Criticism, Biography and Les Murray

On Peter F. Alexander’s biography Les Murray: A Life in Progress (Oxford University Press, 2000), with passing reference to David Ellis, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (Edinburgh University Press, 2000).

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Grrr or Shhh? Is that the susurrus of gossip or the grinding of axes I can hear, as I sit down with the Life of Les Murray? Well before the re-issuing of this biography, withdrawn after the 1999 version had been threatened with at least one action of libel, whisperings were audible in the Australian literary community. They have risen to such a pitch in the past year that the question should be asked: is this cantankerousness and vituperation endemic in the community, or is it Murray himself, perhaps Murray’s career, that inspires such animated defence from his assembled friends, and such naked animosity from the array of his enemies? It would be invidious to assign all blame to the community or the individual, but to raise the question at all suggests how much of a nettle, if not giant stinger, Peter Alexander seized in taking on the Life of Les Murray.

In Literary Lives, an attempt to theorise and even more to scrutinise the principles and practices of biographers in the last century, David Ellis deplores the standard of reviewing of biographies. Ellis profiles the ideal reviewer as one who has covered some of or the same ground as the biographer, since, as he brazenly declares, biographers ‘sometimes cheat…there is so little danger of reviewers finding them out.’ If that is admitted, imagine the clamant queue of potential reviewers for the Life in question! Few readers of these pages will not know a sheaf of Murray anecdotes; some will be first-hand. With such a public subject, Alexander has relatively little chance of cheating, or satisfying, Australian readers, most of whom are already entrenched in the side on which they stand – the Grrr camp, or the still-disconcerting Shhh persuasion.

To establish my qualifications, I had better come clean with my Murray story, having been disconcerted to find Murray, or should I say Alexander, has already recounted it as his Pollnitz story. In Alexander’s biography the story is treated briefly and in appropriate proportion, and if I discuss it at greater length in this review, it is not to suggest it should be a cause célèbre, but because it is, for me, a convenient touchstone of Alexander’s handling of his materials and of Murray’s capacity to alienate and polarise acquaintances.

In 1989, Sydney University Press asked me to prepare a short critical study, targeted for secondary and tertiary students of Murray’s poetry. Having other projects on the burner, I was reluctant at first, checked whether Murray himself was willing to give me a day or two of his time, and having obtained his consent (‘Better you than some of those other wombats…’), correctly estimated that I could get the study written in a few months. I sent a first draft to Murray before travelling overseas, then a second to Murray and the publisher, on my return. Murray was seemingly troubled by the first draft, but his particular complaints related to the family history and discussion of poetic influences in the early chapters, most of which were cut for length reasons. His response to my second draft was to phone Oxford University Press which, in the interim, had taken over the press with which my study was originally contracted. With OUP, Murray had considerable influence. He ‘prohibited’ publication of my study; the verb I heard from an editor at OUP, who contacted me before Murray did to ask what Murray had taken exception to. At that stage, I knew no more than the editor. Murray’s means for enforcing his prohibition was to instruct Tom Thompson, acting for Angus and Robertson, to deny copyright permission for any quotations. Of course, not even a powerful figure like Murray can prohibit criticism of his work – so the fair dealing provision in the Copyright Act seemed to guarantee, and so the publisher now in charge of my contract seemed to agree. OUP humoured me for a year, and then had me rewrite the preface a week before cancelling the study. At the time, I was more outraged by the press’s perfidy than Murray’s, though his going behind my back to the publishers remains a personal betrayal. What OUP did, so I surmise, was check the balance sheet for Murray’s splendid anthology, the New Oxford Book of Australian Verse. The lesson handed out to me was one in economic principle, I suspect, that the bottom line can matter as much to ‘university’ presses as to commercial presses.

