Stephen J. Williams

Category: Comment

Blog posts, commentary, reviews.

  • To like most the poems most needed

    Barrett Reid: Making Country (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, in association with Paperbark Press, 1995).

    I had read these poems many times before they were published here. Barrett Reid worked hard on his poems. He polished them, sometimes for years; and many major changes were made to them only months before this book was sent to be set. Many fine poems, I am told—I never read them—were lost in a house fire, years ago. (What is it about poems, even small, apparently easy poems, that no effort of will can make them come back, force them to be reconstructed or remembered, if a writer should lose them?) So, Barrett Reid’s first and last book of poems will be the last we hear of him as a poet, even though there are fragments, some pieces nearly but not quite finished, that might usefully be studied alongside the ones in this book: no future edition could confidently add anything significant to this one.

    Shortly before his death, after the manuscript of this book was settled and he had himself had a little time to assess it, Reid commented to several friends on the surprise of noticing he had been an editor who encouraged experimentation and modernity even though his own poems, seen as a whole, seemed a bit “old fashioned”. Well, yes, maybe. That would be one way of putting it. As much as I would like to give Barrett Reid the last word on this, I think it is truer to say that Reid did not write an ‘old fashioned’ kind of poem but that he failed to overcome his influences. He was in some ways a better reader of poems than a writer of them.

    These influences sometimes announce themselves very loudly, leaving me with the impression that Reid has borrowed another writer’s signature. In ‘Seatime’, Reid’s love of Wallace Stevens competes with the poem’s content for my attention:

    There is a voice that does not reach the shore.
    We do not hear it, walking on the shore.

    [‘Seatime’, p. 3.]

    At other times the influence of reading is more productive when Reid engages with another writer’s ideas. In ‘Go Gently’ his disagreement with Dylan Thomas is as clear, and as deeply felt, as Randall Jarrell’s with Auden:

    I will go gently to the unmanned night
    where good and bad are left behind the light.

    When in life I shared the quiet of nature
    why, dying, should I seek to make a stir?

    I had some joy, I had some pain,
    some sense they may not come again.

    Loved much, but too carefully. Do not rage
    but love madly to furnish your old age.

    [‘Go Gently’, p. 65.]

    But the first couplet is unnecessary; the second (sitting under the same title), in my view, would have been the better, epigrammatic opening.

    As ‘Go Gently’ shows, I believe, Reid’s poems are most potent when he is most sure of his meaning. This sounds like a truism, unless we recall what Reid often said, as an editor and reader of poems: that he liked most those poems which were most needed. The first principle of his reading practice was to keep one ear alert to the part of writing’s energy that signified this need. And, if that urgency or sense of necessity were present in a poem or story, then there was a good reason to take the writing seriously. It’s a liberal urge: to look first for writing’s urgency, rather than judge its content or intent.

    Measuring Reid’s poems in the same way, by his own method, any reasonable estimation would have to conclude they succeed wonderfully. (Examining the poems by a different method might lead me to different conclusions, of course. Why, for example, are there twenty-six references to ‘air’ [twenty-seven, if I count all senses] in only 117 pages of poems? Can it be because this is an important leitmotif, or are there at least a few instances where a too-easy rhyme causes an imprecise image to appear? Close reading of any kind, according to a program or ideology, will have the effect of making a text unwind before your eyes; and at a point somewhere near the reader’s exhaustion—or frustration—it isn’t hard to imagine the author shrugging his shoulders and saying, “But you weren’t meant to read it like that. Does anyone read poems like that?” And this imaginary author is right—so I will not read them that way.) There is a marvellous variety of poems here, humorous, philosophical, satirical, generous, on love and lovers, on friendship, on places, on art, cancer, poets and plants. The mixture seems, because it is, a perfectly natural reflection of Reid’s interests, preoccupations and ethic.

    So, it also seems natural to say that these poems are not about nothing, even when (in at least two poems) that is exactly what they are about. How to make a life, a way of living, of being with others, out of ‘nothing’? The atheist’s problem: there is no god, so, what now? This appears to have been, going on the evidence of the poems themselves, a theme that Reid struggled to work out and to write down. ‘Making Country’ offers no solution, except to note what can be done:

    So take it easy.
    We can do no more
    than map precisely
    and explore the world we make.

    [‘Making Country’, p. 47.]

