David Malouf’s Surprises

This essay is a revised and expanded version of the 2024 Fryer Lecture in Australian Literature given at Customs House, Brisbane, 11 October 2024, to mark David Malouf’s 90th birthday and UQP’s republication of three of Malouf’s collections of poetry: Typewriter Music, Earth Hour, and An Open Book. A live recording of the lecture, followed by a Q&A, can be found here. 

There’s a poem in Typewriter Music called ‘An Essay on Angels – the short version’ where the speaker remembers as a child always being ‘on the lookout […] for white horses’: 

An earlier poem had imagined catching, ‘silk thread on thread, the unicorn’. Now, rather than white horses or unicorns, the poet is alert for angels, and wonders how a visit from one of those might change things. What comes instead is a poem – in fact, poem after poem in that book, published by David Malouf with UQP in 2007, and the two that followed, Earth Hour (UQP 2014) and An Open Book (UQP 2018). The author’s long relationship with poetry is renewed in these late works, which are now republished together, with a coda of new poems added to An Open Book. That is also ‘extraordinary’ and, with the poet in his 91st year, deserves our attention.

Among the very first of Malouf’s poems to appear in book form – in his section of Four Poets (Cheshire, 1962) – is a poem called ‘Sheer Edge’ that has certainly lasted. It has been reprinted a number of times, including in Selected Poems: Revolving Days (UQP, 2008), a volume which reprises poems from previous collections in an arrangement that reflects the pattern of the writer’s life: ‘Part I […] childhood and youth in Brisbane and its surroundings in and after the Second World War, Part II the 1960s […] teaching in the north of England and travelling in Europe, Part III the decade after […] [in] Sydney [and] Part IV […] the years since then […] moving back and forth between Sydney and a village in Southern Tuscany’, as he tells us. This thematic, rather than strictly chronological, arrangement offers a kind of biography.

‘Sheer Edge’ opens the book. But a small, significant change was made to the poem after its original appearance, where the last stanza read:

In the version published a few years later as the last poem in Bicycle and Other Poems (UQP, 1970), and from then on, those lines became:

The shift from ‘gesture’ to ‘moment / of touching’ is key. In evoking the possibility of creation at an extreme – on the ‘sheer edge / of a continent’ or ‘an abyss’ – the ‘gesture’ produced when ‘fingers […] / fail to hold’ is replaced by the felt contact of ‘the moment’ that is also ‘the poem’. The world touches us as we touch back. So too, in metaphor, does the poem, in a lingering intimacy. The surprise of this signals a change in Malouf’s poetry over time – from performative detachment to a more immediate, experiential sense of wonder for which ‘touch’ is the necessary word.

In ‘Donation’, from the sequence called ‘A Knee Bent to Longevity’ in An Open Book, for example, a long life and its traces are encompassed as:

Malouf explains his way of writing as allowing ‘the poem to tell me where it’s going’. Has it come to its final line in suspension like that? Only temporarily. The next poem in the sequence, ‘As Living Is’, starts again on the same theme, moving towards a mysterious circularity by way of conclusion:

One way of describing this modulation from gesture to touch more generally in Malouf’s work would be in terms of register or affinity – from Roman to Greek, say. In poems such as ‘The Little Aeneid’, ‘Reading Horace Outside Sydney, 1970’, and the writing inspired by Ovid, he can be Classically detached, a Latin ironist in a Pax Romana, while in later years he becomes more Greek, a lyric fatalist in awe of the gods. In 2002 he produced his Hippolytus, ‘a free version, after Euripides’, mostly in verse, of a play first performed in Athens in 428 BCE. In Malouf’s translation ‘touch’ is again a key word. ‘A god has touched me,’ says Phaedra of her barely controllable passion for her stepson Hippolytus. ‘Madness!’ The goddess Aphrodite, offended by the young man’s refusal of love (he serves her rival, Artemis, chaste goddess of the hunt), plots revenge through the desire that touches Phaedra in a sensory assault:

Phaedra comes with a curse in the form of an erotic life force that also brings death: ‘that desire, that pricking on, that hungering for life that is her great gift to us’, in the nurse’s words for the love that destroys both Phaedra and Hippolytus. Touch resisted becomes touch that kills.

says the young man at the end. The Chorus steps forward to sum up the message of these terrible events:

To which Malouf’s compacted language bears witness.

While the order in which work is published does not necessarily reflect the time or place in which it was written (let alone the moment of its inception or the circumstances of its gestation), the parallax error between bibliography and biography can be revealing. Malouf’s list of publications suggests a hiatus in poetry volumes after First Things Last in 1980 (overlooking the new work included in the Selected editions of 1981 and 1989). Established as a poet by the time of Neighbours in a Thicket (1975), he had started turning to prose: Johnno was completed in draft by 1972, and published in 1975. His next prose work, An Imaginary Life (1978), the internationally esteemed meditation on Ovid’s exile from Rome, began as a ‘poetic monologue’ before finding a prose form and a signal title to go with it. Fly Away Peter followed in 1982, and Remembering Babylon in 1993, both widely studied novels. 12 Edmondstone Street (1985) is prose memoir, while A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness (1998), Malouf’s Boyer Lectures, is a set of essays where the writer reflects on the ‘complex fate’ of Australians, a theme adapted from Henry James’ remark that ‘it’s a complex fate, being an American’. Being Australian is different again, Malouf suggests.

