Shakespeare's Love

(i)
The claims of the Scarry book (from the back cover)
The traditional understanding of Shakespeare’s first seventeen sonnets.

Elaine Scarry says we now know the name of the young man Shakespeare wrote the first 123 sonnets for and about. ⁽¹⁾

The traditional explanation for the sequence is that Shakespeare was hired by the Earl of Southampton to persuade his son to marry. The sequence begins with witty and formal arguments to that effect.

From fairest creatures we desire increase
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die – [Sonnet 1]

Look in the glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another – [Sonnet 3]

Though the arguments are propositions, formal and abstract, so abstract they feel the way Elizabethan scrollwork looks, lines wound around themselves in air, continuing, unanchored and centreless, there are phrases so sound they are still striking. "The world’s fresh ornament" – structured like a cliché but still singular; "thy youth's proud livery" – so simultaneously abstract & concrete it could never become the pedestrian clothed in youth; perfume, "a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass" – so exact you can see the glint on the edge of the bottle. Wit and argument condense to single lines: "Oh change thy thought that I may change my mind." "You had a father – let your son say so."

The first 17 sonnets can be difficult or abstruse. It's the syntax, it's the language changing: 400 years of empire and social and scientific revolution. But even as Euclydian as they are, as apparently supportive of the old tale as they seem, the first 17 of these poems also document, 1 step forward, & a step back, the social and personal distance between the poet and the young man diminishing. Shakespeare is coming closer.

Any overview of the sonnets will always group the first 17 together. This is because 18 breaks style and subject completely: neither distanced nor impersonal nor general nor abstract; not designed to be harmless if overheard or presented in public, it's intimate, unguarded, direct, electric.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate…
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And summer's lease hath all too short a date
But thy eternal summer shall not fade...
Nor shall Death brag thou wandr'st in his shade.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

After number 17, there's no more talk of sons.

(ii)
I begin to catalogue the book. Tweak the boss’s orders & chafe because the book sends me into a hurricane of curiosity and I’m going to be able to read it. My take on the first 17 sonnets.

December, 2016

Tuesday, Dec. 13, '16
Today I picked Naming Thy Name: Crosstalk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets off the truck I was "cataloging" – i.e., copy-cataloging, in the new, streamlined, do-nothing way: pick record, Dewey/category, initials, no duplicate call numbers please.

("You can correct it if it’s just plain wrong.")
(How wrong are we allowed to know it is?)
("Your job is to choose a record and assign a call number – Dewey/category, initials, no duplicates.")

Scarry says she knows who Shakespeare's sonnets were written to & about: the name of the guy. (The name of the guy!? The name of the guy! I'm avid.)

I have to read the sonnets before I read the book. I've been meaning to read them for yonks. Now I'll read them for the goss.

First impressions: They start all strained and ho hum, and I'm finding that I don't like the editor’s glosses, they're too literal and nailed down (which is what you have to do as an editor, I see that). I like the word to float over all its applicable semantic areas; you lose the sense of richness otherwise. So I only look at the glosses when I really am puzzled & have no hope of etymologizing my way out – as in misprision for fault. But anyway:

By sonnet 13 Shake's hooked, the sonnets start to get substantial, the language gets less... twisted around almost nothing like wire on air or the loops in an Elizabethan signature (1 & 3, e.g.) and they go on and on about the guy’s beauty and grace and how he'll live forever in these lines (18) and how he's the best thing ever (sonnet 33) and Shake's not old, only as old as the guy because they're one spirit (22) and his heart lives in the guy's (and the guy will live forever in these poems). This goes on for quite a while and it gets a bit tedious, but there's a tidbit about not being able to acknowledge each other publicly (sonnet 36), which makes me wonder how Marlowe managed. (By being flamboyant, like Guy Burgess? There's a long tail of hiring the Queen’s eisenspies atte Cambrigge.)

And then Shake's wittily talking himself out of jealousy because the guy's boffing a woman Shake's also ditto, (42). Then Shake gets miserable because the guy's gone away, or he's gone away (50, 51), and the guy's out doing godknowswhat (sonnets 57-58), & Shake spends his nights trying to sleep & imagining the guy under the ceiling & under his eyelids (61) and then the guy is writing a book (77), and then other poets are writing to and about the guy (78, 80) and Shake is all jealous again, and I keep reading because I have to know what happens next.

The love/affair's been going on for three years (104). (This isn't Michael Wood’s safe-for-fambly-viewing Saint Shake.⁽²⁾ And Shake starts condemning himself & asking for forgiveness because he's been off bonking other people (sonnet 110) – now I really know you're the best, but the others gave me a new lease on life.

My mouth was still gaping after the word outrageous passed through my mind, but managed to close when the word shameless arrived. This jaunty Act of Cocktrition! But the flattery combined with the unbreakable bond, the mixture of condescension and erotic connoisseurship and helpless helplessness

Mine appetite I will never more grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend
A god in love, to whom I am confined.

save the poem as well as Shake. He gets forgiven & taken back (sonnets 119-120).

Then there's the farewell (sonnet 126), which is really interesting. The original editor put 2 blank lines in square brackets where lines 13 & 14 should be, on the assumption that this was also a sonnet.

But I don’t think it’s a sonnet at all, & was never meant to be. The affair is over for some reason, the union is broken, and so the form of love poetry, the sonnet, is also broken: the fourteen sonnet lines with a patterned rhyme scheme have become six rhyming couplets ending in the emptiness of a less-filled page.

The couplets that end all the sonnets are little knots tying up the thought, or adding a new facet or consequence, or making a moral point, or all three. Not only does each of these couplets do these things, each explicitly speaks of the passing of all things, Nature rendering the guy down just as it has, and will have rendered, everyone and everything else.

The affair has ended. Every utterance speaks of ending. Love ends. The sonnet ends.

The next sonnets are the "Dark Lady" sequence, and these are immediately less interesting, initially a lot of mere wit as in the first twelve, satirizing the tired panoply of tropes of woman as Other… But Shake does move almost immediately on, to the psychology of the relationship – fear that she’ll mock his age in front of her other suitors, openly prefer them while he's there, humiliate him, rob the performer of performance, make the playwright a play.

And in among all of them, the entire hundred and seventy four, are the old warhorses, the safe-for-teen-anthology-pieces which thud along now so accreted and sunk in sentiment as to scarcely register.

Those are Everest after the Anapurnas, miracles of clarity and resolution and achievement, seeable in that way only in their context. The context is the others, nearly as good: electric, fresh with not being over-read, fresh with new description, new discovery, vivid joy. Though there is obsession, it seems benign: there's no sense of threat, no domination or wheedling. There is no hierarchy here – the poems describe an equal and returned love. It is a relationship: it is ongoing, it includes praise of virtue, identification and merging, being involuntarily bound, voluntarily committed ("to whom I am confined").

There’s no obvious gender hierarchy, even one being wittily or sincerely ignored or satirized as in the Dark Lady sonnets. Complete identification with the other, like this, produces lack of hierarchy.

One of the things about contemporary gay love poems — no animal, vegetable, or mineral metaphors. Often that's how you know before being told that a poem is about a gay relationship.

Is it because the gay love poem has often been an underground tradition, a suppressed situation bringing isolation to the writer, and so thought of as unique? Something outside an otherwise all-encomassing social hierarchy?

Is it because publicaton of this kind of material, not having been commonly allowed, leaves everything to be reinvented from scratch and described exactly? Is that it?

Is that why this kind of material hasn't accreted metaphor yet? Let alone developed the distancing, objectification, and condemnation of women that womb-bearing, child-birthing, has terrified into existence? Is that why this poetry is so often so sensual and so tender?

(iii)
At the level of events: things that really happened

Sonnets:
50-51 – Shake did leave London on occasion: the Puritans or the plague closed the theatres, or the company was taking the show on the road (the circuit of major coaching inns), or all three.⁽²⁾

57-58, 99 – Henry Constable also left London on occasion, and sometimes for significant periods of time. A very skilled diplomat, he was sent on missions to various parts of Europe from a very young age (Scarry, p. 36) and later exiled for his Catholicism. (Scarry, p. 42)

78, 80 – Other poets were writing to and about Henry Constable (who was widely known beloved, and admired) and imitating his poetry. He published a book of sonnets in 1592 and a second edition, containing his Shakespeare sonnets, in 1594. (Scarry, p. 52)

(iv)
With personal or factual tangents.

Thursday, Dec. 22, '16
Have finished reading the sonnets. Not very well, I know: I sometimes find it so hard to get even a basic prose-level sense out of Shakespeare - always have - that I have to admit that I'm not a very good reader.

