Atavism

There was a good deal of the Scots in Kenneth Slessor, but not as much as the Sydney Morning Herald had in mind when, in November 1995, it paraded the poet as a famous Australian with a Scottish name. ‘Kenneth’ maybe, in deference to his mother’s family, who had emigrated from the Hebrides: but the poet got ‘Slessor’ from his father, who got it from his father before him. In those days it was pronounced ‘Schloesser’, and it remained ‘Schloesser’ until Slessor was thirteen, when, after the outbreak of war in 1914, his father changed the name to conceal its German origins.

But there was another, much older process of effacement at work, which had begun generations before. Few would recognise Kenneth Adolphe Schloesser as one of Australia’s great poets: but until Geoffrey Dutton’s 1991 biography, only a handful of people could have known that Slessor on his father’s side was as Jewish as he was German. Slessor’s great grandfather Louis was a distinguised musician, a valued acquaintance of Beethoven and a friend of Berlioz – his position as Kapellmeister at the Court of the Hesses in Darmstadt presumably required some down-playing of his Jewish origins. Slessor’s father noted that his own family was ‘entirely free of any religious observances or creeds’. Yet his mother was a Salomon, and the family tree boasts distinguished Jewish names on both sides, Schloesser and Salomon, Emmanuel, Cohen, Nathan, Baruch.¹

Slessor evidently cherished this inheritance, since papers relating to his family history, and a copy of the family tree dating back to the eighteenth century, are to be found in his papers in the National Library of Australia. But it seems to have been largely a secret possession, a hidden aspect of what was, by all accounts, a personality marked by repression and inhibition. In the Sydney of the 20s and 30s, which is when Slessor made his mark as a poet, and in the artistic and journalistic circles he moved in, Jewish forebears were probably best left in the closet. The anti-semitism of Lionel and Norman Lindsay is well-known: the one presented modern art as a pernicious conspiracy foisted on an innocent public by international Jewish financiers, the other saw the Jew as a threat to all that was noble and joyous in human creativity. Slessor was close to the Lindsays, and to Norman in particular. Yet as late as 1959, as editor of Southerly, Slessor could publish an essay in which Lindsay railed against ‘the monstrous amalgam of sadism, masochism and nihilism’ which Christianity had got from the East, by which he meant Judaism. ‘Is there any need to question a mystery in the hatred of the Jew,’ Lindsay asked, ‘the only Eastern race which has penetrated Western civilization and imposed on it its own religious cultisms and its racial cunning?’² Lindsay had developed this line of argument at length in Creative Effort, almost forty years before. One wonders what Slessor did with his Jewish part when Lindsay spoke of these matters in private conversation, as he surely must have done during their long period of friendship. The one reference to Jews in Slessor’s poetry is a slighting one, when the poet imagines himself as a retired sailor or sea captain walking down William Street, ‘With a tin trunk and a five-pound note, looking for a place to eat,/ And a peajacket the colour of a shark’s behind/ That a Jew might buy in the morning. . .’ Ironically, Slessor’s sea-captains often exhibit Jewish characteristics. But in this poem, called ‘Metempsychosis’, the Jew is definitely other, and inferior – one of Lindsay’s Jews.³

How completely can one efface the past from which one has come? ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’ is one of Slessor’s most famous poems. In its short compass it does more to establish Cook as a heroic figure in the Australian pantheon than many larger works of scholarly or hagiographic intent. Faced with the task of imparting a mythical resonance to the figure of the great explorer, Slessor’s imagination drew on atavistic sources. Slessor presents Cook as a Jew. Not as the Jew that Lindsay, or the cartoonists of Slessor’s own Smith’s Weekly enjoyed caricaturing, a swarthy, lecherous, cunning, usurous, rather slimy figure – but as a Magus, a wizard or alchemist, one of a fellowship of Kabbalist sea-captains, ‘daemons in periwigs, doling magic out’ –

Who read fair alphabets in stars

Where humbler men found but a mess of sparks,

Who steered their crews by mysteries

And strange, half-dreadful sortilege with books,

Used medicines that only gods could know

The sense of, but sailors drank

In simple faith. That was the captain

Cook was when he came to the Coral Sea

And chose a passage into the dark.

