening fast; it was just happening. And actually, there was plenty in the tank. His reading was wide and deep and, all through this book, Heaney illustrates with examples, images, metaphors and quotations from other writers. He was also learning to trust his personal experience, to write out of his own places and people and to invest intimacy in the language itself. One thing is very obvious about Heaney; he is patient. He has never forced the pace. The writing that interests him is not a race. It’ll happen or it won’t.
It did happen. The books continued to come; poetry, criticism and translations. In 2000 he published his translation of Beowulf from Old English. It was a sensation, enriching the language at its source. In doing this work Heaney used words we use now but only those that come directly from Old English. Old English words are short, strong, stalwart, conveying meaning, not flourish. He gave as an example the section from the Churchill speech, which begins ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ and ends ‘We shall never surrender’. The only word in it which does not come from Old English is ‘surrender’.
Throughout Stepping Stones the reader is surfing in language. Heaney can lilt from a serious point to a softening aside or another thought without losing ‘the whole thing.’ His English is assured, exhilarating and colossal, but not complex. He returns often to Robert Lowell’s landfall line, ‘Why not say what happened?’ It is never unclear what Heaney is saying and his poetry is able to be read by anyone. When his mother died he wrote a sequence of short poems called ‘Crossings.’ Read them when your mother dies. When his father died he wrote a sequence called ‘Clearances.’ When his children were born he wrote about it. When his country was in turmoil he wrote about it. When he and Marie were young marrieds living in a country cottage he wrote the ‘Glanmore Sonnets’ (1979). When he wanted something new, he journeyed to the bogs of Jutland, digging again but in an older place.
At the heart of this book is an investigation into what Heaney thinks matters and how to say it. In Preoccupations: Selected Prose (1980) he asked, ‘How should a poet properly live and write?’ He found some of his answers in Eastern European writers who were ‘keeping on’, who prevailed through horrors; the Czech Miloslav Holub
, the beguiling and deadly Joseph Brodsky and the man Heaney describes as ‘the giant at my shoulder’, Czeslaw Milosz. Read Heaney on his admiration for Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz. Read him also on his fellow feeling for Ted Hughes or the playwright Brian Friel. Read him on his aunt Mary, on Elizabeth Bishop and on Yeats. When Heaney speaks of the ways in which people have helped him in his poetry, he is not always talking about an insight into where he could tighten a stanza. Often it is a kindness, some support, a wink.
Ulster humour is dark, nutritious stuff. When Heaney showed his friend John McGahern the house he had recently purchased, McGahern pondered upon it. ‘Well,’ he announced, ‘you’ve bought the coffin.’ When Heaney had a stroke, from which he has now recovered, Brian Friel visited him in hospital. Friel had had a stroke himself a few years previously and comforted his friend with the insight, ‘Different strokes for different folks’.
If you like poetry or think you might, if you are a writer or might be, if you value place, memory and language, you might enjoy this remarkable book.
W. H. Auden
Across southern Australia there is a beautiful tree called leucopogan. If you google it and find a picture, you’ll realise you know it quite well. The leucopogan seed can germinate only once it has passed through the gut of a bird. The bird eats the seed, softening it through digestion, so that when it drops on the ground, it can open and grow. Twentieth-century poetry is the Leucopogan tree. W. H. Auden is the bird. Next slide please.
Another natural history lesson includes the maxim that in polite company, you should never discuss politics, sex or religion. Auden was cleaning this theory one night when it went off. Almost everything he wrote about, and he wrote about almost everything, was politics, sex or religion.
It was Auden who said that you don’t read a book, a book reads you; a description of the way the creative impulse communicates itself in art. From an early age he himself was read by a lot of history and literature. He was multilingual, saw world events very clearly and he wrote all the time. He also smoked all the time, read all the time and talked all the time. He published verse, prose, criticism and lyrics. He wrote letters, gave lectures and kept a journal all his life. He wrote about love, death, fear, hope and gossip. By the time he was twenty-five a large queue had already formed behind him, waiting to see where he would go next. He pulled journalism into poetry. He pushed politics and ethics into forms previously used only once a week to drive to church. He wrote with such ease and covered such ground that he ran most of his generation out in the heats. People are still copying him and there are strong traces of him even in writers who claim they never touch the stuff.