Murray did write to me, at length, explaining what he objected to in my book: it was the literary criticism. As inventions of the Enlightenment, criticism and critical interpretation were impediments to the function of poetry, namely, communication of the sacred. This had been the theme of some of Murray’s essays in the eighties, both in verse and prose, but I found the tone of the letter in which he applied the theory to this particular case unpleasant – it recalled to me references Murray had made to his psychological difficulties, references that I should perhaps have construed as warnings – and I have filed rather than re-read it. Murray’s claim to have rejected the study because it was criticism was too much a blanket explanation of his conduct. I had not disguised the book’s purpose in raising it with him. As a practising critic, he ought to have been aware that readers turned to his criticism to compare their own critical readings with his. But however contradictory, his behaviour was not wholly inconsistent. Murray had cut me after my series of articles surveying his poetry appeared in Southerly in 1980–81. He was inclined to look upon such articles as academics making careers out of his creative work and seemed particularly to dislike attempts both to evaluate and discriminate; criticism as unalloyed praise might have passed unchecked. Some confirmation of this impression came from my editor at OUP, who said that the problem lay with the chapter on The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, in which I had suggested that the verse novel’s sexual politics detracted from its readability. In darker hours, I suspected that Murray saw the role of the critic as that of a proselyte and proselytiser for the author’s ideas. My abiding impression is that he prohibited the study because I had ideas about his poetry he had not had and did not want aired.

The story has two pendants. Murray did write to me again, after a review I wrote of Translations from the Natural World. He corrected me on some points, forgave me for having had to prohibit my book, and permitted me to go ahead and publish it. This did not seem an enormous concession, considering Murray’s knowledge of how publishers operate, but who knows, one day my little study may have its day. I see a lurid cover with the blurb, Now at last, the book Les Murray prohibited. The second anecdote is that Peter Alexander rang me in 1994, asking my advice on whether to undertake the biography. In our only exchange on Murray, I warned him not to do it, adding that if he went ahead the very worst thing he could do was to show Murray drafts. How mistaken I was! Here is the biography in front of me, with footnotes referring to corrections Murray has made on Alexander’s drafts, all bespeaking the complete amity between biographer and subject. Most intriguing is Alexander’s account of how unreservedly Murray agreed to his project: ‘I explained that I wanted complete access to everything – manuscripts, letters, diaries, accounts – that I could be interviewing them [Murray and his wife] over months, and that I would also be talking to family members, friends, ex-friends, enemies and literary rivals.’ Murray’s response to the proposal was ‘You can publish anything you can find.’ If Alexander’s is not a warts-and-all life, it contains a variety of intimate details most writers would be reticent about disclosing, and I (were I ever to embark on a biography) would be reticent about asking. Is Murray’s ego so much invested in his poetry that he doesn’t care what people know of him, only what they think about his poems? There is much to be said for such a view of Murray as he emerges from this strange collaboration. But if there was one remark in Alexander’s preface which whetted this reviewer’s curiosity it was to learn the distinction in Murray’s mind between a critical reading and a biographical finding. The answer was not what I foresaw.

Alexander elucidates the family history, the tangle of Murrays who migrated to the mid-north coast of NSW in the 1840s, then multiplied and intermarried in the river valleys between the Myall and the Manning. He draws a satisfying narrative circle to show how the descendants of emigrant Hugh Murray did not grow into a powerful, leisured squattocracy, but instead how Cecil, Hugh’s great-grandson and the poet’s father, fell in three generations ‘to the level of tenant-at-will, which his ancestor Hugh had left Scotland to escape.’ ‘Born in a Biscay storm’, Hugh’s first son, John, missed out on being a currency lad, but won the title of first settler ‘Bunyah Johnnie’, when he married his cousin Isabella and moved south from his father’s leasehold on the Manning, to take up land on the Wang Wauk River. A prodigy of generosity and fecklessness, Johnnie was able to leave only a small holding to his sixth son, Allan. Left to mimic his father’s feats of generosity on a meaner scale with his drinking mates, Allan exploited the labour of his own sons, eventually neglecting to pass on to Cecil the farm he believed he was working to inherit.

Alexander outlines the family history firmly and for the right reasons – not because of any dotty theory of heredity, but because it forms the dramatic core of so much of Murray’s poetry. Murray’s fascination with family history offers clues to many of his poems, from ‘The Widower in the Country’ to the characterisation of Sam Mundine, the Jewish Aboriginal, in Fredy Neptune. Alexander’s notes reveal that Murray’s mother, Miriam, had one cousin, a Coolongolook Worth, who married an Aboriginal, and that ancestors of the Worths may have been Parisians and Jewish. The notes indicate that Alexander has followed rather than led Murray’s research into ancestry, but the illumination of the poetry that becomes available through Murray’s own impressions of his family tree makes the biography’s explication of the research required reading. Without it, readers may overlook the explosive and changing mixture of celebration, defensiveness and satirical spleen with which Murray’s portraits of ‘simple’ country life are loaded, a mixture that has enabled him to blow up the old conventions of Australian pastoral and start again with new foundations. It is of interest that Murray and Alexander see the bringing home of Lesley to a poverty-stricken shanty in terms of family drama rather than from a sociological perspective. Many Australian children grew up in shanties during the Depression and can relate to ‘The Sleepout’ and ‘The Tin Wash Dish’ because of it. Alexander may be right to point out that this was a difficult start for a poet, but Whitman in the nineteenth century and Heaney in the twentieth might at least vie with Murray in terms of educational disadvantage.