Indeed Slessor goes so far as to dress Cook in phylacteries, the small boxes containing holy script which orthodox Jews bind to head and arm while at prayer, ‘It was the spell/ of Cook did this, the phylacteries of Cook’. The poet Heinrich Heine defined the phylactery as the means by which ‘faith is fastened on to the arm’. In Slessor’s use religious faith has been replaced by the power of magic, in line with his general sublimation of the Jewish element – that element characterises Cook, but only because it has been washed clean of the taint of deceit or malice or cunning, and refined to the highest degree of heroism. At this level of refinement, even Lindsay would have been able to claim the Jew for his own cause, and in fact did so. Slessor’s Rabbi Cook is like no-one so much as the magus in Lindsay’s 1927 etching, ‘Enter the Magicians’: the same glittering stare as Cook, the trappings of the astrologer-alchemist, and with a Star of David emblazoned on his sorcerer’s cap. ‘The magicians, of course, are the artists, the creators’, Lindsay noted in a gloss on the etching, though he had elsewhere seen the Jew as the death of creativity.⁴

Slessor would not have needed to look deep into his unconscious in order to find an expression of Jewishness so acceptable, and even attractive, to his contemporaries, that it might not have seemed Jewish to them at all. The association between alchemy, astrology, divination, and the figure of the Jewish magus is a persistent one.⁵ It gained renewed currency in the use made of the Kabbalah by the various occult movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is possible that Slessor and Lindsay read the same books – Blavatsky, Eliphas Levi, A.E. Waite, or the fugitive writings of Aleister Crowley. But Slessor clearly has more invested in the figure of the Kabbalistic magician or alchemist than Lindsay, for whom it is just one in an eclectic cavalcade of exotic figures, most of whom are young, nubile, and in a state of undress. In the poem which stood first in his first volume of poetry, and which was aptly titled ‘Incongruity’, Slessor pictured himself ‘robed in the stoles of alchemy’ in the midst of the Australian bush, in a scene charged with apocalyptic promise, waiting for night to fall so that he might exercise a magical power that would stop the planets in their tracks. Towards the end of his poetic career, in ‘Five Bells’, his elegy to his friend Joe Lynch, and to his own powers as a poet, Slessor’s stance is still essentially that of the kabbalist or the magician, seeking in vain to attach meaning to the name, and to conjure the past back into existence, through a divination unsuccessfully practised on the fragments furnished by memory. Slessor defined poetry as ‘music and magic’, and the notion of the poet as a magician, always carrying a sense of incongruity or diminished power, in recognition of his circumstances, in Australia, in the twentieth century, is apparent both in the perspectives of his poetry, and through displacement and projection, in the gallery of heroic and mock-heroic figures that appear there.

