Читать книгу Knocking Round - J Le Gay Brereton - Страница 4

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My father was a poet and a friend of poets, but his time was so fully occupied by his duties as a physician and as the leader of the Swedenborgian church in Sydney that, as a small boy, I never thought of him except as a beneficent but seldom-seen angel who wore a pith helmet and went to the Turkish bath for refreshment. He was broadly-built, and I recollect a happy evening when he crawled about the floor, a realistic elephant, with one or two of us on his back. His kind blue eyes and his great fair beard were a joy to the heart of many an ailing child, and his presence must often have done even more good than medicine.

It was his friendship with poets that accounted for my only interview with the most distinguished Australian writer of his time. I was playing solitarily in the paved courtyard in front of our home in Richmond Terrace, when a rather haggard man, whose trousers seemed to flap about his legs, came in from the Domain. After a moment's hesitation he approached me and said, "I suppose you'd like a penny." I supposed so too, and answered accordingly. He regarded me with deep melancholy, shook his head, exclaimed, "I wish I had one to give you," and walked up the steps to the front door. Disappointment impressed upon my memory that simple conversation with Henry Kendall.

Another versifier, whom I remember well, used to come—a few years later I suppose—to read his lines to my father and consult him as to their merit. If my father found fault with the metre, this poet controverted the objection by triumphantly counting the syllables on his fingers. Once he brought a political epigram, which he repeated magnificently:—

Better that in cold obstruction Old obstructionists should lie And our veins be filled with new blood Running deep and running high.

"Better than what?" asked my father with polite interest. The question was evidently unexpected and disconcerting.

Probably the first poet in whom I took a warm personal interest was Dowell O'Reilly, who, when I made his acquaintance, was teaching the boys in his mother's school at Parramatta. He sought me out, at a school cadet camp, because he had read stray verses of mine which engaged his sympathy, and we formed an immediate friendship. My home was at Gladesville, and more than once I walked up to Parramatta—eight miles—in the evening, talked with Dowell till nearly morning, and then walked home again; such was the charm of his companionship. He did not sleep under the same roof with the rest of the family but in what had been a fowl-house, though, when I knew it, it had been converted into very comfortable quarters. The window opened upon the interior of a large cage, occupied by pigeons, and sometimes Dowell would throw a handful of wheat on his floor for the birds. They were friendly and picturesque, though not as fastidiously careful of their manners as they might have been.

Dowell O'Reilly was an athletic young fellow in those days, an enthusiastic cricketer, a lieutenant in a volunteer regiment, and a fellow of happy disposition. He had vast ambitions and fiery enthusiasm and a great heart. Humorous and quick-witted and glib-tongued, he soon developed into a public speaker whom nobody could hear without appreciation, so that he naturally chose politics as the quickest and most effective way of using his talents for the public benefit. By way of introducing himself to what was to be his constituency he delivered a lecture in Parramatta on "The French Revolution." The town crier had made a slight mistake, and had publicly announced that the subject of the address was to be "French Revelations," and consequently the size of Dowell's audience was amazing; nevertheless, his oratory gave them no opportunity to feel regret. But in the political sphere, as elsewhere, though he had some success he met with many disappointments, his ardency was dimmed, and his faith in human nature tarnished. He seemed to have no firm anchorage, but was tossed on the surface of theories and events. Still, he retained to the end much of his old impulsiveness, his power of affection, his eagerness to acknowledge merit, and his pathetic belief in his ability to summarize the characters of his friends and enemies. As a protection against the shafts and poison-gas of the Philistine, he kept his armour of bright humour and his mask of whimsical irony. His face was wonderfully expressive, and, even when he did not seize advantage for a quip, his lifted brows and laughing eyes were eloquent. I remember well his extraordinary look of dismay and astonishment and delight when a poet, for whom we both had an affection, said solemnly and sonorously, "I am very fond of birds, myself. I never allow my boys to shoot them within half a mile of the house."

