Between Text and Life

I recently sent a copy of a pamphlet, the quaintly but truly named Literary Circle of the Post, produced by a Sri Lankan acquaintance in Melbourne, Manny Candappa, and containing a piece of mine about Collected Works Bookshop, to another of my correspondents. In response he referred to the claim I’d made in my piece that I thrived on the daily literary and philosophical discussions at our bookshop, preferring them to most of what I hear on the literary scene. He wanted to know what was my objection to the latter? I used to say the same sort of thing of my experience with different creative-writing groups over many years teaching; that while the amateurs could benefit from the rigour of the professionals, so could the pros benefit from the amateurs’ great therapy of art and literature, in which the ordinary and the marvellous properly intersected in the search for self-knowledge and life’s meaning. Likewise, issues and references assumed to be passé around the traps, due I suspect to the ahistorical and postliterary “freedoms” of postmodernism, are alive and well amongst our readers and writers-who-read!

A couple of months ago, I was telephoned by John Ruffels of the D.H. Lawrence Society of Australia, asking permission to republish my juvenile poem, “Goodbye Lorenzo”, in a forthcoming poetry issue of their journal, Rananim. His request was synchronous with my accelerating return to Lawrence, especially his poetry, particularly spurred on by a television documentary on Lawrence’s paintings, and two superb films, the biographical Coming Through and Tim Burstall’s version of Kangaroo. Since that call I’ve been immersed in back-issues of Rananim which have restored to me the passion of my first encounter with Lawrence as a teenager, as well as vaulting me into the continuing controversy over Lawrence’s sojourn in Australia and the status of his story of it. In passing, I’ve marvelled at the denigrations of Lawrence by such critics as A.D. Hope and Dorothy Green; and have been shocked by Les Murray’s heated contention, in a letter to the editor, that Kangaroo was a “very interesting roman à these about Australia at one period, not least because of its total condescension towards Australian rural people and its typically Pom lickspittle put down of the proletarian strength of that Australia…” Consequently I’m rereading Kangaroo and occasionally wondering whether my own fortune here has been touched by such attitudes! Be that as it may, when I last read it in 1971 or 1972, prior to returning to Melbourne after three years in England, my identification with Lawrence’s observations about the people and the place had confirmed them as the absolute truth! Today I realize that my affinity is with an emigrant perception. I’ve become Australian to the extent of understanding that locals would have to have a different optic despite the legitimacy of the foreign view. However, chauvinism and parochialism remain as issues in themselves.

In his editorial for The Poetics of the New American Poetry, Warren Tallman hoped that “no one will mind too much our adopting Garcia Lorca and D.H. Lawrence into this company. They, after all, didn’t hesitate to adopt both America and Whitman into their own searches for the new…” By the same token, there’s a case to be made for an equivalent hospitality on behalf of an Australian writing defined from within and without continental boundaries and biasses—which is more or less what our “internationalism” is all about.

One of the books I’ve resumed on my Lawrence come-back is Anais Nin’s D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study, in which Kangaroo is perceived as Lawrence’s journal of his struggle with the imperatives of inner and outer revolution. The alluded to “unprofessionalism” is simply non-academicism, or at least a balancing of the academic and the intuitive or imaginative interpretation.

The annual of the Anais Nin Foundation, Anais, now in its fourteenth year, epitomises this approach. One of its long-time Australian correspondents is Javant Biarujia, whose account of a pilgrimage to Nin’s and Miller’s “Louveciennes” was noted in the 1994 publication. As the publisher of the little press Nosukumo, he’s responsible for the Nin-David Pepperell correspondence, Letters to a Friend in Australia. Leo Hamalian in his article “A Spy in the House of Lawrence”, in the 1995 annual, quotes Nin—“My first passionate love for a writer was D.H. Lawrence. Reading him was a discovery for me. His descriptions of emotions, sensations, instincts, ambivalences, all the obscure parts of experience, were an illumination of the path I wanted to follow.”

This is the tenor of wholehearted commitment distinguishing all of the literary society newletters and journals with which I’m familiar—and distinguishing them from most “professional” literary criticism. I once replied to a Powys Journal questionnaire that the criticism therein ought to be “Powysean” instead of mimicking standard academic literary modes and tropes, in which the subject is simply the excuse for critical exposition.

Having enjoyed to the utmost my membership of the Powys Society (dedicated to that remarkable family of novelists, essayists, short-story writers, poets and artists) and the Edward Thomas Fellowship (which extends into the domain of the other Dymock poets, naturally), I’m predisposed to joining the D.H. Lawrence Society of Australia. And if Kevin Hart gets wind of this he’ll be renewing his invitations to join the Johnson Society, and the Reverend Ken Parker will be pursuing me on behalf of the John Shaw Neilson Society! I might yet succumb to them all.