Some of these figures may seem far removed from the strict representation of the Kabbalist, with the Jewish element leached out, but with the oriental quality, and the sense of homage to the patriarchal ancestor intensified, as in the mandarins and mages portrayed in poems like ‘Marco Polo’ and ‘Taoist’, ‘those wise old men/ Dozing all day in lemon silken robes,/ With tomes of beaten jade spread knee to knee’. At other times, Slessor’s orientalism is given a European twist, which allows Jewish attributes to enter in a disguised form. In ‘Earth-Visitors’, the heroic figures from the East who appear without explanation at a wayside inn, fascinating the onlookers and tumbling the girls, display all the features – the beards, the dark furs, the gypsy eyes, the foreign garments, the strange words upon their tongues – commonly associated with the hasidim, the Kabbalistic sect with German roots with which Slessor might be expected to have the closest affinity. Of this branch of Kabbalism Gershom Scholem noted, ‘nowhere else in Judaism has man the magical creator been surrounded with such an halo’.⁶ Slessor presents his ‘strange riders’ as figures of desire, haloed in light and casting a ‘wild radiance’ in their wake – and he goes out of his way to dignify them, calling them princes, barons, kings, before deciding they must be ‘Archdukes’. The ‘archdukes’ is a measure of how far the ‘riders’ might have had to travel from their otherwise lowly origins, how deeply Slessor felt the need to give them exalted credentials. The epithet ‘sweet as pineapple’ applied to their ‘strange tongue’ shows a similar urge to exaltation – overdetermined, even in this ornate context, the detail is worth setting against the caricature of the Jew current in Slessor’s time, which has him spitting and lisping his way in an insinuating fashion through the English language. This suppressed negative underside to Slessor’s exoticism is clearer in his use of dark or black fur as a poetic detail. In the poem ‘Two Nocturnes’, where the detail is applied to the portrayal of night, it is first a sign of grandeur (‘cloaked in black furs, like some magnifico/ come mourning to the catafalque of day,/ night swaggers down the sky to Arakoon’) and then a sign of intrusion, as ‘the swarthy wash of night’ comes like a Jewish peddler into the middle-class comfort of a Sydney suburb. There is the ‘fur of the night’ which chokes the lips of the dying poet in ‘Heine in Paris’, and the grapes, ‘half-savage with black fur’ in ‘Wild Grapes’, ‘outlaws of a strange bough’ which carry in their exotic sweetness the taint of murder. In these negative connotations one senses as well a certain horror in the very reach backwards, as if the conjuring with the past were also a form of necromancy, and atavism a trade with the devil.

In some cases, Slessor’s fascination with powerful ancestral father-figures and precursors, like Dürer in ‘Nuremberg’ and Heine in ‘Heine in Paris’, takes him back, quite explicitly to Germany. Here the reference points marked out by Slessor’s atavism can be quite precise, though still veiled from the common gaze. Heinrich Heine was of particular interest to Slessor as a poetic precursor, not only because he was German, but because, like Slessor’s own paternal forebears, he had had to submerge his Jewish origins, and profess himself a Protestant. Heine’s satirical and scornful poetic stance is not unlike Slessor’s own – Heine was an exile in Paris, Slessor in his poetry clearly conveys the sense of a poet exiled from his sources of inspiration. There are certain family resemblances: between Heine’s Uncle Salomon, the Hamburg merchant, and Slessor’s own ancestors, Falk Schloesser, listed in the Slessor family tree as Court Provider of Foods to the Darmstadt Brigade, and Jakob Baruch, listed grandly as ‘banker’, of Frankfurt-am-Main. Jakob Baruch’s son Löb Baruch was an essayist and journalist who had changed his name to Ludwig Börne in order to relieve the stigma of being born a Jew. Subsequently, like Heine, who was his friend and fellow-exile in Paris, he changed his religion too. Börne was Slessor’s great-great-grandfather’s brother, according to the family tree – a famous writer, and one of the leaders, with Heine, of the ‘Young Germans’ literary movement, he was an ancestor well worth claiming. Slessor claims him in ‘Heine in Paris’, but so subtly, and so ambiguously, that their affiliation must have remained unknown to all but the poet himself –

Men crumbled, man lived on. In that animal’s face,

’Twas but a squirt aimed at the moon, to fling contempt.

Meyerbeer, Börne, and Klopstock vanished, but in their place

New Klopstocks, Meyerbeers blown again, and Börnes undreamt,

Sprang up like fungi, and there remained no trace

Of lashings past. . .

Slessor would have been, according to this line of descent, one of those undreamt Börnes, springing up like fungus, in a foreign land.