The proliferation of Murrays and other intermarrying Scottish families on the mid-north coast resulted, Alexander notes, in a Bunyah dialect, a local vocabulary and intonation that were predominantly Scots English but included some treasured (by Murray) Aboriginal borrowings. I can confirm this from personal experience. Standing on Broadmeadow station one day, I heard Murray’s distinctive accents and, turning to say hello, was embarrassed to find myself addressing someone I had never met. No, he was not a Murray, he explained (my curiosity had got the better of me), but he did come from up the Myall Lakes. While offering a helpful glossary drawn from Murray’s poetry and essays, Alexander betrays his own origins when he himself adds ‘skillion’, meaning a lean-to, to this regional dialect. ‘Skillion’ is not even East Coast; South Australian informants and the Macquarie Dictionary (which includes a citation from Henry Lawson) confirm that the dialect Alexander is dealing with here is Australian English. An Australian might also complain of a lack of tact in Alexander’s treatment of the contacts between the Murray settlers and the Aboriginal people of the district, the Kattangal. Murray has expressed pride in his pioneer ancestry. In an early poem like ‘Noonday Axeman’, ‘the draywheels’ silence final in our ears,/ and the first red cattle spreading through the hills’ makes the silence and hills sound suspiciously like terra nullius. While I know of no basis for disputing Alexander’s historical assertions – ‘in this new land, the Murrays prospered’, partly because, it seems, ‘Hugh Murray and his brothers found the Aboriginals no threat, and offered them no violence’ – it is possible to miss any expression of regret at the shrinking and ghetto-ising of the Kattangal into the Purfleet settlement. Some will prefer Judith Wright’s wistful account of first contact in her autobiography, Half a Lifetime, and in poems like ‘Old House.’

To turn from family history to family romance, to the dynamics of Cecil, Miriam and Les in their Bunyah shanty, is to turn to that entry-way to a literary life where, David Ellis would say, a biographer must be largely dependent on his subject’s witness, where the new materials Alexander has elicited from Murray and his family are indispensable, but where the requirement on him for detached and objective scrutiny of the evidence is at its most stringent. Alexander’s narrative has a satisfying psychological complexity, the result of ‘nice contradiction between fact and fact’ which, in Robert Graves’s words, ‘makes the whole seem human and exact’, but which also suggests he has not sceptically screened the testimony received. On the one hand, Murray as a child never had any friends to come around and play because his parents were ashamed to reveal the poverty of their home; on the other, he was dreamy, cocooned in his own world of words and sacred objects, socially inept and incurious. While the mother, with her nurse’s training, was prim, efficient and ‘untactile’, by his own diagnosis Murray was semi-autistic as a child and unable to recognise or respond to parental affection. As a ‘half-autie’ he was also given to uncontrollable rages and destructive acts, which his parents attempted to manage with savage beatings, demanded by the mother and inflicted by the father: ‘From about the time he turned two, Murray was smacked increasingly severely and often, intensifying to what he called “frequent harsh floggings for being a bad boy”.’ What credence can be put in this report? A child might remember being smacked at age two, but a routine of beatings at that age might rather be repressed. Given the vagaries of early memory, how would one know that the beatings had begun at the age of two? These are extraordinarily painful recollections. To deal with them in any other way than sympathetic acceptance may seem brutal, but their horrific content in itself must provoke doubts about their accuracy. A biographer might well be pleased to escape from such a nightmare atmosphere to the more historical and sociological question, of the effects of Murray’s upbringing in that puritanical splinter sect, the Free Presbyterian Church. But Alexander gives little, in my opinion too little, attention to the effect of this on Murray’s isolation, sense of guilt and fear of retribution.