He wrote less poetry in those decades after the seventies, he tells us, because his creative energies were going into his prose. The poems he wrote occasionally at the time became bigger, ‘ambitious’ poems of ‘analysis’ and ‘commentary’ on history and culture, of which The Little Panopticon (1981) and Aerial Views (1989) are examples. He was better known as a novelist. His last novel to date, Ransom (2009), returned to the world of Classical antiquity through an episode from Homer’s Iliad.  Along the way were works of almost every other kind as well – stories, libretti, reviews – responding to other works of art, moving across genre and form, prompting creative and critical responses from others in a generative circle. There’s a metamorphic capacity in the variousness of Malouf’s writing that connects with the matter of Australia too. His Latin and Greek worlds can be read as proxies for this country: terra nullius under Pax Americana, shadowed by a violence that it hurts to touch.

The period from 2007-8 to the present adds another part to the pattern of Malouf’s writing life in which the author sells his house in Southern Tuscany, reduces his travel between Australia and Europe, and returns to Brisbane and the Gold Coast, where he eventually relocates after selling his house in Sydney. In Part V, three volumes of new poems are published. The turn and return to places of childhood and youth have been accompanied by poetic turn and return.

At a festschrift for Alexis Wright at the University of Melbourne in 2024, Ellen van Neerven talked of how, for them, Wright’s work always ‘leans in’ to the poetic, although Wright writes prose. It was a way of expressing how poetry can be intrinsic to a writer’s vision and present in their work, even if they are not writing poems. What is the work, then, that the poetic does?

On that occasion, van Neerven had this to say about the writer they call Aunty Alexis Wright:

This is a great tribute from one Queensland writer to another.

Much of what van Neerven says resonates with the relationship to language, world, and place found in the work of that other Queenslander, David Malouf, however tentatively he imagines the healing of place and people in his own kaleidoscopic cosmopolitanism. What is it about this brutally colonised territory that can inspire such verbal magnificence, the poetic running through it like a silken thread?

For Malouf ‘the music of poetry is its meaning’, in the ear and on the tongue, in the touch of sound, in the new-old toccata that is played on the keys and comes out on the page as typewriter music: a restorative and a remedy. The poetic comes with care for language, close attention to sound and rhythm, a consciousness of meanings that are at once precise and multiple, a pleasure in the fluidity of language and its power to harness imagination beyond itself, while holding space for silence. It tilts towards what can only be imagined, as in the very last of the new poems that form a Coda in the reprint of An Open Book, a further PS:

Days revolve like a revolving door, and as they revolve in the mind, they take us back into the past even as we move forward through time. ‘Revolving Days’ is a Janus-faced poem of angles and glances that starts with a memory in past tense – ‘That year I had nowhere to go. I fell in love…’ – before moving quickly to a present tense commonplace – ‘We never write.’ – that changes again to a differently present, more interior sense of ‘write’ – ‘I’m writing this for you.’ The one addressed appears as a visitor from the other room, a glimpse in the mirror as the speaker dresses himself: a ‘you’ who might equally be a double ‘I’, a self, summoned and ad-dressed with a change of shirt. Within the revolving dualities of day and night, between hemispheres, season after season, near and far, inside and out, the subtle play of presence and absence, loss and continuity, goes on.

Malouf has called the different music of these later poems ‘low-key music’, reflecting the everyday rather than commenting on it. The poems are often short, with shorter lines, ‘simpler’ without being ‘facile’. The improvisational tone is colloquial but intent on distinctions. A modest starting point produces a surprise in where it leads, whether to grandeur or a more casual indeterminacy, as in the poem ‘The Cup’ which starts from daily routine – ‘In the one cup / darkness, espresso black […] I drink at the open window’ – yet reaches:

Those hyphenated words – ‘bitter-sweet’, ‘shadow-like’ – are enjambed as oppositional pairings across the line in an effect – a slight hesitancy – that the page creates. Elsewhere lines run across pauses and spaces as one poem gives way to another in a series. The poet attends and follows, open to a poem’s twists and turns. A sharp move away from where the beginning seems to be heading finds an ending that leaves the poem as if incomplete, more like an arrival that the next poem can take off from. It’s like a game of tag. The words can’t help but move, as the poet can’t help but inhabit multiple worlds.

That morning coffee ritual could be taking place anywhere, but we can guess from the dedicatee, Joan Tesei, Malouf’s neighbour in Campagnatico, that the setting is Tuscany. I borrowed his house there for a few months in 1984 and wrote most of my novel Paper Nautilus. Later still we were ‘neighbours in the thicket’ (to use one of his phrases) of inner-city Sydney when he lived in Myrtle St, Chippendale, in the ’90s and 2000s. The travel between these overlapping worlds, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, Tuscany and Sydney – instant in the mind, a long traverse in practice – offers ever more planetary views.