Atavism is, by its very nature, a complicated and mysterious transmission. In Slessor’s case the transmission is further complicated by a sense that the past is both a source of riches, and a blight upon the present. Slessor’s ancestral figures are not all cut from heroic stone. In his poetry there is a line of descent from the Kabbalist through the Jewish merchant and wanderer – magicians of another sort, transforming matter through exchange, bearing strange talismans from other worlds, avid readers of the stars – to the retired sea-captains who capture his imagination in the later poetry, anchored in the calm waters of old age, conjuring tropical visions of paradise from old maps and ledgers, mementoes and memories. These captains are somewhat foolish figures, benign but impotent, marooned in a past which holds them in its spell – yet they bring the poet an important gift. Because they have been travellers in tropical waters, through their eyes Slessor’s imagination enacts another Eastern displacement, East and South this time, to the enchanted beaches of the Pacific, and to the east coast of Australia. Slessor’s Captain Home, whose body moves in Scotland amidst ‘the vague ancestral darknesses of home’, but whose eyes are ‘dazzle-full of skies and water farther round the world’, embodies this paradoxical trajectory of atavism, which by coming from home, finds itself at home, in a place very different from that it had started from. One of Slessor’s great achievements as a poet is to have seen his own place, Sydney, with an ancient gaze attuned to the possibilities of magic, and to have seen it truly.

But if time has given Slessor’s sea-captains this visionary power, it has also rendered them impotent. Behind these figures there is a deeper fear, of time falling backwards into the past, since it is from the past that the present draws so much of its significance. Joe Lynch, the friend whose drowning in Sydney Harbour Slessor mourns in ‘Five Bells’, may have had an oppressive father: but nothing quite prepares one for his appearance in the poem, the type of the ancestral father whose very influence, exercised in all innocence, is a burden that weighs heavily on the present –

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare

Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper,

We argued about blowing up the world,

But you were living backward, so each night

You crept a moment closer to the breast,

And they were living, all of them, those frames

And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth,

And most your father,the old man gone blind,

With fingers always round a fiddle’s neck,

That graveyard mason whose fair monuments

And tablets cut with dreams of piety

Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men

Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment

At cargoes they had never thought to bear,

These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone.

Slessor was descended from a line of distinguished musicians, and Lynch’s fiddler-father is reminiscent of his own ancestor, Falk Schloesser, Court Provider and violinist. The past seems to carry for him too, this double aspect: as sweet nourishment, as terrible cargo.

There is a distinctively Jewish attitude to history which sees it as a terrible cargo, a burden of sorrow born of exile and persecution, from which one can never fully escape. Ludwig Börne referred to this melancholy outlook as ‘the immense Judenschmerz, a rich dark treasure handed down from generation to generation’. Heine offers a vignette in his 1840 memoir of Börne which begins, ‘He who does not know exile will not understand how luridly it colours our sorrows, how it pours the darkness of night and poison into all our thoughts’. At least, he went on, the German writer exiled to France still finds himself in a familiar kind of landscape, and an almost identical climate. ‘‘How terrible exile must be, where this likeness does not exist,’ Börne once remarked, as we were strolling in the Jardin des Plantes. ‘How terrible if one were to see only palms and tropical vegetation, and strange wild life, like kangaroos and zebras.’’⁷

That is precisely the kind of world in which Börne’s undreamt-of Australian relative found himself. Much has been made of Slessor’s supposed pessimism, the determined cynicism with which he confronts, not only his surroundings, but his own pretensions as a poet. This power of mockery and scorn is an important feature of the work of Heine and Börne, where it is often attributed to the oppositional stance forced upon them by the fact of being Jews, and underwritten by a literary tradition running back to the Hebrew prophets. The same kind of affiliation might be claimed for Slessor, who is usually seen as an angst-ridden modernist, were it more widely recognised that his gestures of negation are usually performed with a self-conscious deliberation, and with a theatrical aplomb often bordering on self-parody. In some cases the gesture has gone completely unnoticed, as in the first of the ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’, when Slessor observes how, faced with the choice of sailing north towards the safety of home, or westwards into the unknown, Cook had proved more courageous than his predecessors, and sailed into the west. ‘So Cook made choice, so Cook sailed westabout,’ Slessor wrote, ‘So men write poems in Australia.’ Slessor is usually seen as pressing a claim here for the Australian poet, on the grounds that Cook’s heroic choice made it possible for other heroic acts, like writing poetry in Australia, to take place in turn. But if you read the lines with a resigned emphasis on the repeated ‘so’, and a disillusioned shrug of the shoulders, Slessor’s ironic inflection becomes obvious. ‘So Cook sailed westabout,/ So men write poems in Australia’: so if only Cook had sailed north, he – Slessor – would be writing poetry in Paris or New York.

