Even as We Speak (35 page)

Yet even our most doom-laden efforts were written on a tide of optimism. We had a terrific time, and I think some of that afflatus got into what we turned out, giving a joyous lilt to even the
bleakest dirge. We used to meet late at night in the Footlights club-room, which in that era was a first-floor walk-up in Petty Cury, a decrepit lane which has since been replaced by the kind of
blond-brick shopping mall where people in training shoes buy fluorescent haversacks. Snugly installed with a pint each from the bar, we put our songs together at the old upright piano, Pete
changing the melodies to fit my words, me changing the words to fit the melodies, both of us working towards each other like tunnellers from different sides of the world. Upstairs, the massed
hearties of the University Yacht Club were either dancing a reel or else attacking the floor with sledgehammers. Downstairs, the loosely stored merchandise of Macfisheries sent up the odour of the
ocean after a thermonuclear blast. But nothing could break our concentration or poison the atmosphere of shared endeavour. We knew what we were after. Total expression, and popular success.

Pete loved rock and roll. He had a fierce, though not undiscriminating, interest in everything rock was turning into, from Fairport Convention at the soft end all the way across to Randy Newman
at the ragged edge. But he also loved the traditions of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. He wanted to get everything into his melodies. I felt the same about lyrics. I wanted to get every form of
writing into them: poetry, drama, reportage, aphorisms, gags. But I also wanted to get every
form
into them. I liked the grab-bag lyrics of Bob Dylan but would have preferred them tightly
rhymed; vowel rhymes were too loose. I wanted those clinching syllables to match up, as they always had from the courtly love lyrics of the troubadours all the way through to those stomping numbers
Leiber and Stoller wrote for Elvis Presley. Word play, slang, literary allusions: let’s have it all. Why not?

There was nothing Pete couldn’t set. I could write a long, complicated verse full of tricky internal rhymes and he could make it soar and swoop like an aria. Even better, I could follow
the flashy verse with a childishly simple chorus and he could fill every black-and-white phrase of it with emotional colour. Remembering Sydney Harbour on a Saturday afternoon, I wrote:
‘Between the headlands to the sea/ The fleeing yachts of summer go.’ He set the two syllables of ‘fleeing’ to the same note-length as the single syllable of
‘sea’ and the yachts sped up in front of your mind’s eye, as if their spinnakers had been snapped open by the wind. Here were melodies you could touch, and my words were there
inside them like amber-breathing butterflies, transfigured and vivified into a sumptuous compound that would never come apart. Talk about a lucky break!

I loved what we were doing. Better yet, when Pete sang our numbers in the Footlights revues on the Edinburgh fringe the audience loved what we were doing. Better even than that, when the albums
came out –
Beware of the Beautiful Stranger, Driving Through Mythical America, The Road of Silk, A King at Nightfall, Secret Drinker
– the people who bought them loved what we
were doing. They wrote letters to tell us. Strange, wild-eyed young men would come up to me in the street, quote a phrase and give me their blessing. I didn’t see how we could lose. What
could go wrong?

Everything. The rocket sat on the pad for year after year, spilling impressive plumes of boiling liquid oxygen but resolutely refusing to lift off. I blamed the record companies, the BBC
playlist committee, the journalists, the weather. I even blamed poor Kenny Everett for managing to get himself fired in the very week that he was playing one of our songs every time he went on the
air. It was a long time after we packed it in that I started blaming the real culprit. Myself. You could have total expression, or you could have popular success, but not both. What I had created
was an insuperable marketing problem. Guilt-ridden at having led my gifted colleague down a blind alley, I put it all behind me.

What I never guessed was that the market would change, and that the old, rigid recording industry would melt down like the Soviet Union. There was a new form of distribution on the way: the
Internet. Early this year, when some bright young spark in my office taught me how to switch the thing on, there it was: the rocket finally lifting off.

On the Pete Atkin website (www.peteatkin.com) anyone who wants to can find out everything, including how to buy the first two albums, reissued on a
single CD. (Seeformiles C5 HCD 664). There are photographs, music sheets, chord sequences, learned analyses. What really floored me, however, was to see all the lyrics I had ever written come
popping up one after the other. Many of them I had utterly forgotten, but somebody had remembered. There really is a life after death: a nice thing to find out while you’re still alive. It
was a perfect moment, like the one at Cheltenham. The audience was still there at the end, by the way, and their applause made the trousers of two ageing men flare as in days of old. If we still
had sideburns, they would have been on fire with pride.

