Australian Peculiarities
Les Murray
Les Murray: Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, £12.95.
Les Murray: Fredy Neptune. Manchester: Carcanet, £18.95.
“But there’s too much in life: you can’t describe it”, runs the last line of Les Murray’s new verse novel Fredy Neptune. A reviewer faced with the elephantine bulk of his Collected Poems (literally: a massive pachyderm, rear on, adorns its cover) and Fredy Neptune can only wonder at what exactly Les Murray’s idea of “too much” would be, if all this falls short. The first of these books is a Collected rather than a Complete Murray, but still manages to run to five hundred pages of poetry, from The Ilex Tree (1965) to Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996). If everything in Murray is writ large, it also tends to be writ dense. Here he is on the lyrebird, in Translations from the Natural World:
Tailed mimic aeon-sent to intrigue the next recorder,
I mew catbird, I saw crosscut, I howl she-dingo, I kink
forest hush distinct with bellbirds, warble magpie garble, link
cattlebell with kettle boil; I ran ducks’ cranky presidium
or simulate a triller like a rill mirrored lyrical to a rim.
This is instantly recognisable Murray. Lines like these proceed by a kind of metaphorised shorthand, typically in too much of a hurry to bother with definite articles, but undeniably powerful and compelling in their very strangeness. As we see from the poems on animals and on other obsessions like heraldry and military history, Murray does best with subjects he knows well, and that he feels passionate and enthusiastic about. The vocabulary is self-consciously technical and acquired: Translations from the Natural World could not be further from the relaxed, taken-for-granted intimacy with rural life we find in Death of a Naturalist.
If only all of Collected Poems showed the same sure grasp. It doesn’t, and in its absence Murray’s Dr Hyde rises from his dark subconscious to wrest the pen from his hands. There’s probably little point at this late stage in complaining about the hectoring right-wing Christian side to Murray, which can be relied on to put in an appearance whenever sex, war, liberalism or cities come up. But I’m going to anyway because the sort of garbled writing it inspires in him remains a serious obstacle to enjoying his work. The last poem in Collected Poems, for instance, ‘The Head-Spider’, is a fairly dire portent if this is how he intends to keep writing. “Misrule was strict” in the swinging Sydney suburb of his student days, we learn, where resentment of the poet’s chastity poisons his life: “If you’re raped you mostly know/ but I’d been cursed, and refused to notice or believe it”. In case this is too personal to be of interest, Murray dresses it up in theological pseudo-profundity: “If love is cursed in us, then when God exists, we don’t”. It’s not an isolated case. There’s not much Christian grace in evidence in the conclusion of ‘The Last Hellos’, an elegy for his father: “Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can./ Fuck thém. I wish you God.” R.S. Thomas and Geoffrey Hill both have a reputation for being more forbidding and frosty poets than Murray, but I can’t imagine either writing a line as cheap and nasty as that in the name of religion. Other examples of more of the same include ‘A Torturer’s Apprenticeship’, ‘Where Humans Can’t Leave and Mustn’t Complain’ and ‘The Beneficiaries’, a guaranteed inclusion in the Faber Book of Ignominious Verse that James Keery usefully suggested someone should compile.
Equally annoying is his addiction to daft political metaphors, as when he tells us in ‘The Inverse Transports’ that “America and the Soviets/ and the First and Third Reich were poems” (what was the Second Reich – a Bildungsroman?), or, worse still in ‘Rock Music’ that “Sex is a Nazi… what is a Nazi but sex pitched for crowds?” (a pensée that comes up again in Fredy Neptune). Does that make the Spice Girls Nazis? When it comes to satire, Murray’s onslaughts are remarkably underdeveloped and one-sided. As a distant observer of the last Australian general election I saw a few threats to the national fabric, and they weren’t playing rock gigs. So where is the Les Murray satire on the odious Pauline Hanson, or is it bullyingly liberal to pick on an honest Redneck like her? If Murray can’t reclaim the Redneck without the nasty right-wing baggage he trails with him in Subhuman Redneck Poems, and the clotted, hectoring poetry he inspires, perhaps we’d be better off letting the species die out.
Having got that out of the way it’s safe to return to what I like so much about Murray: “the endless detailed rehearsal of Australian peculiarities”, to use his own phrase for what distinguishes Australian poetry. For me, Murray’s early work remains his best, and there are large tracts of The Weatherboard Cathedral and Ethnic Radio that I would not want to be without. There is much in The People’s Otherworld and The Daylight Moon too that ranks with his best work, but no Murray book is without at least a handful of exceptional poems. A list of these would include ‘Spring Hail’, ‘Driving Through Sawmill Towns’, ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’, ‘The Idyll Wheel’, ‘Escaping Out There’, the hilarious ‘Hearing Impairment’, ‘Roman Cage-cups’, ‘The Conquest’, ‘Morse’, ‘Tympan Alley’, ‘Glaze’, ‘Suspended Vessels’, ‘Stacked Water’, ‘It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen’ and ‘The Warm Rain’. If Murray’s sprawling Collected Poems could have tightened its belt sufficiently to include only poems as outstanding as these, “it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise him”. One last niggle: Collected Poems lacks a title index, though its 1991 predecessor managed to stretch to one. In a book of this size, it’s the least one expects.
Big as Collected Poems is, within a month of its publication Murray was back in print with a verse novel as long as many other writers’ Collected Poems, Fredy Neptune (whose cover, again, looks like a comment on its own bulk; someone at Carcanet certainly has a sly sense of humour). Murray had already written a verse novel, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, though there’s no mention of it anywhere here. The hero of the book is Fred Boettcher, a pacifist German-Australian sailor caught up in World War One. After witnessing a group of women being burned to death he loses his sense of touch. Periodically his feeling begins to return, only to be driven away again by lapses into unworthy or violent conduct (it takes the completion of his éducation sentimentale at the end of the book to restore it fully). In the course of the novel Fredy moves from Turkey to Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Australia, America, Germany, and Australia again, as a sailor, a circus strongman, a Hollywood actor and Zeppelin manufacturer. He searches for his parents and becomes a husband and father. He works as an extra on All Quiet on the Western Front, has Rilke read to him by Marlene Dietrich, and rescues a mentally retarded boy from castration in a Nazi hospital.
Fredy Neptune is 10,000 lines long, but the cumulative effect of its enormous length is to overwhelm rather than beguile a reader’s patience. Its dustjacket compares it to Byron, but so many of the qualities that make Don Juan a pleasure to read are utterly alien to the spirit of this book: Byron’s flirtatious toying with the reader, his lightness of touch and epigrammatic wit, his ability to make sex sound comic rather than terrifying, and not least his skill in altering the narrative pace to avoid monotony and relentlessness. Fredy resembles Juan to the extent that things tend to happen to him more than he ever makes them happen himself, but the things that happen are almost uniformly awful. Fredy Neptune is a monumental epic of pain, violence, waste and futility. In addition to his inability to suffer pain, Fredy has remarkable physical strength and, a bit like the Incredible Hulk, unleashes it whenever bad guys get fresh with the weak and defenceless. When the occasion demands, though, he rises above comic-book heroics to genuine moral heroism. His saving of the mentally retarded boy in the chapter set in Nazi Germany (easily the novel’s most impressive) is one such example. It is a relief to see how Murray’s hectoring falls by the wayside when his moral outrage is given a genuine subject to work on and the real writer in him takes over; he even breaks out in rhyme to mark the occasion. If only the real Les Murray could emulate Fredy’s emergence from sensory deprivation and learn to respond a little less defensively to the world beyond the Redneck in the bush.
Page(s) 29-32
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