The demarcation between text and life, maintained in the various theoretics for different reasons and results, is either non-existent or quite fluid in the literary society journals. Furthermore, readers’ own identifications with both life and text is accommodated to the prosperity of the whole endeavour. This collaboration of scholarship and discipleship recalls one’s own beginnings as reader and writer, but isn’t necessarily a regression into naiveté. The boot may be on the other foot since the naive anti-humanism of some postmodernists may not have been intended either—the renewal of the traditional subject rather than its abolition its truer purpose.

If I might characterise the preceding mood as one of homecoming, and allow its exigencies to prevail upon current reading, I have to confess that despite a history of poetical adventurism and an aptitude for reconciling theoretical and ideological contradictions, I now find myself unpersuaded and unfulfilled by the programmatic estrangements of the avant-garde and strangely charmed by the diverse but traditional practise of the rest. For example, browsing a number of recently received titles from Ireland’s Gallery Press, I was immediately attracted to the run of the language, the shapes of its concerns and its imagined sound, in short its proffering of worlds such as invite one’s whole occupation. They included Michael Hartnett’s Selected & New Poems, Nuala Ní Dhomhnail’s The Astrakhan Coat, Paul Muldoon’s Prince of Quotidian, Cian Carson’s First Language, John Montague’s Collected Poems, and, best of all, a first collection by Conor O’Callaghan, The History of Rain.

The contrast is provided by John Ashbery, whose Can You Hear, Bird initially excited and then sharply disappointed me. The plea that as an exemplary postmodernist he’s doing just what he ought to be doing no longer convinces me—Marjorie Perloff’s blurb-description of the collision of “literary echoes, puns, paragrams, and mini-narratives” within a “failing panopticon” has me responding “So what?” I experience a let-down, perhaps even on behalf of one of the books dedicatees, that arch-fictioneer, Harry Mathews—yes, on Mathews’s, Merrill’s and Stevens’s behalves—on behalf of the legatees of the symbolists’ and then the surrealists’ grand designs. But of course, this is an argument had in Heaven—that is to say, Ashbery’s book is there to bear every mortal argument, since he’s big enough to receive all comers. It’s reading and criticism which might be at a crossroads, not John Ashbery.

The jaded narrator of Can You Hear, Bird disports his airs and graces, and like the pessimistic theory which would justify him, it’s never more than words. No “everything” for words to be all over, as Olson charged—and in 1967, when I first read Ashbery’s wonderful poem “The Skaters” I thought it was oracular like Olson’s “The Kingfishers” or “Those Lordly & Isolate Satyrs”. Since then I think Ashbery’s developed a cryptology akin to Gertrude Stein’s as analysed by William Gass—“tender buttons” of a concealed and mystified life and not the celebrated autonomous objects, not “Cubism”’s or any other liberation’s jewels. “But since I don’t understand myself, only segments/ of myself that misunderstand each other, there’s no/ reason for you to want to, no way you could/ even if we both wanted it”—sounds a degree of pessimism which cannot be sustained and shouldn’t be. And Ashbery’s brilliant images and conceits do not finally stay suspicion of the existential dissembling in his work and everywhere else that’s self-consciously today’s.

As concerned with identity and presence (I want to say the sanctity of life, its integrity, value, meaning) as Ashbery, the Dubliner O’Callaghan keeps time with time’s passing without abandoning a traditional form of address. He has no need of sarcasm or vacuum—his tone of voice rhymes with the given world’s; his railway-station, unlike Flaubert’s, is as good as a work of art! Sometimes the old Ashbery, sometimes the young O’Callaghan—my argument spins. Reversing, conversing, traversing—and hinges or unhinges upon such a verse as this in O’Callaghan’s poem, “Silver Birch”: “The day is gone. My longest memory of trees/ is the one in which I walk across a road/ to where silver birch leaves are darkened on one side./ The shadows from a story will survive like this.”

References

The Literary Circle of the Post is a privately circulating publication.

The D.H. Lawrence Society of Australia, PO Box 100, Millers Point, NSW, 2000.

The Powys Society, Secretary, John Batten, Keepers Cottage, Montacute, Somerset, England, TA15 6XN.

The Edward Thomas Fellowship, Richard Emeny, Butler’s Cottage, Halswell House, Goathurst, nr Bridgewater, Somerset, England, TA5 2DH. Newsletter to members.

Anais: An International Journal, ed Gunther Stuhlmann, Anais Nin Foundation, 2335 Hidalgo Ave, Los Angeles, California, 90039, USA.

Can You Hear, Bird by John Ashbery, FSG, 1995.

The History of Rain by Conor O’Callaghan, The Gallery Press.