Where Have You Been? (25 page)

The thing about Murray is that he needs little or nothing to run on. He is a poetical perpetual motion machine. He doesn't need, therefore, intense experience, or its mental/intellectual equivalent, something to prove—a bee in his bonnet—a cause—to write great poetry. He takes no ball, and runs with it. He doesn't actually need the Taj Mahal (with which
Taller When Prone
begins—“From a Tourist Journal”), though there is of course no one one would rather have writing about it: “In a precinct of liver stone, high / on its dais, the Taj seems bloc hail.” It remains the case, though: the way there is just as good, or even a little better, “over honking roads / being built under us, past baby wheat / and undoomed beasts and walking people.” The smiling attentiveness, the respect for the blur of other beings and becomings, are pure, best Murray.

Taller When Prone
is like a book of late Rilke, stray personal dedications, handwritten improvisations, travel notes, set topics, and young ladies' poetry album poems (
Albumblätter
), but then tipped or armed or inflected with a memory of the reliable magic of the
New Poems
of 1907. It is indeed “further topics”: brown suits and bastardy (united in the person of the former Australian prime minister, Bob Hawke); an ancient pear tree that after more than a century continues to bear fruit; a pork sandwich, its paper wrapper scrunched up in—typical Murrayism, two parts oxymoron to one of surrealism—a “greaseproof rose”; another retelling of the tragedy of his father and his uncle Archie; the poet's strange mute cat; a lunar eclipse; the night sky; the vagaries of the stock market; lavender fields in Provence; toddlers playing in a roomful of red balloons; his wife's restored eyesight following an operation for cataracts. It celebrates “Cherries from Young” (“one lip-teased drupe / or whole sweet gallop / poured out of cardboard” and “Eucalypts in Exile” (“Their suits are neater abroad, / of denser drape, un-nibbled: / they've left their parasites at home”). It keeps a weather eye out for the police—always a
bête bleue
of Murray's—(in “Croc”), and, in a splendid blizzard of estuary Saxon, proposes, Marianne Moore–style, an unlikely new name for London's fourth airport: “so savour this name: London Sexburga Airport.” It hymns the new fast metaphysics of motorways (“I'll ride a slow vehicle // before cars are slow / as country was slow”—the “slow vehicle” is Murray's hearse-to-be), and recalls an ingenious way of getting across (boiling-hot) tarred roads relatively unscathed during “the barefoot age” (“The Filo Soles”). Like the
Neue Gedichte
, the poems average out at around sonnet length and sonnet punch. The cobbler's widow in “Winding Up at the Bootmaker's” (“Kneeling up in Mediterranean black, / reaching down the numbered parcels / as if returning all their wedding gifts”) has something of Rilke's notes on life at the Rodins', or his Paris poem “The Blind Man,” where a blind beggar is described as extending his hand “almost formally, as if in marriage.” “The Suspect Corpse,” fourteen lines from “The dead man lay, nibbled, between / dark carriages of a rocky river, // a curled load of himself, in cheap / clothes crusted in dried water,” down to its denouement: “After three months, he could only / generalise, and had started smiling,” seems to me to be very evidently in communion with Rilke's “Washing the Corpse,” at the end of which “one without a name / lay there, bare and clean, and gave orders.” “Generalise”—a refusal to incriminate anyone or himself under the torture that is forensics—is unexpected and funny and canny, and “smiling”—the skull's grin—is grimly sweet; truly, in both cases, dead men talk.

As with Rilke, physical laws change direction, gestures and appearances acquire a different meaning, and power is vested in unexpected quarters. The delicate pastry makes an impermeable layering for tender feet in “The Filo Soles”; “Midi” begins with a cloudscape of exceptional firmness, “Muscles and torsos of cloud / ascended over the mountains,” and ends (by agency of the blue herb, itself described as “a strange maize / deeply planted as mass javelins”) as an even more solid wonder: “sweet walling breath / under far-up gables of the lavender.” “The Farm Terraces” celebrates these wonders of (no pun intended) terrifying human persistence and anonymous, collective labor (“at the orders of hunger / or a pointing lord”), a form of planetary home improvement, visible from space, “Baskets of rich made soil / boosted up poor by the poor.” Everywhere, there are these little, or not so little wonders, whether they meet with Murray's approval or not: “A full moon always rises at sunset / and a person is taller when prone” and the drolly conservative musing, “Soldiers now can get in the family way” are both taken from “The Conversations”; there is the blind man who says to the poet, over the phone, “I can hear you smiling,” or the mute cat, “A charcoal Russian / he opens his mouth like other cats / and mimes a greeting mew.” The language knots, bulges, scintillates; everywhere, organic matter is being pressed to coal, or coal to diamonds. The effect can be silly (I can see and hear Murray's cracked giggle)—“Raj-time uniforms,” “plum Crimean fig,” “the drunk heir-splitting / of working for parents”—but it is never arch, and is sometimes sublime: “As bees summarise the garden,” or “Chefs' knives peeled green islands / as the climate turned bohemian / over Woop Woop of the wind farms / and the bloodshot television” in a poem about global warming and fusion cuisine, both together (I'll confess I don't understand the “bloodshot television”—perhaps the turbines interfere with the reception?). An “Infinite Anthology” celebrates a sort of folk poetry close to Murray's heart, wonderfully resourceful anonymous linguistic inventions that add, often slyly or disrespectfully, to the gaiety of things: “daylight—second placegetter when winner is very superior to field,” “dandruff acting—the stiffest kind of Thespian art,” “Baptist Boilermaker—coffee and soda (an imagined Puritan cocktail),” “limo—limousin cattle / proud—castrated but still interested.”