Alexander’s coup has been to reconstruct, from the testimony of other family members, an account different to Murray’s own of the events leading up to his mother’s death. Miriam Murray died of toxaemia in Taree hospital in 1951, after a miscarriage that left her haemorrhaging for some hours on the farm at Bunyah. In his poem ‘The Steel’ Murray blames the doctor at the hospital for refusing to send an ambulance. In Murray’s version of events, the doctor was misled by social and professional snobbery: ‘Did you often do/ diagnosis by telephone?’ But since the countryside around was rich in Murray families with operational cars, Alexander deduces that no ambulance was sent because Cecil, ashamed of another pregnancy which might not go full term and which Miriam had been warned against, did not ring for one, but passed the fatal hours in a frenzy of shame and panic. If ‘The Steel’ remains undisturbed by this alternative narrative, it is because the poem is not primarily a meditation on professional ethics, but on a father and son coming to terms with their bereavement. How the status of ‘The Steel’ is affected is not an issue Alexander discusses, nor is the conclusion drawn that Murray’s assaults on the educated do not always elicit his most self-aware writing. Alexander’s account of the mother’s death does help clarify Cecil’s determination to fulfil his wife’s dying wish, that Lesley should complete his education. Despite ongoing financial hardship, quarrels and disappointments, it was Cecil whose resolve sent his son to Taree High, where he discovered there were such beings as Australian poets, and to Sydney University, where he became one.

In 1988, Murray’s reading at a Rotary Club meeting in Taree led to his meeting former school acquaintances from Taree High, and the meeting in turn precipitated involuntary weeping, panic attacks and some six years of severe depression, which coincided with my 1989 visits to Murray. It is understandable, then, that Murray’s self-diagnosis is that the two years at Taree High, specifically the sexual teasing meted out to him by some of the teenage girls, formed what David Ellis calls, after Freud, the ‘primal scene’, beloved of biographers for its explanatory power. It is less understandable that Alexander unquestioningly assents to this self-diagnosis, given the succession of other traumas to which Murray was subjected in childhood; indeed, that he, Alexander, attributes more explanatory force to this teasing than does Murray. According to Alexander, after being called ‘fat names’ by the girls, Murray, henceforward, ‘would be always on the side of the outcast…It was Taree High that turned him decisively against conformity, intellectual gangs, particularly literary and academic ones, and the mob-persecution of any individual.’ Here there is an unexpected transposition: from being the nerdy book-worm overlooked by silly girls, the adolescent Murray has become the common man singled out for persecution by an intellectual SS. I know at least one well-read contemporary of Murray’s from Taree High who avers that the girls were not only not like this but not that bad. Why seize on this event to explain Murray’s maverick intellectualism and defence of unlikely causes, at the same time as discounting the possibility that the teasing might have left Murray with some fear of, and hostility towards, women? Murray enjoyed the cadets at Taree High. At the University of Sydney, feeling excluded by the likes of Robert Hughes and Germaine Greer, though he got on well with Clive James and Bob Ellis, Murray clubbed together with younger undergraduates to form a group who called themselves the Four Colonels and went in for weekend-long, paramilitary bushwalks. During the Poetry Wars of the 1970s, Murray gathered around him a male cadre of poets whom he called ‘the stable’ of Poetry Australia. There are patterns here, but they are not the ones Alexander highlights. For Alexander, Murray’s university days are a succession of friendships and pranks. He lacks the gift of an Andrew Riemer, to sum up the flavour of a period or the calibre of an institution in a single epiphany.

Alexander did well seizing the nettle and compiling this biography, which makes itself indispensable for those who want to learn more of the two major Australian poets (two, because Murray’s interactions with Judith Wright are explored in detail) from the second half of the twentieth century. Extensive bibliographies go a long way to fill a pressing scholarly need. The chronology and the detailing of Murray’s travels, from 1965 on, are useful, though Alexander, by insisting on the Australianness of the poems Murray wrote for The Weatherboard Cathedral during his time in Wales, misses pointing out that the way forward for Murray was through poems like ‘The Fire Autumn’, which position Australia in a global phantasmagoria. To have between boards Murray’s account of the circumstances of composition of so many of his poems makes the book an invaluable resource. That Alexander has often played Boswell to Murray’s Johnson means that we have some record of the second glory of the poet’s verbal productions (I would set it equal with his essays), namely his conversation.