I've always been afraid of Shakespeare, by reputation beforehand (he's hard); (he's too hard for you, for us), and then doing Henry V in 2nd year. I was 13. I knew immediately that the St. Crispin's Day speech was very good, rousing; and the wooing scenes were remarkable for their bad French; but beyond that I didn't understand any of it – who was who, why any of it was done in the first place or was important now, hundreds of years and thousands of miles later, where, if I turned my eyes from the page to the window I could see the post-summer grass yellowed and strawed and dying on the nearby hill, where we sniggered because England declared a drought if it hadn't rained for ten days.

I wondered why the Bishop of Ely was important, where the cathedral was and why that seemed to be important. I wondered why about the whole thing. Looking Ely up in the encyclopedia gave factual answers about the town and cathedral, but made nothing clear. The dictionary was even more useless for this than it had been for sex and intercourse.

Of course the answers to those questions are that the presence of the bishop confirms the approval of the Church (the other great power in the land) for the war, and the justification for the war is at the end of Henry IV Pt II. Other people have equal claim to the throne, and they're getting resltess. But you have to have seen shaky coalitions abase themselves & sign up to foreign adventures more than once to understand the deep and cynical realpolitik of that answer.

My brother had Julius Caesar. At least that had a plot.

Hearing lectures this year on Sappho and Ezra Pound; seeing glosses on Japanese prints intermixed with translations of Horace and Catullus;⁽³⁾ seeing little-known Renaissance voices translated and re-imagined in relation to each other;⁽⁴⁾ reading translations of Cavafy,⁽⁵⁾ and Ritsos;^(6-7) reading a dual biography of Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald,⁽⁸⁾ I find myself revelling in a level of education we could never have imagined, and understanding how thin our education really was. We really were expected to become shop assistants & car mechanics, bank tellers & kindy teachers, faithful mothers and fathers and Mass attenders, well-bearing & well-fleeced sheep. (Plasma physicist came later, and then by accident.)

So I'm a recognizer of superior quality, by and large, but not of all its multiple levels & layers of meaning, which Scarry and so many other critics are.

Have started the Scarry book. I've clearly misread a lot of the sonnets, missed some of the kink and fury and most of the meaning – but I did get some of it right, and now, at least, the chronology is settled. Shake published them 20 years after writing them, perhaps to cheer HC up because he was in prison. Oh, and the bit about Marlowe: Elizabeth I condemned homosexuality; the punishment was imprisonment or execution. (Scarry, p. 23). So "public shame" was the least of it. (Which makes Marlowe's situation all the more...interesting. What was the deal there?)

Did Kit Marlowe Guy Burgess it? – Yes and no.

Marlowe was smeared as an atheist & seditionist for political reasons.⁽⁹⁾ When the Church and the State are combined in the same monarch, religious dissent becomes heresy becomes sedition becomes secessionist plot. His homosexuality was both real and a smear.

The unknown margin-writer of the county facility's copy of this book (plucked off a re-cataloging truck) – faded blue fountain-pen ink, fascinating hand, half artist, half academic – has seen through the layers of evidence and the contradictory first and last halves of the closing paragraphs of Nicholl's final thesis. "Oh the English!" he writes, "They will never examine the Cecils."

The evidence Nicholl has unearthed and pieced together, and the point he makes and draws back from, is that Marlowe was very likely slated for disposal, if need be, by Robert Cecil. Marlowe's defence in court against false accusations of seditious poster-making and pamphleteering would have revealed his years of provocateuring, in an Elizabethan street-sleazy way, for, ultimately (up, up, up through the layers), that same Robert Cecil, of the Queen’s Privy Council, whose chief business had always been managing the succession.⁽¹⁰⁾

Along the way Nicholl's book is a how-to of scams for and by Elizabethan grifters, who, once London was teeming and frothing with religious change and the nascent possibility of and lust for wealth, byproducts of its defence of itself against serial European rivals, enemies and powers, set to and invented most modern cons.

July-August 2017
Seventeen is a lot of sonnets.

There is a photo I saw on the intertubes and squirreled away at the time – saw it somewhere in The Age or the Sydney Morning Herald, I think, in 2002, according to the file-date my computer gives it – of a painting of an unknown man who might be Shakespeare. It was tiny, it was blurred; I kept it carefully from computer to computer, because this tiny glimpse might be a treasure.

Hesitant mo' & goatee; retreating hairline; sweet smile; deep-sharp, observant eyes, I've-got-your-number eyes.⁽¹¹⁾

So why is someone who looks approximately like this⁽¹¹⁾ writing these sonnets, and sending them to the young man if the traditional story isn't true?

Scarry thinks they were all known to each other, a circle of young people, young artists, actors, musicians.

There are some people so beautiful their arrival sends everyone into a tizz. If there were a circle of people which included Shake, if all these people knew each other, there might have been a consensus about this recently arrived young man, this beautiful and kind and intellectual and irresistible young man – and a sort of good-natured and semi-subliminal desire to be part of his extraordinary sweetness and beauty, to be included in the sunlight of his goodwill by giving him gifts. Recognition of your gift could make you a minor sun, for a moment.

A pretty penniless young man like Shakespeare, already in the theatre, in the speaking & writing biz, could send a sonnet. On some general theme, or the theme the communal joking with the young man took. "The world's fresh ornament" (sonnet 1) does suggest someone new to the scene, and strikingly beautiful.

The picture in my mind is strange. It's from the first story... an image of a man in a field, cartoonish castle in the background. The man has a quill pen and a modern writing-pad. This is Shakespeare, persuading the young man in the castle to marry.

But with the old story wrong the field and castle vanish. But the sonnets still continue in a vacuum. My mind supplies a drawing-room of sorts – or maybe a tavern – a small group of teasing bohemians and young aristocrats or the aristocratically-connected. Pleasantries, wit, non-specific. It seems slightly feasible that jokes and gifts and gossip and poems might all be exchanged here.

Shake's first 9 sonnets are full of almost abstract argument. Some parts are so compressed the syntax gives out –

Then were not summer’s distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft
Nor it nor no remembrance what it was – [sonnet 5]

Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his place, for the world enjoys it – [sonnet 9]

– but mostly it does not. The arguments are beautifully made, but the first sonnets of the sequence aren’t engaged.

(Even so, there are 9 of them so far... Was Shake writing them that fast? Was that another part of the joke, if at this stage the whole thing were still a joke, a game, a pastime in and for the group?)

But there is a gradual change throughout this whole (what I think of as preliminary) sequence. In sonnet 10, Shake says:

Make thee another self for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

... for love of me. ?! This is a bit personal for a trope or joke even in a small and habitually meeting group. I'm not sure now how a group setting for these is plausible.

Sonnet 13, line 1, addresses the young man as "love": Oh that you were yourself, but love you are and line 13 says "dear my love." Something is happening; the distance between the speaker and the subject has lessened drastically. This is really beginning to sound like a private conversation, not a public one. This intimizing begins to cast doubt on whether any part of the sequence had ever been read or extemporized or conducted in the company of a group.

In Sonnet 15 Shake declares:

And, all in war with Time for love of you
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

There’s scarcely any distance between speaker and subject now. It is much easier to see this as a private matter of Shake sending poems to the young man privately.

But still – this is still a lot of poems. It's the vacuum around them from my first understanding of the old story that always... Made me afraid of them, because they were incomprehensible, difficult in themselves but also suspended in a contextual void – Michael Wood⁽²⁾ says that after the opening sonnets Shakespeare then fell in love with the young man, possibly in his grief over the death of his son, Hamnet. The quill pen scribbling on the modern notepad a good furlong from the castle returned to my mind. I think the absurdity of the image meant that, unconsciously, I thought the explanation unlikely, but that, consciously, I didn't want to disrespect anyone's grief. And so, for me, the sonnets continued to swirl along in their difficulty and conceptual mistiness, another bit of Shakespeare I didn't dare advert to.

Sonnet 16 draws back a bit (a better war against Time, you having a son), but 17 says a son would prove Shake's descriptions no exaggeration, and that the young man would live twice, in his son and in Shake's verse.

Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, as heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
and in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, "this poet lies -
Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces."
So should my papers yellowed with their age
Be scorned like old men of less truth than tongue
And your true rights be termed a poet's rage
And stretchèd metre of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time
You should live twice - in it and in my rhyme.

This is the first time Shake says this.

It's almost like ownership, this new boldness, boast, decision, policy, procedure. The premise/promise affects two people, not one. This formulation of the position of the speaker with regard to the person spoken to, this new claiming of one by the other (What are you doing with my life in your poems? Even thinking of somehow putting my life in your poems?) would be presumptuous, suffocating, intolerable.

Unless the young man were amenable.

Unless the young man had also been speaking.

Or, as Scarry has discovered, writing. Back.⁽¹²⁾

Seen as one man writing in privacy and isolation, even with the clear movement of the writer towards the subject, there's no situational sense in this many sonnets except as some kind of ... bizarre exercise? Fantasy? Delusion? Astonishing and pointless creation of air and glass? A young man, an extraordinary young man replying gives a stable, sane explanation for the seventeen, the eighteen, most of the many.

