The Meaning of Recognition (3 page)

One ‘as’ after another, linked like a little chain of worry beads. How can he, of all people, be so definite about being indefinite?
As if I had cancer
.
Well, we can be reasonably sure that the house has it. In the last line of the poem, the narrator is worried that for the house there might be no cure.

The house has it, but an intergalactic literary critic who stepped off a spaceship could be excused for deducing that the poet himself does not have it, or he would have written a different way.
The intergalactic critic, however, would be deducing the wrong thing. At one stage I was myself the intergalactic critic, and I can remember all too well how, with regard to Hodgins’ career
as a poet, I got things exactly backwards. Stuck in my study in London, a long way from the Australian poetic action, I first noticed him in a little poem about a dam in the country. The poem
popped up somewhere in the international poetic world: the
New Yorker
or some anthology. (If you’re serious about poetry, it’s probably the best way of finding out what’s really going on: when a poem hits you between the eyes even though you don’t know
anything about the person who wrote it, the chances are better that the person in question is the genuine article.) The rim of the dam featured a pair of ibises.

Immediately I reached the correct conclusion that Philip Hodgins had the talent to write anything. It was the only correct conclusion I was to reach for some time. By the time I read about
Hodgins at length, in an essay by Les Murray now included in
A Working Forest
, Hodgins was nearing death. When I started to read Hodgins himself at length, I started in the middle and
somehow convinced myself that his illness had snuck up on him, and had become a subject only towards the end, when he became aware of the threat. This was a conclusion easily reached from the
seemingly untroubled richness of his central work. But it was the wrong conclusion in the biggest possible way. For a student of literature, the advantage of living abroad is that he is less likely
to have his judgment pre-empted by gossip. The disadvantage is that there is always some gossip he ought to hear. Knowing about Hodgins’ possible death sentence earlier wouldn’t have
altered my estimation of his qualities, but it would have drastically affected my appreciation of the way he brought them into action. Hodgins had known about his condition right from the beginning
of his career as a poet. He had known that some periods of remission were the most he could hope for. That he had not made this his principal subject, or anyway the ostensible centreline of his
viewpoint, was an act of choice. This act of choice, I believe, must be called heroic, but before we call it that we should look at some of the results, as they are manifested in what he left
behind at the start, and then in what he passed through before he returned to what he left behind, in a curving journey which contains a world.

His first volume,
Blood and Bone
, came out in 1986 and contained not only ‘The Dam’, which I had seen in isolation, but a cluster of poems less contemplative. In the long
run, the dam and its tap-like ibises, with their effect of an Egyptian fresco discovered by flashlight, would set the poised tone for his central pastoralism. But in the first volume they were as
uncharacteristic as an embrace in the middle of a battle. Most of the first poems were anguished reactions to the news the doctors had given him; news about his blood; news that gave him a new
measure of time. The last three of the five tiny stanzas that make up the poem ‘Room 1 Ward 10 West 23/11/83’ give us a summary.

Though Hodgins probably did not mean us to, it is impossible for us not to think of the girl who gave her age in disbelief to the German engineer at Babi Yar as she was driven naked towards the
pit. What is happening here is a wartime atrocity. Wartime atrocities happen in peacetime. Chance behaves like a homicidal maniac. It is one of Hodgins’ messages, and it could have been his
only message for the rest of his short career. He had the power of language to make it stick. His first book is full of moments like that. In ‘Ontology’ – a resonant title for
someone whose existence has just been put into question – he collapses, or seems to collapse, into an inconsolable solipsism.

He knows this is self-pity. He calls it that. He called a poem that, ‘Self-pity’, and put into it the pure expression of a purely personal emotion, thereby letting the rest of us
taste its tears, if we dare to.

In the first line of ‘The Cause of Death’, a deadly wit got into his range of effects. ‘Suddenly I am waiting for slow death’. Like the sudden sitting up and childish
smile, the wit was a hint that he would find a kind of liberation in this prison. (Though Rilke was always pretty careful to keep his living conditions as comfortable as possible, the liberating
prison was an idea he was fond of, so it is not strange that Hodgins was fond of Rilke, and cited him often.) But first Hodgins had to conjure the prison’s stone walls and iron bars, and he
went on doing it over and over. In ‘Trip Cancelled’ (and between the title and the first stanza we have already guessed why the trip was cancelled) he says:

How could he write the poem at all? And how could the poems be different from each other? In ‘From County Down’ he seemed to wonder that himself.

We can be sure of that. But we can equally be sure that he’d seen a possibility. We might not have done, and this time by ‘we’ I mean I. To the extent that I
know myself, I’m fairly sure that I would have given up. But Hodgins seems already to have had an inkling that he might have been handed a way back to his deepest memories if only he could
keep concentrating. There are hints of this awareness even in ‘Question Time’, a poem that takes it for granted the clock will soon stop.

But there’s the wit already, and at the end of the same poem is the hope that persists on surfacing through despair: the hope that something might be achieved even
now.

He never went on easily, but he did go on, into the great central period of his achievement that we can already see as one of the glories of late-twentieth-century Australian poetry. To a large
extent generated by the rise of Australia to the position of an interconnected communications metropolis, a component of the global artistic hypermarket, one of the most remarkable multiple
creative outbursts of modern times had the poetry of Philip Hodgins as part of its central cluster of events, and his poetry was much more pastoral than urban: it almost always had something to do
with the farm. It was about a vanishing world, and it was written by a vanishing man. But in both cases, he found a way to keep the loss. One of the death poems, ‘Walking Through the
Crop’, starts like a renunciation.

But it does matter, or he wouldn’t be saying so. It’s the writerly paradox that lies at the base of all poetry about despair, and in that paradox the young Hodgins
has just received the most intense possible education. The death poems went on into his second volume, brilliantly called
Down The Lake With Half A Chook
: I say ‘brilliantly’
because there could have been no more economical commitment to the Vernacular Republic than to give a book of verse a title so
echt
Australian that it would need to be translated even into
English. ‘The Drip’ is the most terrible of all the needle poems. It registers what happens when the needle comes out during the night: damage to the damage.

This is beauty as dearly bought as it can get. It would have been no surprise if Hodgins had stuck to these themes until the end, no matter how long the end might have been postponed by
remissions. Most artists don’t know what a winning streak is when they are on it. A few know how to follow where it leads, and only a very few, the great ones, knowing exactly what it is, get
out early and look for something else. Somewhere about the time that his projected three years were up and he found himself still alive, Hodgins expanded his range into the unexpected, and began
talking as if his memories of his upbringing on the farms were going to accompany him into his old age. He knew they couldn’t, but he talked as if they would. ‘A Farm in the High
Country’ is typical of his poems in this manner: typical, that is, in being pretty much a masterpiece.

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.