Yet the critical reception of Murray’s poetry is not well handled, not because Alexander fails to go through volume by volume, quoting from selected reviews, but because he shows insufficient discrimination and independence of judgment. His usual procedure is to counter negative criticism and support laudatory reviews, with the result that Murray’s entire oeuvre is evenly puffed – or would be, did Alexander not feel called on for a crescendo. So Translations from the Natural World is ‘clearly’ the work of ‘a poet at the height of his powers’, while Subhuman Redneck Poems demonstrates Murray’s ‘poetic output was rising to a peak’, another peak presumably. In the case of the latter volume, Murray had already signalled to Alexander in an interview that Don Anderson’s review, in which Anderson singled out ten per cent of the poems as ‘vile’, indeed vomitory, including it may be surmised those explicitly dealing with Taree High, was close to the mark. Murray himself did not rate these cathartic poems high on his list of achievements: ‘I’m not interested in all that stuff now…I wrote that out directly in Redneck…Fred [i.e. Fredy Neptune] is the turning of it right up to the level of poetry.’ I too can accept Fredy Neptune as the summit of Murray’s achievement in the nineties, a recovery of the ground he had reached in The People’s Otherworld and The Daylight Moon. But without the nod from Murray, would Alexander have found anything to endorse in Anderson’s judgment? Then, in case he has not fully covered himself, Alexander goes on to reclaim the Subhuman Taree High poems as specimens of Swiftian, or Yeatsian, saeva indignatio. They are nothing of the sort. That accolade might be worth bestowing on the impersonal but deeply moving ‘Dog Fox Field’, but even here Alexander cannot resist quoting the couplet about the slaughter of the intellectually handicapped under the Third Reich – ‘Our sentries, whose holocaust does not end,/ they show us when we cross into Dog Fox Field’ – and relating it to the ‘fashion police’ and Taree High. It is offensive to those who lost their lives in the Holocaust or have been threatened with involuntary euthanasia since, and incidentally to Taree, to draw the belittling comparison. It is a detraction on Murray’s poem. Lack of critical acumen is one reason Alexander’s is not a critical biography.

Another is tied up with Alexander’s almost Shavian propensity to offer stage directions for scenes at which he has not been present. Murray often produces an outrageous sally ‘cheerfully’ (indeed, he does), but when he faces one of his Taree High tormentors he delivers his one-liner ‘evenly’ – as indeed he might have, relating the encounter in interview, but how he did it at the time is Alexander’s gloss. Alexander reaches for the purple when he seeks to engage a reader’s full sympathy. While workshopping poems at the University of Sydney, Geoffrey Lehmann’s ‘dark, cold face would glow with triumph when he was about to annihilate one of Murray’s efforts’ – or so Alexander supposes, the style of reportage being his, not Murray’s. This weighting of scales rises ‘to a peak’ in exchanges which are not even oral but epistolary, notably in Alexander’s report on a series of letters between Judith Wright and Murray, initiated when Wright invited Murray to contribute to a manuscript exhibition being mounted in support of an Aboriginal Treaty. Murray sees the ‘real menace’ in Wright’s initial letter, but his ‘admirably sure-footed and elegant’ reply leaves Wright ‘clearly rattled by’ its argument, and so on. An irritated reader learns to read against the grain of the superfluous commentary, but the result is to find it difficult to do justice to Murray’s argument in this case, and to lament room was not found for more extensive quotation of a searching literary and political debate.

As against this distinguished exchange between well-matched adversaries, in which the text of the exchange is not in dispute, the biography enumerates a succession of what I could call ‘Murray controversies’ – quarrels which are high on acrimony, denunciation and hysteria, in which the substantive issues of the dispute have been lost in the dust of the conflict, and the clearest common factor has been Murray’s involvement. Murray controversies include: Did Vincent Buckley disseminate the idea that the young Murray was ‘a promising poet…but a terrible Nazi’? Were the poetry wars of the seventies any more than power struggles and Pyrrhic name-callings, in which Murray gave as good as he got? What manoeuvres and motives led to Murray’s ousting as editor of Poetry Australia, as reader for Angus and Robertson, and as poetry editor of Quadrant? Did Manning Clark ever receive the Order of Lenin, and if so what significance had his wearing or not wearing the decoration? Alexander’s venturing upon these questions only muddies the waters. While it is sometimes possible to read against his commentary, the over-reliance on Murray’s testimony makes his adjudication of the controversies all but useless.