    ‘Nothing’ is one of the poems in this book that benefited by being severely cut late in its career: there was a whole fifth section, now gone, that added nothing important to the difficult and hopeful conclusion of its final version:

    Such is their nakedness.
    You would say: their love
    has come to nothing after all,
    there is no other here, or anywhere —
    nothing to take the strain, nothing
    between each one. Here
    in distance, in exile, above
    all, shall love grow.
    This is its very air.
    For there is nothing here
    there are no names for you to go by now
    there is no prayer,
    only a heart beating, below
    all, and being human
    free to move
    into that nothing which is love.

    [‘Nothing’, p. 61.]

  • Literary-hetero-potentates Rule, OK?

    Robert Dessaix (ed.): Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing; An Anthology (Oxford University Press).

    The title is wrong, of course, and the stupid scandal, which the book’s promoters no doubt thought a coup, could have been avoided, if anyone wanted to avoid it, by naming the book honestly. Not an anthology of gay and lesbian writing, this is a collection of writing about gays and lesbians. And, either way you look at it, an inadequate one.

    The “literary association of homosexuality”, Dessaix writes in his introduction, “with an abnormal closed social system [of Australia’s convict period] has given Australian writers the freedom to explore homosexuality by locating it inside other kinds of microcosms — in particular prisons, boarding-schools, ships, the armed-services and hospitals.” I don’t get it. What sort of “freedom” is that? A literary association with the abnormal and the closed gives writers a freedom to explore homosexuality by locating it in other kinds of microcosms, which also happen to be (it can’t be by chance!) abnormal and closed systems. This freedom, which does not look to me like a freedom at all, is apparently the same sort of freedom that allows Dessaix to put Patrick White and Elizabeth Jolley into the same category of “mainstream writers, none of whom would have identified themselves as ‘gay’…” The problem with White is that, although his homosexuality was not his ‘identification’, he did not hide it; he is the prime example of a ‘gay’ writer whose subject matter does not line up neatly behind his sexuality.

    And that is Dessaix’s — and his anthology’s — problem. This anthology is a demonstration of how narrow the concerns of gay writers can seem if one starts with the (unspoken) premise that gay writers are writers who write from the position of their sexual preference about matters relating to that preference. The truth is, of course, that gay writers and their writing in Australia are not limited in this way; and White is only one of the proofs of this.

    It would not have been hard to construct an anthology of writing by gay writers, men and women, that included work about heterosexual relationships and everything else. Such an anthology would have had the double advantage of showing that gay writers write about more than sex and their own sexuality, and of being a true anthology of gay writing. Instead, Dessaix retells the big lie: when gay writers write about sex they are writing about sex; when straight writers write about sex they are writing about life.

    This first major error leads Dessaix into others, equally damaging. He asks, for example, since much gay writing (by men) is short and fragmentary (so he claims), whether the form of the novel is “inherently heterosexual, unconsciously based on heterosexual paradigms about the generation of meaning through heterosexual coupling and reproduction …” David Leavitt, who provides a blurb for the book, might have thought this funny, if he read it at all. At least four important Australian novelists might at any time wander onstage and spoil Dessaix’s fantasy. Literature, after all, is the business of stating untestable truths; but I am not so sure we should allow anthologists the same licence.

    And why shouldn’t Australia’s literary-hetero-potentates be allowed to put their shoulders to the wheel of gayness? Supporters implore prospective purchasers to consider their commitment to the higher good of good writing, which is to be enjoyed despite the anthology’s short-comings. Leaving aside the real scandal that would greet an anthology of aboriginal writing that had whities in it, or the realler scandal of an anthology of writing about aboriginals that forgot to include great slabs of beautifully written bigotry — it is true that this anthology contains some fine writing. Dessaix must be praised for that, and for finding and acknowledging Jon Rose’s At the Cross: Growing Up in King’s Cross, Sydney’s Soho, though he does not publish any of it, I suppose because the permissions could not be obtained. He has chosen a good part of Dennis Altman’s The Comfort of Men, a book that is nearly important, and would have been, had it found a good editor. Peter Rose, Dorothy Porter and David Herkt make significant contributions to the weight of the poetry (a good deal of which is slight and clichéd).

    There are also mistakes. Dessaix thinks that Nigel Krauth’s novel, JF Was Here, is “brilliant.” I’m not convinced. I laughed out loud when I got to part describing the “club-club of fearful hearts”; and this book is infamous for its crass depiction of how someone dies of AIDS.

    Dessaix chooses a non-chronological approach in order to avoid, he would have you believe, the trek from oppression to celebration (as though Dessaix’s battalion of hetero-potentates would know anything about that!). AIDS does not figure in that appallingly simple-minded reckoning. The non-chronological presentation serves the interests of Dessaix’s preference to depict homosexuals as transgressive, asocial outcasts. He has simply left out much of the best new writing available for him to publish.