This may be one of his replies. If the English ever existed, it is lost. This is a literal transcription of the Latin, published in the Netherlands in 1591:

I send, Light, this narcissus to you by gift of a warm spring, and I send our poems joined to the narcissus. I do this so that in return for the book you may give back to me moistened lips, and in return for my flower you may give your flower to me.⁽¹²⁾

Light, this early bloom I send thee
Our songs bound with its open bell and tips.
For this book give me thy moistened lips,
My flower make thine; give thine to me.

(vi)
Shall I compare thee?

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate

This old anthology-piece... This strangeness out of nowhere on the page of the book I've covered in thick plastic because everyone covers their textbooks to sell to next year's class, with the ink of my red-biro'd name already blurred and spread and reduced to vivid pink in the plastic texture, and I'm sitting here, thousands of miles and hundreds of years away, spending my eyes trying to make my name sharp again while wondering how much the blurring matters – bored and uncomprehending because I can read the poem and it makes sense (but why does it signify?) – reading it with a sigh because this week is the week they've decided to teach poetry again –

This sonnet's full of praise, syntactically sturdy & forthright, the language rich rather than frilled, tender as well as rich; and Shake's verse has declared itself the young man's immortality even before we understand what Scarry has said: that all the letters of Henry Constable's name are contained in the last line, and that reading the line aloud does cause his name to be said aloud by the reader, does cause the young man to live beyond death.

Shall I compare you to a summer's day?
You are more lovely and more temperate.

Leaves me agape.

Lovely, you, you more lovely, more temperate, you, temperate, lovely, you summer lovely day

The second line is so gentle, forthright, and open, so much about the “you” spoken to, so utterly not about the speaker, that it shatters the defensiveness at the attack or denigration I automatically anticipate at compare –

A lifetime of experience with compare: compared to anyone I’ve ever met you’re worse. Compared to. Why can’t you be more like. Lazy, selfish. Sheila, girlie, diminish, sneer, scoff, demean, obliterate.

It cuts right through

It cuts right through the multilayered sarcophagus of misogyny I’ve lived in. I can see its thickness. I can see it sliced apart, thick, pyramid thick -

Who dares to write like that? Who could accept being spoken to like that?

More lovely. Lovely – the word accurate and intimate, speaking of the experience of another person; more lovely, the speaker like someone overcome, speaking close, at whisper distance, the reaction pulled straight out of him – Not lovelier, its consecutive unstressed syllables creating a fading blur of the readers' attention and their apprehension of the loveliness. More lovely: the person spoken to being wholly seen and approved of and desirable without change: loved.

Gentleness strikes me (fear and lightning), unshells me to a world I’m not equipped to live in.

==

1. Scarry, Elaine, Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, New York, 2016.
2. Wood, Michael, In Search of Shakespeare, Maya International Vision, Distributed by PBS Home Video: PBS DVD Video, 2003.
3. Merchant, Paul, Bread and Caviar, Hereford, Five Seasons Press, 2016.
4. Merchant, Paul, Some Business of Affinity, Hereford, Five Seasons Press, 2016.
5. Cavafy, Constantine, Poems 1904, tr. Paul Merchant, Portland, Tavern Books, 2016.
6. Ritsos, Yannis, Twelve Poems About Cavafy, tr. Paul Merchant, Portland, Tavern Books, 2010.
7. Ritsos, Yannis, Monochords, tr. Paul Merchant, Portland, Tavern Books, 2015.
8. Richardson, Robert D., Nearer the heart's desire: poets of the Rubaiyat: a dual biography of Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald, New York, Bloomsbury, 2016.
9. Nicholl, Charles, The Reckoning, the Murder of Christopher Marlowe, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1992.
10. See also Gregory, Philippa, The Last Tudor, New York, Touchstone, 2017.
11. See also https://news.canadianshakespeares.ca/2006/04/25/controversial-shakespeare-portrait-coming-to/
12. Scarry, pp. 243-244. The original of this poem may be the Latin quoted on p. 243; at St. John’s College Constable would have written in Latin as often as English. (The collection of fifteen of Constable’s poems in which this poem, Carmen xx, appears, was printed in the Netherlands in 1591; five poems were translated into Dutch, then into Latin.)

In The Tombs of Atuan

From The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and Power, Helen Garner, Sydney, Australia, Picador Pan Macmillan Australia, 1995:
The two young women who accused the Master of Ormond College – a residential college affiliated with the University of Melbourne – of sexual assault in February, 1992, refused to speak to Garner, ever, at all. They offered no illumination of the situation apart from their accusations. Something about the story itself nagged at her. Garner decided to investigate.

Pp. 88-89:
“…Why would a young woman feel ‘worthless’ when a man makes an unwelcome sexual approach to her? She might not like it. She might very much want it to stop. But why does it make her feel ‘worthless’? Would she feel ‘worthless’ if the man were younger, better looking, more cool? Or is worthless sexual object just a rhetorical flourish, a bit of feminist sabre-rattling on behalf of a young woman who has not taken the responsibility for learning to handle the effects on men, of her beauty and her erotic style of presentation?

“Can a young woman really expect to go through life without ever having to take on this responsibility? Has a girl like Elizabeth Rosen even the faintest idea what a powerful anima figure she is to the men she encounters in her life? She told the court that Doctor Shepherd had got down on his knees before her. Which of them does the word humiliated apply to here?”

*

Garner is speaking here as though Elizabeth Rosen and Colin Shepherd are acting a bipolar field of power and sexuality. The people in the incident and its long and complex aftermath actually act in a field which is at least a quadrilateral: power; gender; culture(s); religion.

This expanded view glimmers on the edges of other passages in the book:

“… I lacked the rudeness that’s required in order to go on reading something interesting to you while someone boring is trying to talk to you.” – On the daylight train to Geelong – p. 62

“… out of politeness, embarrassment, or passivity, or lack of a clear sense of what I wanted…” – On the daylight train, “give us a kiss” – p. 63

“Why would a young woman feel ‘worthless’ when a man makes an unwelcome sexual approach to her?” – p. 88

Garner intuits a wider view but doesn’t see it.

*

The clue is the phrase, worthless sexual object.

From before I was born I was wrong, and the sin was mine, not God’s.

What Garner doesn’t put her finger on is this:

In a culture where the overt moral view of sexuality is that sexuality is a sin, in a profoundly puritanical culture that is barely masked by the image of Australia as a land of cheerful anarchists, where the sin of sexuality is venial for men, mortal for women – then being told you are being seen by someone in front of you as nothing but the vile thing you must never be, which you always profoundly are, though polite people don’t mention it; which you cannot help being, which is utterly beyond your control –

(You are blood and cunt. Under all your talk that is what you are; that is all you are.) (We define you.) (Guilt, fear, compulsion.)

You spend your middle and late childhood, then your entire adolescence, with your nose and face shoved manure-deep into this bedrock condition. Having the matter of your inherently and essentially evil composition flung in your face, loudly and unexpectedly by anyone at all – is humiliating: it’s induced shame and self-loathing, fear and guilt; it’s the first step towards your obliteration.

It is a declaration that you can never be anything else, that all the other things you are or have achieved or have striven to be are nothing, can only be nothing, because you are the dark and endless locus of despicability: blood, guilt, fear, complusion; lure and snare and trap.

This is the opposite of equality.

In that quadrilateral field of forces, a serious and unwanted sexual advance, after so many unwanted sexual advances, itself becomes a coercion, a prison; then a guilt, then inescapable blame.

The first step is shame – that despicable thing which you are is pointed out. The second step is humiliation - the repeated insistence on that shameful fact.

Repeated humiliation creates fragility. Fragility is easy to topple, to turn into functional obliteration.

The driver and enabler of the accusation, the skin-dissolving, gut-dissolving attack, is religion. It’s all-encompassing: skin-close, bone-destroying, mind-blinding, paralysing. Your body undoes itself in fear, your soul is undone in the desolation of the inner and outer betrayal. Body, family, church, school. Endless and inescapable guilt is an auto-immune disease of the soul.

*

From her name it seems that Elizabeth Rosen would have been at least culturally Jewish, brought up well aware of community and service. She was also brought up in a generally misogynistic majority culture.

Even without the full Catholic Monty there were and are many different, though related, reasons why Elizabeth Rosen could have felt ashamed.

In a misogynistic culture, all points of female education are relentlessly criticized – dress, manner, hair, makeup, clothes, accessories, posture, deportment, speech, vocabulary, friends, sports, taste in television, movies, music… Every conceivable twist or dimension of existence in this time and place is subject to harsh and constant correction.

This isn’t the development of a person, it’s the polishing of an object. Objects do not act. They do not make a mess.