As the editor of the Sydney University undergraduates' journal, Hermes, I received, one afternoon, a song, with musical accompaniment, printed on yellow paper; and I think there was an anonymous note, begging for a review. Blankly ignorant of music, I published a notice in which I gave my sufficiently favourable opinion of the verses, and almost ignored the accompaniment. That led to an acquaintance with the author of the lyric, a rallying song for "The men of the New Australia." She was Miss M. J. Cameron, now better known to Australia as Mary Gilmore, and she had sent the sulphur-tinted publication merely to secure some encouragement for the young collaborating composer. She was not a student of the University, but she had a room in a terrace opposite the main building, and there I would meet her sometimes in the evening. Her alert manner and abrupt speech went well with an active and original mind which gave a wonderful interest to her talk. When she had endured my conversation longer than politeness demanded, she would turn me out without ceremony, and, I hope, slept the better for her weariness. One night she took me wandering over districts that were strange to me, and we called at the house of the burly, kind-hearted John Farrell, ex-brewer, poet, staunch single-taxer, and able journalist. As I mention elsewhere, it was she who introduced me to Henry Lawson, and then tactfully waved us into the street while the night was yet young. Of all the women I know, there is none who better understands the nature of men than the greatly sympathetic poet of The Passionate Heart. It is pleasant to recall that recently she introduced me to another poet—Shaw Neilson, who combines hard manual labour and the delicate handling of felicitous rhythms—and that she repeated her old tactics.

Lawson and I used to wander into all sorts of queer corners and neglected backwaters in Sydney and he pointed out to me the localities which he fancifully associated with the scenes described by the one novelist with whose work he was fairly familiar—Charles Dickens. He was never a great reader, and, at the height of his powers, devoted more of his time to the perusal of Deadwood Dick's adventures than to anything that could be called literature. I remember his borrowing only one book from me in all the years of our friendship; it was Barrack Room Ballads. His knowledge of Edgar Poe and Bret Harte, he told me, came from his mother, who used to read aloud to her family.

Looking back over the crowded years in which Lawson's reputation spread and strengthened until, at his death, he was deemed worthy of a public funeral, and thereafter was recognized throughout our continent, and even in Europe, as the most typically Australian of our literary figures, I am glad to remember that, from the day when I read one of his earliest contributions to the Bulletin, I knew his worth—I hope without the exaggeration which is habitual with some of his later admirers—and was the first to give a lecture on his work and possibly the first to publish an article in recognition of his pre-eminence. When the article was written, he had not yet published a book; the lecture was delivered in hope of increasing the sales of his then forthcoming volume, In the Days when the World was Wide. He and I together selected and revised the poems for that volume, and I still perceive, with some annoyance, my own handiwork in a passage where neither of us could find the exact word and he insisted on adopting my desperate suggestion instead of recasting the line.

He used to compose his poems gradually, without setting them down upon paper. Shut in from outward disturbance by his deafness, he would walk along, with that intense look of his, fitting his words to the chosen metre. Sometimes he would say, "Here's a bit of a piece I have in mind;" and then, with an almost mechanical insistence on the metrical beat, he would recite a few lines. He could store the stanzas in his head without trouble. The trouble came with the writing.

Though Lawson had a childlike instinct for strongly-marked metres, he had no feeling whatever for subtleties of rhythm. He took up a copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass one day, and glanced piercingly at a few pages. "I can't make anything out of that," he complained; "the lines don't seem to match. Look at this now! It begins all right—'To get betimes in Boston Town, I rose this morning early,' but the next line ought to be, 'Tum tumty tumty tumty tum amang the rigs o' barley,' or something like that." In one poem of his I thought I detected signs of a greater delicacy of ear. It was an early piece, describing the dream of a mother whose little girl had been drowned, and its refrain was the call of the phantom child—.

"Come, mamma! come!

Quick! follow me!

Step out on the leaves of the water-lily!"

