Celebrating David Malouf at 90
‘The most striking aspect of David Malouf’s life in letters is the multiplicity of forms it has taken, as if one should talk of his lives in letters rather than think of it as a single life,’ wrote Giramondo publisher Ivor Indyk in the Sydney Review of Books in honour of the author’s eightieth birthday in 2014. This March, Malouf turns ninety. We celebrate one of Australia’s best-loved writers and a long-time supporter of Giramondo, with a recorded interview, Malouf’s contributions to HEAT, and a poetic tribute from Nicholas Jose.
The photograph above captured David Malouf at the very beginning of his career, just ahead of the publication of his debut poetry collection. Sally McInerney, the photographer, said of that day: ‘David’s book of poems, Bicycle, was soon to appear, and the publishers had requested a suitable “author” photograph. So, in the summer of January 1970, we wandered rather shyly through the University of Sydney’s semi-deserted grounds, looking for places and light that would lend themselves to portraiture. We have been friends ever since.’
In conversation with Ivor Indyk
In a recording made in April 2021, Giramondo publisher Ivor Indyk spoke with David Malouf about his body of work as a poet and novelist, the time he spent away from Australia in Italy, his international reputation, and the imaginative power of his writing. Listen to their conversation below.
Giramondo Talks: David Malouf in conversation with Ivor Indyk
David Malouf in HEAT
David Malouf has been an important contributor to HEAT, Australia’s international literary magazine, founded by Giramondo in 1996. We feature below five contributions by Malouf, recently digitised in the HEAT archive. The sixth piece is a poem by Nicholas Jose, published in the very first issue of HEAT in honour of Malouf’s sixtieth birthday.
Epimetheus, or The Spirit of Reflection
‘We have all heard of Prometheus, great rebel against the gods and bringer to earth of a commodity, fire, which we have depended on from earliest times for much of what makes us human: campfires, cooked meat, the forging of iron into ploughshares, horseshoes, swords. What is not so well known is that Prometheus had a brother, also a titan and demi-god, but as his name suggests quite opposite in nature and habit of thought.’
Buxtehude’s Daughter
‘What she found most insufferable was the camaraderie between them, which she could not help but feel was an alliance; that and the assumption, in their careless all-conquering manner, that the world was theirs by right, to be divided up just as they pleased. Well, not if she could help it!’
Mozart to da Ponte: Words and Music
‘Words act, they get things going, they are sociable. They form unions, found cities, make contracts in which responsibilities are established and dues paid, or they break them and start wars. A sentence is a theatre in which something happens, it is all agents and events. But music is just itself. It has no story to tell, no truth to utter, and it cannot lie because it proclaims nothing but its own perfect presence.’
Ulysses, or the Scent of the Fox
‘The Greek commanders, Nestor, Agamemnon and the rest, could do nothing but wait, unheroically, for the cloud to lift from their champion’s brow. Till it did, they dared not move.’
The South
‘On a soft, sunlit morning in March 1959, just a few days before my twenty-fifth birthday, I stood at the rails of an Italian liner, the Fairsky, and after a five-weeks sea-voyage that had taken me via Singapore, Colombo, Bombay, Aden and Port Said, saw the Bay of Naples open before me, and utterly familiar in the distance the dark slopes and scooped-out cone of Vesuvius – all just as I had always imaged it, like the breaking of a dream.’
Moonflowers
By Nicholas Jose
‘Inside meantime, past sixty, you hold forth, tossing pasta and greens, searing the fish, uncorking wine, adjusting the lights, sentence by sentence giving shape and grace, enthusiasm, optimism, critique — all the while you are out there in the dark…‘