The sore points remain in the soul as emotional trapdoors. Training in being an object becomes the learned helplessness of designated prey.

Elizabeth Rosen stood in the office of her landlord and the controller of student bursaries, the Master of the College she lived in. The Master was at her feet.

Just by being, she’d made a mess; profoundly upset the natural order of things; sinned socially, mortally: she’d brought authority to its knees. The castle was at her feet, looking up at her, begging to be let in. She had rendered Authority helpless as a helpless child asking for help.

The Master was at her feet – giving her power she did not want and had not sought, locking her into it, making her responsible for this utter wreck of order as though she had acted; and she had not.

And he was still the Master. He was in a position of authority over her. She was expected to accede to his suggestions; in this case she was expected to disobey him. He was begging her to disobey his rules.

If she obeyed him society at large would blame her. If she disobeyed him he could punish her socially or academically.

*

“Why should you have been ashamed?” I said. We looked at each other in silence. I can’t count the number of times the discussion I had with women reached this point, and got jammed.” – p. 90

How much shame does it take to make you feel worthless? The psychic trapdoors open lightning-fast: not much. This has happened all your life.

What is the utterance, “You should be ashamed of yourself” for?

To induce a propensity to self-blame and shame, to habituate you to lack of autonomy, to lead to psychic self-destruction.

Could an injunction be any clearer?
Could a social instruction be any clearer?
Be. Ashamed. Of. Your. Self.

*

Elizabeth Rosen was female, an object, and objects don’t act, and she would be condemned for acting. For breathing while beautiful, for being unable to restore the natural order while being unequipped with either confidence and lack of shame, or with the social position, to restore it.

She was ashamed of being seen as nothing but her flesh. Only the feminine is seen that way: women, gays, LGBTQ+ communities, all now again marginalized and openly hated: designated prey.

She was ashamed of being seen as The Unbridled Feminine, provoking the Master’s physical and emotional state by standing in his office, though she hadn’t done more than stand in his office. Elizabeth Rosen was ashamed of making a mess, failing herself and family and society profoundly, of not knowing how to end or reverse the situation. She was terrified that this moment would become her identity, her life and lifelong shame.

*

Until sometime in the early ’60s, in South Australia, Catholics were forbidden jobs in many industries; they were excluded for lack of property from voting for the Upper House of Parliament. Irish/Catholics formed 8% of the population in a racist, misogynist, self-righteous mercantile Protestant culture. Catholics often shared the attitudes of the larger culture; they got their dourness from it. Every three years the parish church hosted a Passionist Fathers Mission against sin and Communism. I knew Joyce’s sermon from Portrait of the Artist almost as well as I knew the catechism. (I suspect Jouce took it straight from the Jesuits, who, I think, probably also supplied it to the Passionists.)

Garner was born and lived most of her life in Melbourne. After the mid 19th century Victoria was 25% Irish/Catholic. Post-Gold Rush, some of those Catholics were very wealthy indeed; they were in a position to shape attitudes. Melbourne also had a large population, industries apart from agriculture, a major port, and a complex mix of immigrants, attitudes, philosophies and contemplatable behaviours. Much closer to Sydney than Adelaide, Melbourne remains part of the largest current of trade and culture in modern Australia.

*

From How To End A Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998 (New York, Pantheon Books, 2025) Garner’s religion was Protestant, with Anglican adumbrations at least later in life. It does not seem to have been virulent. She doesn’t seem to have been held in the tombs of Atuan.

The two young women who accused the Master of Ormond College of sexual assault, refused to speak to Garner, ever, at all. They offered no illumination of the situation apart from their accusations.

Though Garner remembers her long-forgotten encounter on the daylight train to Geelong, she doesn’t see the clues it offers.

And so she remained unequipped to answer the question, Why would a young woman feel ‘worthless’ when a man makes an unwelcome sexual approach to her?

The question Garner asks at the end of the book: What happened between the ’60s and the ’90s, that such a conviction of personal powerlessness overtook so many young feminist women? misses what happened.

From 1965 to 1973 came The Commonwealth Scholarship; in 1973 the Whitlam Government abolished tertiary education fees. This lasted until the mid ’80s. Thousands upon thousands of lower middle- and working-class, and particularly Catholic, girls – a fair percentage of them 17 in First Year – who would otherwise never have set foot on university grounds, came to study. They came with their religious and class-based strengths and impediments.

Boy, did they come with their impediments.

---

Garner Helen, How To End A Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998, New York, Pantheon Books, 2025
   Garner Helen, The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and     Power, Sydney, Picador Pan Macmillan Australia, 1995
Le Guin, Ursula K., The Tombs of Atuan, Middlesex, England, Puffin Books, 1974

Questions, Questions, This Time abt. Eng. Lit. Dying

"Reading" in this context usually means "the reading of novels by adults," or, in some cases, by students, K-16.

Reading in this sense, particularly in the last 25 years, has been simultaneously dumbed down, hollowed out, fetishized and promoted. What is read has been greatly determined by corporate mergers from the mid-'60s on, which has left us with the Big Five... Four... Three... publishers, tasked with making e-media levels of profit. This has narrowed the range of work widely available.

What's left of the adult reading population has also been fragmented beyond belief by identity politics and age cohort. The drive for inclusion quickly became a means to cultural clout and whatever cash rewards were left in teaching and commentary* – and this has led to ever diminishing circles of content and whatever style was lying around.

(Identity politics/political correctness has more than half killed the endeavour. Saw a rack of featured books at my local library branch & turned to examine them for something interesting to take home. It was XX ethnic group month. My blood turned to a taste of metal and my skin felt burnt from within, exhausted exhaustion.

Why can't anything just be a good book? Why does it have to be a good [ethnicity here] book? Why do I have to read a fucking sermon?

Why does someone's book have to be a sermon, or presented as a sermon?**

This approach is self-destroyingly narrow, even as it claims to be widening the reader's experience. As though anything widely distributed & sold for profit is going to seriously challenge manufactured consent! I turned away in another tired & beaten fury. So much for "always had her nose in a book".)

Teaching literature is in an abysmal state. All sorts of mad non-systems replaced phonic in schools & kids were left permanently unable to decode the words on the page with any certainty and fluency.*** People turn away from that kind of experience, and "don't read."

There are all sorts of specialized sub-bits of reading people do do: nonfiction of general and specialized nature, schematics for car repair, science journals, etc., etc.

But "reading" in the sense it is usually meant is a product of the Prussian-inspired move to mass education and literacy from the C19th onwards: it was necessary for the workforce in a technological age.

The pic of Shakespeare as the personification and symbol of English Literature tells you what is really going on. He wrote plays. People watched them & heard them. They attended or performed "English Literature" such as miracle and morality plays. Now "English Literature" is on the BBC & HBO & Netflicks & Canal+ & ...

Literacy of the sort that is in decline has never been necessary to a population of peasants, serfs, tradies... Universal literacy no longer serves the State, and the State is retreating from its former functions in the mass of ordinary lives.

Which leaves ordinary people where they have always been: creating oral traditions.

==

For Extra Credit:

1) Which do you think would be more frightening to the status quo?

a) a book written by a member of an under-represented community set aside and identified as a good [ethnicity here] book
b) a book written by a member of an under-represented community displayed, without ethnic designation, as a good book like any other good book

2) If you watched the video: At the beginning of the 19th century, why would a nation with a nascent empire suddenly start studying the literature of empire?

a) policies, job descriptions and manuals
b) self justification in the face of a near-universal Christianity, which would advocate loving your neighbour / rescuing the man who fell among thieves

Justify your answers on the sheet provided.

==

*Attributed to Mark Twain: "You can make a fortune but you can't make a living." Truer now than it was then. The only reliable money in writing is teaching.

**If you want a sermon, go to church.

*** One of the great grifts perpetrated on the Dept. of Education in the ealier days of public-private business opportunities, begun under Bush the Younger's unfunded mandate, "No Child Left Behind."

A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

I was feeling a bit crook yesterday afternoon – I’d been cutting the weeds at the kerb before the truck could come for the green bin. I’d been out in the sun and humidity for about ten minutes, and clearly that was too long.

I came in. It was early enough in the afternoon to be able to watch Coriolanus. Because it’s about demagoguery I wanted to understand it, but it sends me to sleep at the same moment every time, like Le Samourai with Alain Delon and The Makioka Sisters. I looked at the streaming options.

And there, like an exhaled breath and a great bath of relief, was Top Gun Maverick. Tom Cruise charming, half-smile utterly disarming –

This time he’s a US Navy test-pilot. We don't know where he lives: he first appears alone, in a hangar in a desert. The hangar is a perfection of focus and intention, a cathedral of space and peg-boarded tools and the mechanics of kinetic transcendence – a mid-restoration P49, a heavy motorbike. Per a DOD contract, he’s scheduled to take the latest fighter prototype to Mach 9 today.