A surprise in
Killing the Black Dog
is Murray's prose: he can really write it, and not like Lowell, say, in “91 Revere Street” or “Near the Unbalanced Aquarium,” like the poetry, only more so—
thicker
impasto of adjectives,
more
proper names, the same furtive emblems, the same wounding, pivotal scenes—but as its own thing, with the clarity and good order and communicativeness of prose. Murray doesn't affect to like prose—in this he is like Ted Hughes, who thought writing so much of it (the seven hundred pages of
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being
) was bad for him, and even ultimately hastened his death—but he is undeniably good at it, plain, brave sentences, descriptive, not overly luxuriant language, logical connections, purposeful paragraphs, effective pacing:

Every day, though, sometimes more than once a day, sometimes all day, a coppery taste in my mouth, which I termed intense insipidity, heralded a sense of helpless, bottomless misery in which I would lie curled in a foetal position on the sofa with tears leaking from my eyes, my brain boiling with a confusion of stuff not worth calling thought or imagery: it was more like shredded mental kelp marinaded in pure pain. During and after such attacks, I would be prostrate with inertia, as if all my energy had gone into a black hole.

Murray gives an impressively clear account of his condition, its sudden and unexpected onset—return, really—following “a well-attended poetry reading at the bowling club” in 1988, at the end of which one of the audience “cheerfully recalled to me one of the nicknames she had bestowed on me thirty-odd years previously, and within a day or two I began to come apart,” its roots in the physical and sexual humiliations he was daily offered at school (“erocide” is Murray's term for it, “deliberate destruction of a person's sexual morale”), and the early death of his mother, and the guilt of the two grief-stricken survivors (“Burning Want”):

From just on puberty, I lived in funeral:

mother dead of miscarriage, father trying to be dead,

we'd boil sweat-brown cloth; cows repossessed the garden.

Lovemaking brought death, was the unuttered principle.

The boiling of the “sweat-brown cloth” is especially bleak: here are two monks, Brother Les and Brother Cecil, the last of an order.

Australia, often (the “tall poppy syndrome”), and Australian womanhood in particular, reflexive left-wing politics (encoded as “1968” or the culture of “the demo”), fashion, hippies, Nazism, “the Totalitarian Age” of privilege, atheism, feminism, cosmopolitan chic, got whirled up together into a sort of enemy maelstrom of desire to hurt. Their presence as words is always a bad sign in Murray's poems—
Taller When Prone
has a poem called “The 41st Year of 1968,” dedicated to the memory of the “173 dead in the Victorian fires of 2009”—because the reader knows to expect a dull blast of stodgy fury. “The worst way to have chronic depression,” Murray writes in
Killing the Black Dog
, “is to have it unconsciously, to be in a burning rage and not know you are angry.” Prose—not the prose here, other, more polemical, occasional prose—cops most of the blame, for being “more liable than poetry to be infiltrated with the colours of confusion and obsession,” but it is a strange and terrifying thing to see Murray the poet as well—a generous, charming, equable, and accommodating soul, who gives equal rights and equal time to feather, flower, scale, and rock (and to the human counterparts of these things as well)—become vicious, embattled, humorless, and vengeful. Perhaps none of the poems in
Killing the Black Dog
are really among Murray's best, they are too “hot,” too emotional, too determinedly therapeutic. They let the dogs out; the effect is a little like having Charles Bukowski, say—some hero of Beat autobiography—rewritten by Marianne Moore: it's a waste of both of them, especially Moore. (Although I read them as proof that this too—the rawly personal—is among Murray's gifts.) There are poems in which he writes
about
depression, rather as Lowell writes
about
mania, from outside, from memory, from afterward (“A Torturer's Apprenticeship”):

Those years trapped in a middling cream town

where full-grown children hold clear views

and can tell from his neck he's really barefoot

though each day he endures shoes,

he's what their parents escaped, the legend

of dogchained babies on Starve Gut Creek;

be friends with him and you will never

be shaved or uplifted, cool or chic.