The use of the unaccented syllable for the rhyme has the kind of beauty that Rossetti often obtained by similar means. I asked Lawson how he came to use such a rhyme. He was apologetic. He should have made it clear, he explained, that he was imitating a child's way of stressing the word—"putting all the weight on the last syllable."

One afternoon, in the dim parlour at McGrath's, Lawson introduced me to his friend Roderic Quinn, who sat and ruminated and said little, though the glint of his beaming eyes showed how humorously observant he was; and I dare say there was a good deal in both of us to amuse him. Rod and I have never seen much of each other, but enough for mutual good-will. His best poetry, I suspect, is better than he knows. Often his truest images seem to mean less to him than to an imaginative reader. Chris Brennan once objected to the last line but one in "The Hidden Tide," because the moon that shines therein is so much more than "the full moon of peace;" the words "of peace" set a false limit. Again, in "The Red-tressed Maiden," Quinn is so extraordinarily anxious to indicate that his ancient but ever-youthful girl is fire, that he seems to forget that fire is a primeval symbol of creative, vital and purifying love—the grace and wrath of God; but, because his imagery is beautifully true, one can dream over his comforting fire and divine meaning beyond meaning.

I met Brennan first in the quadrangle of the University of Sydney, in the year in which he took his Bachelor's degree and I entered as a freshman. Jack Peden introduced us. The common-room was still humming with stories of Brennan's pranks as an undergrad, and he had set a standard for raggedness of gown and dilapidation of trencher cap—the ne plus ultra of academic fashion. A travelling scholarship took him to Germany, and several years had passed when I met him again. Then began a close friendship, which I hope nothing can break, though in substantial results it has been entirely onesided: he has had nothing to gain from me, whereas intercourse with him is a perennial education. The extent and thoroughness of his learning reduces fine scholars to a humble docility. His thought ranges everywhere, deeply penetrating. All essentially human qualities are developed in him and combined in a most impressive unity. It would be grossly unjust to view him from only one angle. He is so comprehensive, his nature so spacious, that in him contraries meet and are reconciled. Those who are baffled and lost in the mosses of the borderland are apt to disbelieve in the rich region that spreads beyond. People who have only heard him boom and laugh have little conception of the intimate secrets of his nature—his sensitiveness, his tenderness and spiritual delicacy. Finding his attitude defiant or evasive, they are unable to realize that this is the protective guise of shyness. He is a turbulent sea concealing its lucid deep. He hides often behind his scholarship, for always he is ready to impart knowledge, to open the treasury of his mind to anybody who is interested; and nobody who listens can fail to be interested. His poetry is of the kind that gains 'more and more appreciation with the lapse of time—as people catch up with it, one might say. After a hundred years, when most of us have been forgotten, his honoured name will be familiar. His is not a poetry of occasional felicities and lucky shots. Every line is firmly moulded and genuinely poetic. Have a look at the cluster of his poems in Percival Serle's Australasian Anthology, and notice how thin, how pale and diffuse, the verses contributed by many other Australian writers suddenly appear by contrast. His poetic quality is essential.

Among all the poets who have attended our University of Sydney as students, Brennan easily takes first place, though there are several who have striking merits. Dowell O'Reilly, for example, and L. H. Allen, and H. M. Green. A poet cannot be made, but literary talent can be fostered and the evidence is clear enough that young poets are not daunted by the academic discipline of Sydney, but that people who are interested in the development of Australian literature should be grateful to an institution where literary gifts are recognized and encouraged.

Among the younger poets who are now gaining recognition, there are two university men who seem to me to show remarkable promise. One is R. D. FitzGerald, in whom joy gushes up with the force and constancy of an artesian spring and expresses itself with spontaneous power. The other is Raymond McGrath, who handles words with an artist's instinctive feeling for sound and colour values; for McGrath is a pictorial artist and an architect as well as a poet.

I diffidently bask in a little reflected glory from FitzGerald, inasmuch as I happen to be his uncle. At first, I thought, his parents seemed inclined to discourage his uncommercial talent. I suspect that this was because they had a kinsman who wrote verse and had Bohemian friends, and could easily have been regarded as an awful example. But the superstition that a poet is necessarily an unpractical idler has long been exploded, even in Australia. FitzGerald is an able surveyor.