He wears a white t-shirt and jeans; he gets his leather jacket from a metal closet; he picks up his keyring, a winged insignia and one key. (Dressing/arming the hero, at least as old as The Iliad.)

He takes the bike and to the bike – the closest thing to flying without leaving the ground – flies helmetless along the road beside the airstrip, unencumbered as a god.

The rest of the movie, the test flight in spite of a rear admiral’s plan to junk manned flight, the triumph of Mach 10 and the disaster of Mach 10.2, the new impossible assignment instead of dishonourable discharge, the personal and mission-specification-driven tensions, the old flame, the new marriage (Hermes-Hestia), the defeats, the victories and reconciliations, are all remarkably slick and well-handled. It’s The Dam Busters and Star Wars and Mission Impossible feats of running, all in IMAX.

TGM is a very late version of the military sub-subgenre of the subgenre America Dea – movies treating the United States of America as a not quite secular religion, Washington and Lincoln its formative angels. The civilian version produced Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

TGM is a lovely and dangerous fantasy, where the machines sing together like Blake’s morning stars, a captain can beat jealous and narrow-minded admirals, the government is great and good, the enemy is defeated despite its technological superiority.

The intermittent musical theme sounds at first as though it could be a handful of muted horns, in a soft, slightly jaunty military register: it is actually very softly and skillfully voiced choral music, a smooth and quiet undertone, a bedrock of quiet reverence.

The enemy has no justification for doing what they’re doing; what they’re doing is wrong: the enemy is a number of undifferentiated silhouettes, bad guys bad because they’re opposing the United States.

There’s racial diversity, often in the background in the bar scenes, more visible in the IMDB credits than in the movie. The people who make the running are the white guys. The conflicts and struggles and victories, the characters who create the framework of the plot, the ones in positions of real emphasis, are the white guys.

It’s a very Trumpian flick: a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and vice versa.

New Roses

I happened to pass a rose festival display the other day, long tables of prizewinning roses in slender cut crystal vases. My parents planted rose bushes in the front garden and by the back gate when they got married eighty five years ago, and so I stopped to look.

Of course there were new strains, colours: lemon to litmus-paper mauve, blushed, edged, and single-tone, skillfully produced. That kind of grafting had begun by the late ‘50s with the Peace rose and others, lemon sherbet and slight pink grading and washing delicately on the petals. They had little fragrance.

At the festival I saw roses trying to be hydrangeas, daffodils, carnations, orchids, daisies, lotus, fungi, crepe paper, plastic. They smelt of wet stem and vase-water.

I remember the dark red, almost-black roses my mother grew, the scent of three buds in a bedroom filling the house.

Prophet Song

Prophet Song is warning become handbook.

Set in Dublin, it tells us how the military phase of a fascist takeover proceeds outwardly, what it feels like to endure. It’s not just the plot, the start of the disappearances (trade union activists first), then the gathering suspicion from neighbours, the eldest son over the border to become a paramilitary, the effect on the younger children, the eventual and inevitable descent into ever worsening situations –

It's the manner of the telling. The vertigo of the loss of fact, certainty, information, stability, control; the dissolution of perspective, the mingling of the outer and inner, the endless nausea of barely suppressed terror.

Mam, I tried his phone. Mark’s phone, the number’s been disconnected. Something has rolled across Eilish’s mouth, she is moving through the room bending to collect the clothes on the floor, she is standing in the bathroom staring at the steaming water, what rises and dissipates, what comes into expression moment by moment yet cannot be known, this feeling always of possibility giving rise to hope. She wants to go into the bedroom and take Molly’s hands and say everything is going to be fine, she remains before the wicker basket and drops the clothes and feels herself falling from her arms, this feeling they are all falling towards something that cannot be defined by anything she has known in her life. (p. 170)

Everybody Knows

 

A terrific mystery set in contemporary L.A., the 5th most self-mythologized Western city of the last thousand years after New York, London, Paris & Rome.

Harper’s plot threads through some of the many ethnic subcultures of the city, but its real focus is the L.A. Police and Sheriff’s departments, their daily deputies’ and plods’ desires and drives. Truth and Justice are a long way down the list... One of its strongest virtues is that it continually evokes Joseph Wambaugh’s LAPD novels of the 1970s.

But it’s fifty years later now, and the situation is fifty years worse.

Everybody Knows shares its title with that cynical, elegant, distantly furious Leonard Cohen song about corruption as an open secret, and it does the subject proud.

A Very Private School: A Memoir

A boy made to lie naked across the Headmaster's knees to be caned, so severely the marks were still visible sixty years later.

That's why I value this book.

When I ws a child it was almost impossible to see beyond the British Empire, or very far into it.

And now it's crystal clear what the pain and blood and labour and poverty and ostracism of millions of people, bought.

American Prometheus

Like her father, Toni Oppenheimer was multilingual. She wanted to be a translator in an official gov’t capacity.

Oppenheimer had been cleared of sending information to the Soviets and of being a security risk. For more than a decade afterwards the FBI kept him under surveillance. Nor would they give Toni a security clearance.

She tried to drown herself. She was rescued.

A few days later she hung herself.

I don’t know how America can show itself in public.

Grace Perry: Poet, Revolutionary Editor, Promoter, Publisher

A little while ago a friend of mine joined the S.A. Writers Centre and subscribed to Australian Poetry. I mis-read that as Poetry Australia, founded and edited by Grace Perry. I'd heard a horrified whisper once - the '70s? '80s? '90s? Melbourne? Adelaide? - that she'd committed suicide.

And so I wondered about her. And so I looked around the web.

One of the first things I found was a review of Dot Jensen's biography of Perry. The biography was published in 2020; the review by Hall in January 2023.

Hall stretches the review into an argument about gender expectations of male and female poetry

But: Hall sometimes quotes so selectively from the source material that his argument’s fatally misleading, when it’s just not plain wrong. At other times he ignores the source material altogether. His argument ends up having nothing to do with poetry and little to do with history.

The history is all about gender.

THE STORY FROM JENSEN:

Perry was remarkable among Australian female poets for her willingness to become involved in the politics of Australian poetry. She threatened the hegemony of male poets and critics by establishing herself in the powerful positions of publisher and marketing director, as well as convener and director of workshops and literary events (Jensen pp. 4-5)

Dr Grace Perry took her own life at the age of sixty in 1987. Ten years later few remember her and her work is still largely unacknowledged. Her poetry is no longer in print and few of her poems [are] in the anthologies. The question has to be asked: How can she have been forgotten so quickly? How much more does a woman have to do to be included in the history of her times? (Jensen p. 5)

Hall continues:

Jensen spends some time analysing the 1964 schism in the Sydney poetry scene which saw Perry's Poetry Australia and Robert Adamson's New Poetry break away from the establishment's Poetry Magazine. And she shows, very convincingly, how Perry was unfairly blamed for these splits…

This is the series of events Jensen alludes to:

As the editor (1962-64) of Poetry Magazine, Perry gave preference to new poets such as Bruce Beaver, Roland Robinson, Geoffrey Lehmann, Rodney Hall, Craig Powell and William Hart-Smith. Following a rift over the selection of Australian poets for an English-French edition of Poetry Magazine in 1964, in a secret meeting Perry was expelled from the poetry society by Robinson, J. M. Couper and others on the grounds that she was publishing poetry that had already been printed or that came from non-members. She established a new magazine, Poetry Australia, which she edited until her death. Through her company, South Head Press (founded in 1964), she published Poetry Australia and collections of poetry, of her own and others. Frozen Section (1967), with its frequent images of containment and repression, was the only record of her response to her exclusion from the poetry society. - Australian Dictionary of Biography

Hall's argument with Jensen begins:

The problem with Jensen's explanation, however, is that Perry has not only been forgotten by males. Perry did not feature as a major poet in any of the anthologies of Australian women's poetry that began to appear in the 1970s-1980s either, such as the classic Mother I'm Rooted: An Anthology of Australian Women's Poetry (1975) and edited by Kate Jennings or in The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets (1986) edited by Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn.

MOTHER I'M ROOTED: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AUSTRALIAN WOMEN'S POETRY
Fitzroy, Victoria, Outback Press, 1975, ed., Kate Jennings

At the beginning of the book Jennings describes the literary world of early- and mid-'70s Australia as "for the most part controlled by a small backstabbing backbiting group of men and a few male-identified women." (Introduction, p. [i])

Jennings and the publishers originally intended "a neat anthology of already known women writers, each with their individual poetical statement" (ibid., p. [i]).