One of the features of the later books is the growing greenness of the poet’s world, an expansion signalled by the title Earth Hour and the environmental awareness expressed in the sequence called ‘A Green Miscellany’. ‘The Far View’, a poem prompted by plane travel, opens: ‘Clearly at this height the earth unravels / its secrets’. For the poet that is a matter of seeing back down the centuries into history and culture as well as across space. In Tuscany it is continuous, everything created from the earth in one place over time shaping the earth and its people and their language in turn. In Brisbane and on the Coast, it is personal and familial, from earliest beginnings growing into the community there today. In Sydney, standing for Australia, history and culture are discontinuous, contested, unresolved, even as they stretch far back. There’s a Sydney poem called ‘The Prospect of Little Anon on an Inner-city Greensward’ in An Open Book (a nod to the seventeenth-century English poet Marvell) where the speaker recognises himself in a small child who is taking on the ‘world that’s given’ to him, making a microphone of his fist, the questions asked: ‘What now? What next?’

‘At Laterina’, from Earth Hour, dedicated to painter Jeffrey Smart, an Australian ex-pat neighbour, swerves suddenly from Tuscany to Queensland. Waiting to be picked up for a birthday gathering, the speaker observes the lime tree – the tiglio – in flower in the square, as happens throughout that region in June, its scent a reminder of place. He thinks of migrants from these small towns to other places where they find work – migrants like himself:

A winding question with hard-to-follow syntax for an overarching thought that brings all together.

The sense of the pressure of the past in the present – the lineages, the personal stories, the conflict of culture and creed, the dispossession, the destruction, the dreams and nightmares, the hidden, fractured trajectories that poetic language can register and transform for a more harmonious potential world is something David Malouf’s work brings to our literature and our understanding of ourselves. He is aware of the multiple inheritances that a society carries and how they might be re-imagined in a shared language for a collective good. Such high purpose might come as a surprise. Yet surprise is the stuff of poetry, at the heart of the poetic.

Another way to describe the change in Malouf’s poetry from early to late is in terms of shifting poetic allegiances, from W. H. Auden, supremely the poet of abstracted ironic gesture, to Wallace Stevens, the poet of transcendent touch. Yvonne Smith discusses the importance for Malouf of the poetic as a force for redress, as enunciated by Stevens (as it was in a different locale for Seamus Heaney). She tells the story of Malouf’s friend John Milliner, the inspiration for Johnno, arriving late to catch the ferry to Stradbroke Island for a weekend away when they were students, with a copy of Wallace Stevens’s Selected Poems (Faber, 1953) stolen from a bookshop as a gift: Malouf’s ‘first encounter with that poet’. If Stevens came as a surprise for young Malouf on that occasion, it is unsurprising that an older Malouf would come to appreciate Stevens as a master.

Stevens is profoundly a poet of surprise – of the power of language to unveil the glamour of the world through the mystery of sound and meaning. In some of his most oracular pages, the critic Harold Bloom teases out the presence of surprise in Stevens, tracing it back to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on ‘The Poet’, where Emerson says of Pegasus, the flying horse that symbolises imagination, ‘Surprise and wonder always fly beside him’. ‘Surprise’ (Bloom says) here means ‘the sudden manifestation of the vital will. It means Victory and ecstasy, a seizure’. Emerson related it to metamorphosis, both of actual form and the power of ‘possible forms’. ‘Hence the shudder of joy with which in each clear moment we recognise the metamorphosis; because it is always a conquest, a surprise from the heart of things’ – an American trope, perhaps, that a century later Stevens would sublimate into something subtler. Bloom calls it the ‘hushed eros’ that ‘is wholly characteristic of [Stevens]’, quoting the beautiful lines from the Professor Eucalyptus passage in Stevens’s ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’ (which Malouf nods to in ‘An Ordinary Evening at Hamilton’):

Malouf’s version – being ‘touched / by all we touch’ – mutes this to a reciprocity that is far from any trope of power.

Surprise can be an aesthetic effect as well as an expression of the life force. In Malouf’s poetry, surprise comes as a play on words, a striking image, a lateral association, a sudden shift of register or relaxation of form. All are present in the changes rung in ‘Seven Last Words of the Emperor Hadrian’, the short dialogues between body and soul that delight Malouf’s audiences in public readings. As an expression of power, surprise can be violent, as in an ambush or when bombs fall. In poetry the effect of surprise is rather to unsettle and animate:

There’s a sending of covert messages, an intriguing arrival on the page.

Towards the end of An Open Book, a poem called ‘Before or After’ varies the everyday phrase ‘before and after’ to conjure an equally everyday yet totally other suspension of time – a time when ‘before or after’ makes no difference and all the difference:

‘Most / surprises’, the poem goes on,

Because that may be the last one, ‘till the big / surprise kicks in’.