Independent
, 21 October, 1999

Over the hundreds of years it has taken for the colonies of the old European empires to become nations, there have been cases – most notably, of course, the United States
– where a creole literature has made an important addition to the literature of the homeland, but there has been no case quite comparable to that of Australian poetry in this century. The
Spanish poetry of the Americas comes close – a history of poetry in the Spanish language that did not give Ruben Dario a crucial place would be no history at all – but even that has
little to compare with the burgeoning of Australian poetry in the last hundred years. Trainee midwives on tenterhooks, Australian nationalists eager for every sign of a successful parturition from
the homeland have a lot to go on. Though it remains necessary to call them unwise, it would be unwise to call them fools. What they really want is for Australia to become the new USA: the ex-colony
that made it all the way to the status of world power. The more likely realization of so gullible a wish would be Australia as an extra American state – a new Alaska with a better climate, or
at most a new California with a better social security system. But since it undoubtedly would also have a better literature, there is something to be said, from the cultural viewpoint, for these
dreams of autarky. Sir Les Patterson, Minister for the Yartz, has never been entirely wrong on that point: it is only by missing the larger point that his view becomes ridiculous. A culture can
never flourish as a hedge against the world. It isn’t a bastion for nationalism, it is an international passport.

The best known internationally among his generation of Australian poets, Les Murray would count as a nationalist if there were such a thing as a purely political view. Up to and including the
prospect of severing all monarchist ties with Britain he believes politically in the Australia he gave a name to: the Vernacular Republic. But as his collections of densely wrought essays prove,
when it comes to culture he also believes that such a thing as purely political belief can’t be had. The secret of his pre-eminence as a writer of critical prose in Australia today is his
capacity not to simplify what he would like to change. Blessed with a sense of history and the gifts to articulate it, he would be an important man of letters even if he never wrote a poem, and he
would be a vital shaping influence of Australia’s emergent poetic tradition if only by dint of his anthologies. Murray favours what Ezra Pound used to call the active anthology: one whose
poems are chosen because they are all inventions, and not just representative of their authors’ reputations. Wide-ranging and generous in his choices, adept – sometimes too adept
– at leaving himself out of the picture, he chooses from the creole heritage to bring out the full complexity of the relationship between the Australian poets of previous generations and the
old Empire that was always on their minds even when they tried to repudiate it.

Murray’s anthologies could easily have been more tendentiously selective. In his
New Oxford Book of Australian Verse
he includes a striking proportion of aboriginal poetry: any
Mexican anthology that included so much Indian poetry would be accused of pushing the
mestizo
ideal to the point of nationalist fervour. But not even his Oxford book tries to pretend that
the imperial past was a state of false consciousness from which Australia had to awake before it could breathe free air. Because he has played so straight with the complexities of history, Murray
has established impeccable credentials for himself as an interpreter of his country’s present. As a consequence, everything he does as a man of letters takes on a growing burden of
responsiblity. His poetry can look after itself: none better. But he finds his merest book review being scrutinized for political resonance, and an anthology like his new, quirkily named
Fivefathers
acquires a significance beyond the literary. Speaking as a devout cultural reactionary, my own first reaction to Murray’s latest survey of his literary forefathers
(Fivefathers equals forefathers plus one: I just got it) is that if all the other nationalists were as judicious as he, the prospect of a republic would be a lot less daunting. To borrow Thomas
Mann’s classic formulation about Goethe, Murray is radical enough to understand the good.

Murray’s five fathers were all active in what he tellingly calls the pre-Academic era, when Australian poets had to make their way without any support from the as yet undeveloped academic
industry, and were not necessarily the worse off for it. First-time readers of Australian poetry in Britain, at whom this Carcanet publication must principally be aimed, should be warned that
another criterion for inclusion is death. None of these five fathers is among the living or even the recently departed, which means that there are some comparable contemporary figures who are not
present and should be sought elsewhere. There are fathers like A. D. Hope, mothers like Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood, and sisters, cousins and aunts who should ideally be here too. But
Murray’s anthologizing activities always lead you in that direction: each of them feels like the beginning of the ideal inclusive book, the one that, nothing but art, contains
all
the art. What we need to remember is that such a book can no longer be compiled: Australian poetry has become too big a subject – has become a
field
, to which we need a
guide
, and eventually quite a few more of those academic help-words of which Murray is so rightly suspicious, believing as he does that they threaten the death of personality. Like all
true humanist critics an implacable enemy of literary theory, he wants us to experience his five fathers as living men, and it is permissible to suspect that he wants this with particular urgency
in the case of the first father in the queue, Kenneth Slessor, from whose work Murray’s selection is particularly lavish and – dare one say it? – loving. Of this father, Murray
speaks as a true son.