Jennings solicited established women poets, and also asked the publishers if "I could advertise around and try and reach women poets Out There, women poets of all sizes and shapes, most of whom would never even be able to do an Emily Dickinson." (ibid., p. [i])

As a result of advertising she received over 500 submissions. (ibid., p. [i]) She "[chose] poems mainly on the grounds of women writing directly, and honestly." (ibid., p. [ii])

The writing was so raw, so far beyond the bounds of the restricted speech of conventional poetry that Rooted "slowly … metamorphosed into … a collective statement about the position of women in Australia" and Jennings used the book as "an attempt to question the standards of what is supposed to be good and bad poetry in the prevailing literary hegemony." (ibid., p. [i])

There was little response from the established women writers. "Comments (and lack of response) from established women writers who did not want to be included in an all-women's anthology were discouraging." (ibid., p. [iii])

Excluding a writer for not being a major poet was the exact opposite of Jennings' intention and procedure. She says, explicitly, that Rooted became a radical document (which it remains, the testament of a brutally suppressed underclass) because established women poets refused to appear in it.

We don't know whether Jennings solicited Perry or not. Whether she considered Perry a "male-identified" woman, and didn't; considered her a "male-identified" editor and promoter of poetry (Jensen, p. 103), and didn't; considered her an established woman poet, and did; whether, if Perry was contaced, she didn't reply, or whether she was contacted, and did.

We simply do not know. All the principals are dead. The only evidence we do have is Jennings' statement that she would not have excluded Perry for not being a major poet.

Perry's absence from Rooted doesn't mean what Hall says it does.

2. THE PENGUIN BOOK of AUSTRALIAN WOMEN POETS, Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin Australia, 1986, ed., Susan Hampton and Kate Llewellyn

In The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets there are seven poems by Judith Wright, seven by Mary Gilmore, seven by Pam Brown, seven by Judith Rodriguez, six by Gwen Harwood, six by Lesbia Harford, five by Rosemary Dobson, four by Kath Walker, one by Grace Perry.

The anthology's seal of greatness is seven poems. Grace Perry is not treated as a great poet, though the quality of her work (see below) makes her a better poet than Pam Brown or Judith Rodriguez. Who are also not better poets than Gwen Harwood. Being in the the tight critical poetry community's eye seems to help when the community ranks its names.

Though Perry had won a medal at the New South Wales premier's literary awards in 1985 and was appointed AM the next year (summary, The Remarkable Grace Perry) these honours were retrospective, more headstone than capstone: "services to literature" (the medal); "service to Australian literature, particularly as editor of Poetry Australia" (the AM).

At the national level, which includes the Penguin anthology, Perry wasn't being forgotten so much as superannuated.

But at the local level, the mostly academic-poetic centres of power near or around Syndey University where producing, publishing and discussing Australian poetry took place, Perry's name and work had been suppressed by the men of 1964 for nearly twenty years.

Later she was comprehensively rubbished by Les Murray, for different reasons. All these punishments were inflicted because of her gender.

The reasons stem from the Poetry Society split of 1964. Despite the public overtures made by Ronald Dunlop in 1967, Perry's removal from authoritative public discourse about Australian poetry continued during the 1970s:

… Perry was never published or critically reviewed in Poetry Magazine. Nor were Mas, Robinson or Couper ever published in Poetry Australia. When the rush of new young poets flooded both magazines no one noticed the detrimental effect of the split on Perry’s acceptance in the tight critical poetry community of Sydney. Dunlop, in interview, said he was always puzzled at the way any mention was dismissed by his fellow lecturers at the University of Sydney. Perry's lack of acceptance seemed to stem from the time of the split. She was never forgiven for such unfeminine radical behaviour. (Jensen, p. 52 - emphases mine)

Perry’s expulsion from the "tight critical poetry community" also continued beyond the '70s.

She became even more isolated when she fired Les Murray as co-editor of Poetry Australia in 1980. After that no connective tissue at all remained between Perry, Poetry Australia, South Head Press, and the vortex of reputation, grant money, and critical acclaim centred in Sydney.

Though Murray's reaction at the time was quite calm, by the time Alexander interviewed him (1992? 1994?) his explanations for his termination ranged from off the shelf misogyny to complete vitriol and myth-making. In his revised opinion, Perry was insecure, jealous, a “little lost girl” of a reader and poetic voice. And she was a second rate editorial talent.

The phrase has the ring of an open and shut case (a troublesome matter put to rest). It sounds technical, as though there were procedures Perry failed to follow; missing perceptions, false assessments, because Perry lacked depth and acuity. It has the tone of a well-intentioned public service announcement; it (removed her from the echelons of male power and) smoothly suggested she wasn't worth attention. It was a brilliant slime, utterly damning.

John Tranter and Bruce Beaver were still describing Perry as “second rate” in 2003.

MURRAY CO-EDITS POETRY AUSTRALIA

Early in chapter 14 Alexander explains why Murray became the literary co-editor of Poetry Australia.

By 1973 Grace Perry … was tired and ill with a potassium disease which robbed her of vitality, so that increasingly she was obliged to retreat to her country home of Berrima. She approached Murray and asked him if he would edit her journal in a caretaker capacity until she recovered. He readily agreed to become what he called 'her locum tenens'. Both he and Perry thought of this as a short-term arrangement, but Murray was to remain acting editor of Poetry Australia for seven years, until 1980. (Alexander, p. 163)

The peculiarity of Grace was that she had two voices. She had a kind of out-going extrovert charm and good humour and bounding energy that was expressed in one voice, and occasionally, mostly at poetry readings, when she read her poetry, there was a strange, lost-little-girl voice that she used to read in. I thought, 'That's weird. It sounds like another personality.' That was the personality that wrote her poems. And when I suddenly got terminated in 1980 from the magazine, I had to puzzle over why, and I thought in the end, it was the little girl voice that sacked me.

It was the cheerful, outgoing friend of mine called Grace Perry who hired me, and with whom I got along, and it was that other personality that sacked me because that was the kind of jealous, clenched inner being that Grace's poetry represented.

And it was threatened by the fact that the magazine was getting beyond Grace's grip and beyond her control, and more importantly, beyond her talent, people were publishing in it who were beyond anything Grace could reach, and somehow the unstated final limit of the magazine was that it wasn't allowed to outgrow its founder. She allowed it to outgrow its founder to a good degree, it floated high but eventually it had to be reeled in. (Alexander, p. 195 - emphases mine)

Murray's first explanation takes no account of Perry's history or the state of mind her history and illness might have left her in. It misidentifies her motives.

It seems to me that any insecurity Perry suffered stemmed firstly from her ill-health and weakness, and secondly from her traumatic history with the poetry "community." Perry was still involved in medical practice and doing all the administrative work of expanding the reach of the magazine; by 1980 she was also breeding and selling horses and Simmenthal bulls and using the proceeds to fund the magazine. (Jensen, pp. 107-108) She was editing only when Murray came to her office and she was strong enough to go through submissions. "Every few weeks Murray would go to her surgery in Lyons Road, Five Dock, and 'read the drawer.'" (Alexander, p. 164) Returning to editing would signal the end of her physical weakness.

I think there are indications that 1964 and the aftermath, which still hadn't ended, left her with a great fear of direct confrontation and a repeat of 1964. Which, in turn, led to her stealth in removing Murray and her furtive reversals (Alexander, p. 194) of Murray's recent submissions acceptances.

Perry asked John Millett to replace Murray as co-editor. Millett had been her lawyer since 1962, had advised Poetry Australia on legal matters and provided accountancy services for it since 1964. He had been the managing editor while Murray was the "locum" literary editor. (Alexander, p. 194). Millett would neither create difficulties nor stage a secret takeover.

Murray's second explanation, Perry's "jealousy", is contraindicated, again by Perry's history. In the course of encouraging Australian poetry away from the old Imperial stuffiness and toward the new American directness, Perry paid on acceptance, published in Poetry Australia, and in South Head Press collections, Murray himself, John Tranter, Bruce Beaver, Roland Robinson, Geoffrey Lehmann, Rodney Hall, Craig Powell, William Hart-Smith and many others. Though Murray's poetic and editorial reputation had been growing durng his six years at Poetry Australia (Alexander, p. 192), there's no evidence apart from Murray's word that Perry was jealous of him.

Murray's position had always been temporary and contingent. Perry was now well. It was her magazine. She wanted it back, thank you. The architecture of the situation - leaving Murray in place after she was well, while still raising cattle and horses to fund the magazine and still running her medical practice to fund the household - would have left her, effectively, working for Murray. No one of Perry's character and in her postion would have tolerated that. Murray had never thought the situation through. He never imagined Perry as a separate being with a traumatic history, or drives and ambitions he had no right to control.

Murray's third explanation, that Perry's poetry demonstrated the "clenched little girl/lost little girl" persona, "the persona which fired him", can be tested.