Elsewhere, Slessor’s negative stance is so flamboyant, and so melodramatic, that it really invites one to see it as drawing on an established repertoire of gestures, a rhetoric of indignation and moral outrage. Slessor’s adoption of the prophetic role in ‘Winter Dawn’, looking across the rooftops of Sydney, is perhaps the most obviously traditional of these gestures:

O buried dolls, O men sleeping invisible there,

I stare above your mounds of stone, lean down,

Marooned and lonely in this bitter air,

And in one moment deny your frozen town,

Renounce your bodies. . .

But his habitual conjuring of the bush as blighted wasteland or lurid stage-set, furnished with monsters, or ruins, or poisonous exhalations, and his celebration of the city as a place which the ghostly and the damned, the criminal and the outcast, may justly feel at home in, also belong to the same basic drama of exile and alienation.

The editor and critic A.G. Stephens was right in one way when he noted in his diary, ‘Slessor looks like a Jew; an undercurrent of disapproving Jeremiah in his work’. There is something characteristically Jewish in Slessor’s determination to look on the dark side of things, insistently, with dedication, gaining from his gloomy ecstasy an ironic purchase on the vicissitudes of existence. Others have seen something else – ’a grim Calvinist stressing our doom of predestined mortality’ – thus pointing to the fact that Slessor’s dark side may owe as much to the Scottish Presbyterian in him as it does to the Jew.⁸ In view of its history of immigration and displacement, Australia is fertile ground for schmerz of many kinds, from many different sources: Slessor is by no means the only Australian writer, in outward appearance at home in his surroundings, to have drawn in his writing on the legacy of exile. You don’t have to struggle to hear this dark atavistic note, as if it came, with a weakened intensity, from far away, and a long time ago – it resounds through Australian literature.

And on the other hand, what of the legacy of hope? This note is easy to miss in Slessor, because it leads a bright, but fugitive existence in his poetry. At the end of ‘Five Bells’, as the nightmarish encounter with death fades, the poet’s attention is captured by the light glittering on the waters of Sydney Harbour –

I looked out of my window in the dark

At waves with diamond quills and combs of light

That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand

In the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze. . .

This outbreak of radiance lasts only for an instant, before it is swallowed up by the pitiless drench of the moon’s dead light. This happens often in Slessor’s poetry, a sudden effulgence of light, which is just as suddenly frozen, congealed, or turned into shiny coating or crust. There is a good deal of the alchemist in Slessor’s poetic method as well as in his stance as a poet, in the way his imagery is constantly subject to transmutation, fire into water, water into air, air into stone. There is a similar trade in metals, as natural details are transformed, upwards to copper and silver and gold, but more often downwards, to iron, pewter and lead. It is poetry as a kind of negative alchemy, with darkness and deadness as the common end, but with light as the vital spirit, breaking out of and returning to entrapment in the material world as it flees before the process of transmutation. Indeed so active is Slessor’s light, so dazzling in its effects, though it may turn to paste or to scale, that the force of darkness in his poetry really seems to be owing to the withholding of light, as if in its retreat, light sucked darkness into the world in its wake.