The first of the controversies exemplifies Alexander’s approach to literary history. Alexander’s source for Buckley having disparaged Murray’s politics behind Murray’s back is Murray, and again Murray. Alexander has interviewed Chris Wallace-Crabbe, but whether Wallace-Crabbe, for one, ever heard Buckley make such remarks is not a question Alexander has asked; or if he has, results of the enquiry are not included in the biography. My scrape with Murray is, as I said, a personal touchstone for Alexander’s handling of his sources. Murray stopped my critical study, Alexander records, ‘on the grounds that Pollnitz thought him a misogynist.’ My initial response to this was one of relief (at last I knew Murray’s real motive), followed by consternation (I hadn’t directly called Murray a misogynist in either draft of the book, no such insult had been offered), followed by puzzlement (if Murray thought I thought he was a misogynist, on the basis of what I wrote about The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, he must himself have begun to re-read the book’s anti-feminist rhetoric with something of the appalled embarrassment many readers had). The solution to the puzzle I found in the endnote: the source for what Pollnitz thought of Murray was the phone-call to me in which Alexander asked advice on whether to take on the biography. I suppose, speaking with Alexander, I may have used the word ‘misogynist’ to label some of my difficulties in conversation with Murray in 1989, or with reading The Boys. Though it would be more characteristic of me to say that I ‘found the book’s sexual politics intolerable’, I am in no position to dispute the notes Alexander apparently took from our conversation. But why would a biographer ask Pollnitz for Murray’s motivation for prohibiting a book, and not Murray himself, unless there were questions the biographer was frightened of asking his subject? Some questions Alexander felt he could only ask Murray about; some he felt he could never ask Murray about. Variant findings on such questions, Alexander seems to have felt, would have rendered his biography unacceptable to its subject.

Alexander’s Life commits itself to saying far worse things about Murray than would have offended him in my drafts. Murray’s attacks on the Literature Board in the nineties might, Alexander suggests, have been kept up out of a desire for publicity, and Murray’s idea that the Board itself had been taken over by ‘Tranterites’ was paranoid. At least, Alexander does not use the word, writing instead how Murray believed ‘cliques of his enemies were constantly plotting to do him harm’, though this was ‘largely imagination on his part.’ Yet, within the page, Alexander is describing ‘The Lecture Halls of the Fisher King’, not as a collection of aphorisms whose vitriol has been distilled out of a troubled mind, but as ‘one of [Murray’s] most brilliant pieces.’ This is a biographer unable to let his right eye see what his left hand has just written on the verso. David Ellis notes in Literary Lives that biographers of living subjects, like Norman Sherry on Graham Greene, may forfeit interpretative coherence, hoping to infect their readers instead with their own ‘enthusiasm for information’. There is no dearth of intimate revelations or psychoanalytic interpretation, however, in Alexander’s Life of Murray. Ugly truths about the subject are admitted in such oddly contradictory contexts in this Life because Murray has not spared himself. Very much as in Subhuman Redneck Poems, and to a lesser degree Fredy Neptune, Murray has conducted his autoanalysis with a genuine ruthlessness, and sent it forth, with all its confusions – not even Freud claimed to have completed his analysis of himself – in the form of Alexander’s Life. If Murray has not spared himself, he’s hardly been more considerate of Alexander who, while some of his contradictions verge on the disingenuous, never seems quite to twig that Murray has been ventriloquising a review of his psyche through his chosen biographer. Most of Murray’s interviews with Alexander seem to have been completed by August 1998, when Murray wrote in ‘The Lecture Halls of the Fisher King’: ‘Academics and authors despise each other most when each has it in mind to exploit the other.’

While I suppose I did gain a little self-respect when my study of Murray did not appear in 1990, I can’t claim there was much pressure on me to bowdlerise that study and so appease its subject. Maintaining critical distance when writing literary criticism is not a matter of principle with me; I can’t conceive of doing it another way. It seems from his preface that Alexander both personally admires and is daunted by Murray, but that what he was principally afraid of was Murray withdrawing the right to quote him. In his anxiety to please and his fear of not being allowed to publish, Alexander has produced a portrait that has this reader, for one, shivering with repudiation. It would take a remorseless foe to rejoice in retaining only the warts from this portrait, the larger outlines of which are so blurred with trepidation. Unlike the Ern Malley poems, Les Murray: A Life in Progress is not a hoax; the name on the cover is in some sense the author’s; but like that hoax, this Life raises serious doubt about the calibre and confidence of Australian literary criticism. In the unlikely event of my ever being asked for advice again, I would encourage Alexander to keep all his preparatory notes and tapes. They will be of value for a future, critical biographer.