Red Scarf (Red Scarf, Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1963 – Jensen, pp. 19-21)

Next, please.
Will you come in?
Cracked shoes squeak across the vinyl floor,
and shining blue-grey squares reflect the dust
loose-hanging trousers, and the long-tongued belt,
limp shirt and bold flamboyant scarf.
What can I say?
You do not feel so well today?
You will be better soon. Sometime, but not now.
Remove your shirt and let me see.
Open your mouth and breathe for me.
Your scarf discarded on my chair
laughs in the antiseptic air:
laughs at the sterile ritual, the sad futility
of this naked acolyte who must seek
eternal life in me.
Skin hangs in folds upon your frame,
and languor slows
the rhythm of living that remains
like pale twilight rain dripping unseen
through the forests shadowed where the sun has been.
Upon your forehead sweat gleams faint and cold;
your flushed cheeks seem unreal.
I stand behind you, so I do not see
the depthless eyes, the wordless loud appeal
shrieking in black pools of pain
I am powerless to heal.
Rapid and shallow, stale air moves
through your frosted mouth,
hungry no more for news of summer
sprawling in the leaping grass.
I listen.
And soon a wind disturbs the sea,
and undulating, deadly weed
is rustling to me.
Can you not feel the sprouting death,
the blaze of splitting buds,
frenzied foam and strangled breath
insistent penetration of the bone?
Listen carefully.
Within your darkness, I can hear the sound,
crumbling and falling in slow decay,
milk-white honeycomb eaten away.
How is the cough?
Blood again, bright as a tartan scarf
crumbled on my empty chair in a crimson laugh.
I cannot restore the squandered years;
I offer only a limit of long days
of drowsy poppy magic
trailing moist fingers on your throbbing eyes,
softly untwining the tentacles of pain
and sinuously inundating the convolutions of your brain.
I give euphoria in deep injection,
yohimbine and male hormone
so that your flaccid flesh may rise again,
a full-bodied root of fire,
blood and pain forgotten in the white flood of desire.
And yet I cannot tell you these mysterious things,
for when I listen to your lungs
it is your death who sings.
You will be better soon. Sometime, but not now.
You dress and go out,
and I hear your feet disturb the sunlight in the street.
Your scarf forgotten on my chair
flames in the antiseptic air.

This is the second part of Perry's poem from The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, "Waiting for the Birth" (pp. 118-119):

2

Sky is a bronze plate
  balanced
  on scribble gums

she makes a nest
threading thistles
for a thorny bed
other animals back away
  watch beyond the shade

I sit still

we murmur to one another

the bulge the bag
birthwater
white front feet
white face
  slide towards me
the body
speckled fish
drowsy lizard

she moans and lifts her head
to lick the seacaul
from the bluetongued mouth

she does not hurry
examining the limp shape
grunts    goes on licking
over and over

fishskin dries red curls
 ears move  eyes open

he is alive

"Sky is a bronze plate/balanced/on scribble gum" is precise and confident. It's a landscape in three brushstrokes; it also sums up about a third of Australian Impressionist painting. The rest is precise and sympathetic observation. Perry eliminates punctuation to allow the whole scene to hang simultaneously in the reader's mind, eye-level, a painting on a wall.

Whatever her reading voice might have been, Perry's poetic voice is adult - observant, compassionate, clinically informed.

Murray's descriptions of Perry's poetry - produced by a clenched inner being, a lost little girl persona - so mismatch her what we can see of her poetry in Jensen and the Penguin anthology they suggest he had remade the tale of his termination into a self-soothing, self-serving myth.

In the '90s Murray seems to be looking the event wholly out of resentment. He seems to have given no thought to Perry's history, independence and indomitability, or to the effects a long debilitation and absence would have had on someone who'd been so dynamic, been stabbed in the back and banished for it, who knew she might not have the stamina or strength to recover from a repeat of it.

And so Perry removed Murray by stealth.

[Murray] only discovered she had resumed control when poems he had accepted were rejected by her, to the bewilderment of poets all over the country. 'That cost me a deal of face, but I've since grown it back, and hold no grudges', Murray wrote stoically. At the time, though, he was both hurt and puzzled, for he had very much liked Perry and thought she liked him. (Alexander, p. 194)

This is so different from the Perry Beaver describes I think it's an additional indication that Perry felt she couldn't weather another '64.

Though going behind Murray's back to reject work that had already been accepted seems odd - it's certainly unprofessional treatment of the contributors - it suggests to me that Perry saw Murray's expulsion as having to be so swift and complete it couldn't be argued or reversed. His removal had to be as irreversible as hers had been. It's also another indication that Perry was avoiding direct confrontation with Murray.

Jensen quotes Murray's resignation letter of May 22, 1980:

Your six years of freedom from most of the editorial if not the administrative and worrying function of the journal have restored your vim to the point where the magazine can now flourish … There's also of course the breakdown of our old delegated editorship agreement and my inability to adapt to the new rules – but I won't give you the usual lecture about keeping faith with the contributors, your breaking my promises for me, etc. That's been given. It just seems we can't get the new editing rules to work properly and I suspect I'm the impediment with my stiff-necked lone-wolf ways. So I drop out without resentments; the mag was an epoch in my life and no-one ever gave me a greater compliment of trust than you did. Six and a half years. We grew some poets in that time, didn't we. (p. 108 - emphasis mine)

The letter establishes that Perry's health had improved so much she could take over the editorship again. "[N]ew editing rules" suggests she wanted a stronger say in the magazine's direction, or closer supervision of Murray's work and intentions. Murray's "stiff-necked lone-wolf ways" couldn't accommodate that much close control.

"I suspect I'm the impediment," Murray says. "[I'll] drop out without resentments" implies that Murray was finally prepared to accept the temporary and contingent nature of their original agreement / his co-editorship. Perry had recovered; Perry owned the magazine; his position had always been temporary and contingent. Murray's later summary - that under him the magazine had "floated high" and that Perry had "reeled [it] in" is a good indication of the great amount of autonomy he'd had while she'd been sick. It's another reason removing Murray came to look so much like uprooting couch grass.

Murray didn't have a "personal disagreement" with Perry. Being fired from Poetry Australia wasn't the result of the insecurity and jealousy of a lost little girl with a second rate talent, it was the result of creative differences. (See note below.) Perry's secret-meeting expulsion from the Poetry Society was office politics. Just as Murray's 1991 resignation from his position as Angus & Robertson's poetry reader, was. Murray had held the position since 1976, and made A&R Australia's premier poetry publisher. The resignation was connived at by John Tranter, who wanted the job, and someone on the inside. (Eventually the job went to Robert Adamson. He and Tranter both got books out of the deal.) (Alexander, pp. 197-205)

But by 1992-94, when he was talking to Alexander, Murray was far more vicious about Perry's subterfuge than about Tranter's treachery. His only recorded reaction to Tranter's plot was to look for work outside the publising industry to replace the income he'd lost, and which he needed to support his family.

The best that can be said for Murray's fourth explanation - There is no best that can be said for it. Murray had been considered Australia's pre-eminent poet since The Vernacular Republic (1976). For over a decade he was an odds-on favourite for the Nobel Prize. Murray had no need to attack a dead woman who he knew had been driven to suicide at least partly by a twenty-year campaign of disparagement and silencing, launched and sustained by men he knew, one of whom had also greatly wronged him.

PERRY AS EDITOR

Quoted by Hall, Jensen describes Perry as a revolutionary editor:

Her editorial choices in both Poetry Magazine and Poetry Australia gave preference to the new verse forms, inspired by the American poets, in a local climate that was reactionary and conservative. Her international vision...was the motivation for extraordinary entrepreneurial activities that placed Australian poets on an equal footing with their international contemporaries.

Hall paraphrasing Jensen:

Perry was forceful in her support of new voices and was the first to publish books by such poets as Bruce Beaver, Rodney Hall, John Millett, Craig Powell, Norman Talbot, John Tranter and Meredith Wattison; she also published an early collection by Jennifer Maiden. Along with supporting other poets, Perry published eight collections of her own. Another scholar, Lawrence Bourke writes that Perry 'was a person of prodigious enthusiasm and vitality [who] found time not only to be a poet and physician but also to chase (and catch) sponsors for poetry prizes, organise poetry workshops and edit a poetry periodical' (1992, 12). Bourke comments that Perry's Poetry Australia 'became one of the most important poetry periodicals in Australia' (1992, 12)....

It is arguable, however, that [no editor] did more than Grace Perry - in her publishing ventures and in her writing - to see that it was the American model - especially Williams - which set the pace for radically transforming Australian poetry.

Being considered a revolutionary editor depends who's doing the considering.

OTHER FACTORS IN PERRY'S DESCENT FROM VISIBILITY:

I don't think Hall grasped the length and extent and sheer effectiveness of the Sydney poetry establishment's campaign against Perry. They treated her with silence for twenty years, neither publishing her nor writing about her work; they continued to ignore her for another thirty-odd. Their silence was fatal to her reputation, and to the fact of her epic work in making Australian poetry a factor in the poetry of the world.