At Sydney University in the late 1950s, most of the young poets were men but would haunt the cafeteria of the women’s Union, Manning House. The reason was simple: in Manning House you
could linger over a single coffee cup for hours without getting thrown out, whereas from the men’s Union ejection followed precipitately upon the first gurgling of the dregs. With the
conspicuous exception of Murray – even in those days, he stood out like Sydney Greenstreet miscast as Ginger Meggs – few of the Manning House poets had the heritage of Australian poetry
much on their minds. My own
Stammtisch
would be decorated with slim Faber volumes in their original glamorous wrappers, all purchased from Tyrrel’s secondhand bookshop at the Quay
end of George Street: Auden, MacNeice, T. S. Eliot and the occasional impressively fat black-bound fascicle of Pound’s
Cantos
, which inchoate effusion I held at the time to be
omniscience distilled into a crucible of obsidian. Robert Hughes wouldn’t even be reading in English: if he hadn’t already memorized it, he would be carrying
Mon coeur mis à
nu
, muttering lines from it while he drew caricatures in the margin. Home-grown literary magazines like
Meanjin
and
Westerly
were for old lecturers in gowns who cared about
Vance Palmer and were sincerely, absurdly, bent on setting up a Department of Australian Literature. For them, and for Murray.

For the rest of
les jeunes
, the very concept of an Australian literature seemed far away, yet even those of us already committed in advance to a breakaway existence knew about Slessor.
Everyone owned a copy of
One Hundred Poems
. In those days books of poetry published in Australia looked and smelled like books published in the Soviet Union throughout its benighted
career: i.e. they looked like tat and smelled like glue. Cherishably well-presented volumes like the Edwards and Shaw edition of A. D. Hope’s
The Wandering Islands
were the very rare
exceptions. Slessor’s
One Hundred Poems
was an Angus and Robertson booklet bound in an uneasy combination of paper and stiff cardboard. It was pitiably unimpressive to look at. But
we all knew that the stuff inside it was the best Australian poetry anybody had yet seen. Shamefully, at least one Manning House
habitué
for too long employed this awareness as an
excuse to dismiss everyone else, and even in Slessor’s case I had been away from Australia for twenty years before I took his full measure as an artist, memorized everything, and began the
long job, which his example necessitated, of getting the national literature into perspective within my own mind.

The main point to make about Murray’s relationship with Slessor is that Murray saw Slessor’s pivotal importance straight away, and with a thoroughness that helped determine his own
attitude to his privileges and duties as a poet in Australia, as opposed to the poets
from
Australia that most of the rest of us vaguely dreamed of ourselves as being, if not yet then some
day soon. At his own table in Manning House, Murray always looked as if he was dug in to stay. A boy from the country for whom Sydney was exotic enough, he approached Slessor personally, made his
admiration clear, presented his own work for criticism, and was eventually rewarded with Slessor’s acknowledgment that he, Murray, had been determined by fate to pick up and carry on the
torch that Slessor had dropped. In private life, when the company is suitable, Murray has been known to recount the details of this apostolic succession. His pride is justifiable, and a nice
example of the anecdotal human scale that still vestigially applies to the Australian literary life even in this later age of arts-section hype, globe-girdling travel, and the isolation that forms
unbidden around famous names. I got that story out of him over a glass of white wine at Australia House the last time he read in London, and it was only a few weeks ago, in Bloomsbury, at a
publisher’s jamboree for booksellers, that David Malouf easily secured my agreement to the proposition that Murray’s critical prose was by far the best thing of its kind being written
in Australia now. The idea of an Australian international literary mafia is not a very good one (principally because it is not a very good metaphor) but if there is something to the notion of an
extended family of those devoted to literature, then in a large part it goes back to Slessor, a godfather in the best, most benign sense, even when – perhaps especially when – he was no
longer creative.