McGrath and I have been friends ever since he was good enough to show me some of his verses in the first year of his university course and to listen without impatience to my criticisms.

Victor Daley, whose ideas became so naturally incarnate in lovely imagery that he seemed to be able to write poetry on demand, was the centre of a group of which I was not a member. With him I was never intimate until he was dying at Killara, though I saw him occasionally in happier days. I think the first occasion was when he was beating up a party for a merrymaking on a visiting yacht; when Bertram Stevens mentioned my name, he tried to include me among the revellers. I pleaded a strict engagement. "Break it," he commanded. I told him I had no desire to break it. "With whom is it," he asked, "a man or a woman?" "A woman, of course." "Then you can be no true Bohemian," he cried theatrically, "for no woman on earth is worthy of such a sacrifice as this." I recalled his words, at a later meeting, on hearing him say, with melancholy intonation, "I must give up Bohemianism; it makes too many demands on a fellow." That is the danger, no doubt, when Bohemia becomes an -ism and its traditions are fossilized to Draconic law. The Bohemianist is atrociously conventional, and, for the sake of strict conformity, he may even find inebriety forced upon him by his conscience and may regard frowsiness as a virtue. Daley was fastidious, and he shrank from any such rigid code of morals.

Looking far back, I see myself as a curious kid gazing at a boy named Bartie Paterson. He took no notice of me. He had been shooting pelicans on the Parramatta River, a sport that seems somehow to have fallen into disuse. When I was a schoolboy and he was a man, we lived in the same suburb. He and some other bachelors had an establishment of their own at Gladesville, when he first thought of attempting verse. He had been reading the poems of Gordon and of Cholmondeley Pennell, and believed that he could compose ballads, with a swinging metre in harmony with a rushing action, at least as well as they. Knowing that I was already a writer of verse, he asked me if I would collaborate with him. I was astonished, for that kind of verse was scarcely in my line; and the idea of collaboration was promptly dropped. Soon afterwards some of Banjo's most successful ballads were appearing in the Bulletin.

There are many other things I could tell you of my meetings with poets. For example I might describe how I entered the apparently deserted library of the Supreme Court in Melbourne, and, noticing a stream of grey smoke floating upward from behind a desk, peeped round the barricade and found a poet whose eyes appeared now and then to be covered with a filmy dreaminess from behind which he looked mystically into infinity—that was Bernard O'Dowd. Or I might tell you of the shy idealist, dark-bearded and earnest-eyed, who has somehow been absorbed into the later personality of Arthur Adams. And how many others there are! the exuberant Hugh McCrae, who discovered an unexpected fauna in the Australian bush, was photographed as a smooth-skinned Pan playing his pipes in the shrubbery, and finds himself surrounded by a poetic progeny of skipping fauns; Zora Cross who achieved her reputation by an extraordinary intensity, and added to it by writing the finest of Australian elegies; Arthur Bayldon who astonished the Bushmen by swimming miraculously in inland tanks, while his limbs were trussed, and whose courage and exaltation of spirit give worth to the books for which he secured a sufficient sale by personal canvassing; McKee Wright, who read his delicately-moulded quantitative verse with a voice that passed over the rhythm soothingly, as a soft hand over the curves of a cat; and Dora Wilcox, Dorothea Mackellar, Furnley Maurice, H. M. Green, L. H. Allen, Arthur Maquarie and the rest! But enough for the present.

I have recalled a few personalities and incidents that have interested me, and my only excuse is a hope that somebody else may also be interested.

If you believe the often-repeated sneer that artists are jealous, quarrelsome creatures who are easily excited to petty malice against each other, let me assure you that that is not my experience. It is certainly not true of those artists for whom words and phrases are the materials of creation. As I think of the poets whom I know and have known and of my relations with them, the air about me grows bright and warm with friendliness.