There is a Kabbalist concept called the Shekhina, which has its roots, again, in German hasidism, whereby the glory of God is visible to man as a divine radiance, scattered by the Fall and held captive as sparks and particles of light in the matter of this world. From this dispersion it will be recovered by the acts of the righteous, and restored to its original splendour. Gershom Scholem saw in this image of a scattered and fractured radiance, a particularly compelling retelling of the great myth of exile – but with this consolation, that it offered the reassurance of an ultimate home-coming. Norman Lindsay has a rather twee, secularised version of the Shekhina in the foreground of ‘Enter the Magicians’, where in the midst of an extraordinary burst of radiance you can just make out a naked young girl. As for how this magical light reached Slessor, by what refractions and displacements, we are left only with conjectures. Atavism, like the radiance of the Shekhina itself, is unpredictable and intermittent in its operation: it does not submit readily to the rigour of proof.

But there is this interesting line of descent, through the medium of a third party, from the Kabbalah through Madame Blavatsky to Kenneth’s father, Robert Schloesser-Slessor. Robert Slessor was a mining engineer, an expert on the extraction of metals, an alchemist of sorts. He was also an amateur philosopher, and filled notebook after notebook with his thoughts on important topics, and his dreams. In the first of these notebooks, titled ‘Night Thoughts/Daylight Discounts’, in an entry dated 5 May 1916, he noted:

The only acceptable conclusion (concerning the evolution of the soul) to my mind is the Theosophical doctrine that God gave forth ‘divine sparks’ which descended into gross matter and gradually evoluted up and up, till the divine spark is reabsorbed in the Deity – that seems to me today the satisfying and reasonable conclusion for the conviction that ‘God is immanent everywhere’.⁹

Whether it travelled by this path, or by some other, the light in Slessor’s poetry sparks with a radiance which belies the distance it has come. Nowhere is it more dazzling than when it blazes out of the Pacific visions of Slessor’s retired sea-captains, and nowhere more at home than when it shines in the glittering waters of Sydney Harbour.

Darkness comes down. The Harbour shakes its mane,

Glazed with a leaf of amber; lights appear

Like thieves too early, dropping their swag by night,

Red, gold and green, down trap-doors glassy-clear,

And lanterns over Pinchgut float with light

Where they so long have lain.

All this will last, but I who gaze must go

On water stranger and less clear, and melt

With flesh away; and stars that I have felt,

And loved, shall shine for eyes I do not know.

1. Geoffrey Dutton, Kenneth Slessor: A Biography (Viking, 1991), ch.1; Slessor Papers, National Library of Australia, MS 3020/9/481.
2. Southerly, 1, 1959, quoted in Norman Lindsay on Art, Life and Literature, ed. Keith Wingrove (UQP, 1990), p.194.
3. All references to Slessor’s poetry are to Kenneth Slessor: Collected Poems ed Dennis Haskell and Geoffrey Dutton (Angus & Robertson, 1994).
4. Heine, It Will Be a Lovely Day: Prose Selections , trans. Frederic Ewen (Seven Seas, 1965), p.252; Lindsay, letter to Charles Shepherd, quoted in Ursula Prunster, The Legendary Lindsays (Art Gallery of NSW, 1995). Permission to use a detail from ‘Enter the Magicians’, for the purpose of illustrating this essay, was refused by the copyright holders.
5. See, for example, Raphael Patai, The Jewish Alchemists (Princeton University Press, 1994).
6. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken, 1961), p.99.
7. Börne cited in Solomon Liptzin, Germany’s Stepchildren (Jewish Publication Society, 1944), p.33; Heine, from Ludwig Börne: A Memorial (1840), in It Will Be a Lovely Day, p.280.
8. ‘A.G. Stephens’s Bulletin Diary’, ed. Leon Cantrell, in Bruce Bennett, Cross-Currents (Longman, 1981), p.83; T. Inglis Moore, ‘Kenneth Slessor’, in Critical Essays on Kenneth Slessor, ed. A.K. Thomson (Jacaranda, 1968), p.114.
9. Slessor Papers, NLA MS 3020/2/11, pp.63-64.