I have only one small window on all this. In 1966 I was wandering around my school in Wellington with a book of Auden’s letters tucked into my belt in order to ward off evil spirits. My English teacher took me aside and explained the following: When Auden was a young man, the First World War had just blown everything apart. It was no longer possible to write about daffodils or the skylark; the only legitimate subject was the war, the mindless carnage and waste. So Auden and Louis MacNeice, who could not write about the war since they were too young to have been at it, and could not write about anything else since only the war was a proper subject, decided to embark on a venture that was uniquely theirs and out of which they could write. So they went to Iceland with a friend who was a teacher and was taking a party of boys up there on a walking tour. They wrote throughout the trip and eventually published a book about it called Letters from Iceland. ‘And,’ said my English teacher, ‘I was the schoolteacher. So if ever you’d like to read any of Auden’s real letters, let me know. I have boxes of them.’ And so it was that I spent some time reading Auden’s rather chatty letters to Bill Hoyland. The handwriting was small, upright, swift, assured and fluent, in a blue fountain pen, with no corrections. I had no knowledge of Auden, of course. The person most illuminated for me here was my English teacher. He told me that Auden’s two grandfathers, MacNeice’s father and many of the Hoylands were churchmen, and that during the 1930s the young men had sought a way of investing Christian ethics in secular society. Hoyland, a Quaker and our school chaplain, never spoke of scripture. His sermons were about philosophy. So were Auden’s.
Wystan Hugh Auden was born in 1907 in York and grew up in the Midlands where his eyes swallowed the limestone country and where he expected to go into the lead mining business. When he got to university he studied English instead and became a prodigiously gifted shambles at the centre of a group that included MacNeice, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. Like them, during the 1930s Auden wanted poetry to be a force for change. He was to be disappointed, ‘For poetry makes nothing happen.’ But he certainly changed poetry. Even his rhythm was new. It sometimes doesn’t look like rhythm at all. It looks like talk.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place while
Someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
On the real events of his time, Auden is deadly. Here he is in 1939, in a poem officially about Yeats:
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
A lot of Auden’s poems read like this. He’s not a performer; he’s a writer who is thinking aloud. The poet’s project is himself.
Auden and Christopher Isherwood (see Cabaret) left England for America in 1939. Auden married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika, to get her out of Germany, and accepted American offers to lecture. Debate has raged about this ever since. The English establishment disliked Auden because he had sided with the left in Spain in 1936. The left disliked him because he changed his mind after going to Spain in 1937. George Orwell criticised him for writing that during war we all acquiesce in ‘the necessary murder’. Orwell called him ‘a gutless Kipling’. Auden thought this was unfair and, upon reflection, so did Orwell. Auden also agreed with Orwell, disliking some of his own writing of this period and pulling it from his collections.
One of the criticisms made of modernism is that it was essentially selfish; clever and exciting by all means and for a while there the arts were very cool. But modernism did not warn of the two great monsters, Hitler and Stalin. What use is art if it doesn’t pop up a signal before 50 million people get killed? Why should we listen to artists if they don’t have a problem with fascism, racism and mass murder? As Auden himself pointed out, his writing didn’t save a single Jew. This wouldn’t have bothered a lot of poets but to Auden it was a significant moral failure and must be acknowledged. This is a very honest man. Reading him is like being in the disinterested but clever company of a big man who’d have been happy to be small, a famous man who’d have been content to be anonymous and a somewhat distant figure who desperately wants to be close.
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Jane Austen
When I was at university the form guide provided to students of the novel was produced by the Cambridge flat-earther, F. R. Leavis, who named the great novelists as George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence and Jane Austen. Lawrence was probably an honest mistake and rehabilitating George Eliot after the Dickens/Thackeray boom was at least courteous but what Conrad was doing in the side no one knew and selecting Henry James was obviously a c
ry for help.
It was some time before I returned to reading of any kind and it took decades before I could get near Jane Austen, approaching only at night, through biographies.
During the 1990s, however, many of Austen’s works were adapted for the screen and it was possible to actually respond to them rather than be told what the examiners would be looking for.
The novel I knew best was Pride and Prejudice. (Discuss. 30 marks).
In the BBC adaptation it is observed that if the writer’s asides to the reader are removed from a novel, what is left is the plot. Beefing this up and pouring music through it can elevate it slightly but the writer has gone and in the nineteenth century, before the writer was the subject of the novel, the relationship between the writer and the reader is the key part of the arrangement.
In the TV version Elizabeth is beautiful and her mother is a neurotic shrike who insists that her daughters marry the richest men they can find. Elizabeth then marries the richest man she can find, a smouldering stallion she can’t stand until she sees the size of his huge house. In other words we are invited to view Mrs Bennet as a hysterical peabrain with the values of a provincial snob and to imagine somehow that Elizabeth undercuts these values by fulfilling them. This is not terribly ironical and diversionary tactics are employed by the BBC to distract us; extra scenes are added which are not in the novel, such as Darcy peeling off a few laps in his own personal lake and then wuthering off through a Constable landscape.