He blusters shyly—poverty can't afford instincts.

Nothing protects him, and no one.

He must be suppressed, for modernity,

for youth, for speed, for sexual fun.

This is a terrifyingly lucid account of bullying, and the potential for the further, downward transmission of more bullying (“this one might have made dark news”) that Murray found in himself. “A Hindenburg of vast rage / rots, though, above your life”—though “rots,” as if the thing had been not a blimp but a marrow, is terrifying—somehow still stacks up alongside Lowell's coolly and amiably apologetic “when I have one head / again, not many, like a bunch of grapes.” “Performance” builds on Malcolm Lowry's eight-liner “After Publication of
Under the Volcano
” (“Success is like some horrible disaster”):

I starred last night, I shone:

I was footwork and firework in one,

a rocket that wriggled up and shot

darkness with a parasol of brilliants

and a peewee descant on a flung bit;

I was busters of glitter-bombs expanding

to mantle and aurora from a crown,

I was fouettés, falls of blazing paint,

para-flares spot-welding cloudy heaven,

loose gold off fierce toeholds of white,

a finale red-tongued as a haka leap:

that too was a butt of all right!

As usual after any triumph, I was

of course inconsolable.

But I don't know that I know anything like “Rock Music” (“Sex is a Nazi”) or “A Stage in Gentrification” (“Most Culture has been an East German plastic bag / pulled over our heads”) or “Demo” (“go choke on these quatrain tablets, / I grant you no claim ever”)—or if I do, then, like graffiti or heckles or green vitriol, unsigned. These are poems Yeats might have theorized or promulgated in dreams but didn't write, sour outbursts of loathing and unquenchable aggression. Writing not
about
but squarely
out of
his victimhood, Murray is too hard on others, too easy on himself; poetry here shrivels to gifted labeling and sloganeering; things normally played with and toyed with are handled in deadly earnest, as weapons; all superiority disappears, except a desperate need to be superior in close combat. It was surely to punish and forestall just such writing that Yeats delivered his stricture on arguments with others making for “rhetoric.” The sense of the poet as embattled and opposed acquires an unhealthy prominence, a centrality, even.

It was one part of Murray's hope that he might be able to write “the dog” out of his system; another—as witness the title of the present volume—that it might have failed to survive its host's near-fatal liver disorder in 1996. It was in that same year that he wrote the bulk of what was originally given as a talk, and with it, the sober makings of a happy ending: “My thinking is no longer jammed and sooty with resentment. I no longer wear only stretch-knit clothes and drawstring pants. I no longer come down with bouts of weeping or reasonless exhaustion. […] If I have a regret, in the sudden youth and health of my mind in its fifty-eighth year, it is that I've got well so late in my life.” In a brief afterword from 2009, Murray concedes he was overoptimistic: “I know now that you can't kill the Dog, and that thus my earlier account has the wrong title; it should be called
Learning the Black Dog
.” Still, he sounds a little easier, and with the rest of us, and with them (his real and imagined enemies). One feels for him, and with him, in his last sentence: “What I still do mourn is the terrible waste of energy the Dog has exacted from me, over my lifetime and especially in my twenty horror years, and how much more I might have achieved if I'd owned a single, healthy mind working on my side.” Poetry, in Murray's admirable practice of it, has been a function of health, of wholesome excess, a margin of clear profit. He is not some sort of John Berryman, luridly and misguidedly asking for “the worst possible ordeal that will not actually kill him”; rather, I see him as a grease monkey fiddling and tooling with language and perception, making idiosyncratic memorial word machines. Murray's crisis narrowed and crabbed his focus, and turned him in on himself—a shame in one who sees so levelly and far, and who writes so abundantly and with such generosity and fullness. The poems and prose here are accordingly—cutely—aptly—dedicated not like his other books “to the glory of God,” but “to the need of God.” Murray has shown such amazing, prodigious strength of character and discipline and bravery and faith, that he allowed neither himself nor his gift to be broken, but that they fought the Dog together, if not to victory—“
wer spricht von Sieg
,” says Rilke—but at least to a standstill.