Mark Butler...was an aspiring young university poet in the early 1970s. He remembered attending poetry events, but said, influenced by Professor Couper at the University of New South Wales, he was more attracted to Roland Robinson, Joan Mas and Robert Adamson .... Most [contemporary Sydney poets] seem to have heard of Grace Perry but few had any idea of her role in masterminding [the workshops at Macquarie University] (Jensen, pp. 100-101)

Or put it this way: if Perry had been as much an acknowledged member of the Sydney poetry establishment as, say, Adamson or Dawe, over those twenty years, the new radical feminist editors would have heard of her. There would have been no "forgetting" to wonder at now.

Illness & other interlocking factors:

Jensen says (p. 62) that in 1970 Perry had a minor stroke which she described [to everyone else] as "the Flu;". This seemed to have begun her long-term debilitation as the same sentence continues: "and in 1973 Les Murray took over the editorship of the magazine ... so that she could retain her old vitality and concentrate on her writing and medical practice."

In 1973-74 Perry was awarded a $3000 Writer's Fellowship. She took the year to write, moving to Berrima for 4 days a week. (Jensen, p. 106) The effects of the her move to Berrima and her illness overlapped and potentiated:

a) In 1974 she moved Poetry Australia's address to a P.O. Box in Berrima. The country town address gave the impression that Poetry Australia had moved out of the poetry mainstream. Perry managed her medical practice in Five Dock with several locums. (Jensen, p. 108)

b) Between 1973 and 1980 guest editors prepared several issues of the magazine while Murray managed the rest; Perry was less visibly tied to the editorship.

c) After 1973 Perry's community of poets became dispersed - Beaver was writing, Craig Powell moved to Canada, John Millett began breeding racehorses follwing the collapse of his legal practice. Under his guidance Perry bought property in Moss Vale and began breeding sheep and Simmental bulls to add to her income and continue funding Poetry Australia. (Jensen, pp. 107-108)

d) After 1975 the university workshops were organized by the universities. (Jensen, p. 107) The younger poets emerging from those workshops were even less likely to send material to Poetry Australia than before: the magazine was no longer Syndey-based, and Perry's founding of the workshops was lost and ancient history.

e) During the 1970s Perry also focused on publishing core Poetry Australia writers through South Head Press: 2 books each by John Millett, Bruce Beaver and herself, and one book each by Norman Talbot and Noel Stock.

f) During the '80s Perry published a number of issue-length collections by Poetry Australia poets - Jennifer Maiden For the left hand (#78, 1981), John Millett Tail Arse Charlie (#82, 1982), Peter Murphy Lies (#90, 1983), Barry Donoghue View from a first floor window (#91, 1983), Grace Perry Be kind to animals (#94, 1984), and Craig Powell A face in your hands (#97, 1984). Though these were "important collections of poetry in the development of each poet" (Jensen, p. 110), they show Perry and Poetry Australia focused more inward than outward. “[Perry’s] personal power as based on her role as editor, publisher and controller of grant money declined." (Jensen, p. 110)

Perry did publish women poets: J. S. Harry, Rhyll McMaster, Mirian Stone (another then-new pseudonym of Gwen Harwood), Joan Mas, Jennifer Maidan and Vicki Viidikas, for example. Because none of these poets became as well-known as Dawe, Beaver, Tranter, Adamson or Murray, identifying Perry as their publisher would not have raised her reputation. (Who? Who?) And so her actual feminism and real feminist credentials also became invisible.

But greater than these were the efforts of the men who elided her existence. Being considered a major poet, or even a poet at all, depends on who's doing the considering.

THE PENGUIN BOOK'S ONE POEM

Because of the awards she received in 1985 and 1986 Perry couldn't be excluded from The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets. But she couldn't be resurrected, either.

The longer she was buried the more awkward resurrecting her became. Prolific poet and poetry promoter, founding editor of Poetry Australia, founding editor of South Head Press, NSW literary prize-winner, AM honouree - how had someone with that kind of CV disappeared? Loud and awkward questions.

It's hard to see how her resurrection could have been managed without scandal, and scandals have financial consequences. In 1986 Roland Robinson, J M Couper, Bruce Beaver, John Tranter, Les Murray and Perry herself were all still alive. In a period of fermenting feminism, hints of well-known male writers' roles in the erasure of someone with Perry's CV would have had unpredictable financial and personal consequences. The anthology itself had Literature Board Funding. Eighty percent of what happens is covering up what people actually do.

Though Hall is a thoroughly unreliable narrator, he did publicize Jensen's biography of Perry, and for that I'm grateful. In his Plumwood Mountain Journal essays he urges a re-assessment of Perry's poetry. Though that's extremely unlikely now, so many years later, in such a different world, it's freeing to know about Perry, bare the levers of a machine of culture manufactured and defined by manufactured absence.


BACKGROUND

1 - SO, APART FROM NOBODY, WHO AM I?

In mid-late 1969, Professor R. W. V. Elliott asked me if I would like to submit something to Poetry Australia. He was sitting behind his desk and a tri-fold letter. Flinders was low on the totem pole; I assumed that if Flinders got a letter then Poetry Australia must have been contacting every university in the country asking for work from interested/promising students. (I've only found from Jensen that he became a consulting editor for Poetry Australia in 1968 and edited its South Australia edition in 1969. Jensen, p. 91)

The issue came out in early '70. I remember the shiny red cover, the whitewhite paper and the very deep black and shiny print, and poems by J S Harry and Rhyll McMaster. I remember looking and looking at a 5-line poem by Harry in a later issue - it contained the word "crucifix" - and wondering how Harry'd done it - simple, unimaginable beforehand, just there. I remember looking in the same wondering way at another poem, by Rhyll McMaster. And at the ending of yet another poem, in another later issue, by a man whose name I have no idea of, his last lines quiet and still and complete in ways I had no vocabulary to explain - "she took me/to the last/drop."

I didn't know anything about any of the writers except the work on the page. At the time I had nothing to associate them with, no other way to know or remember them.

I suppose I knew theoretically that editors are people who edit, but the idea of knowing or contacting an actual person, who actually physically edited the magazine in my hands, was so far outside my immediate terrors and concerns that it never occurred to me.

I remember Poetry Australia becoming boring. I particularly remember the entire issue devoted to John Ciardi's new translation of Dante's Inferno. I read it from cover to cover, didn't understand a word, hated myself for not understanding it, hated it for boring me, hated finding it boring, hated myself for being bored by it. I found the issues that followed less and less interesting. They weren't nourishing. I've ways preferred being astonished to being lectured, and those little poems were astonishing. (Hyacinths trodden to a purple stain.) I didn't renew my subscription.

I relocated from Adelaide to Melbourne in 1975, Melbourne to L.A. in 1982, and L.A. to Portland, Oregon, in 1992. In 2002 I co-founded the Portland-based, multi-lingual journal Gobshite Quarterly, and in 2008 co-founded Reprobate/GobQ Books.

2 - PROBLEMS READING THE SOUTHERLY INTERVIEW

I wanted to read all of John Tranter's interview with Bruce Beaver to get more context, if there were any to be had, but the link led to a splash page which said that before I could continue I had to download a Firefox extension which would change my default search engine. (Click here.)

Our computers are set up by our tech guy, our own as well as the Company's. I wasn't enthusiastic about adding an unnamed extension to Firefox and replacing duckduckgo with an unspecified search engine. So the Beaver interview/Tranter material remains unviewed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Alexander, Peter, Les Murray: A Life in Progress, South Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hampton, Susan, and Llewellyn, Kate, eds., The Penguin Book of Australian Women Poets, Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin Australia, 1986.

Jennings, Kate, ed., Mother I'm Rooted: An Anthology of Australian Women's Poetry, Fitzroy, Victoria, Outback Press, 1975.

Jensen, Dorothy, Grace Perry: Australian Poet, Publisher and Paediatrician, Sydney, Boraga Academic, 2020.

Jensen, Dorothy, The Remarkable Grace Perry: Poet and Publisher of Poetry Australia Paediatrician and breeder of Simmental Bulls, Independently published, 2020.

WEBLIOGRAPHY:
Hall, Phillip, "Grace Perry: Australian Poet, Publisher and Paediatrician" 2023
https://plumwoodmountain.com/book-review/dot-jensen-grace-perry-australian-poet-publisher-and-paediatrician-a-review-by-phillip-hall/

Hall, Phillip, "Poplars Stripped Bare and Mental Health and Other Catastrophes in the Poetry of Grace Perry" 2017
https://plumwoodmountain.com/essays-interviews/poplars-stripped-bare-mental-health-and-other-catastrophes-in-the-poetry-of-grace-perry/

Adamson, Robert, biography: https://robertadamson.com/about/

Beaver, Bruce, biography (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Beaver

Beaver, Bruce, poems: https://www.poemhunter.com/bruce-beaver/

Couper, J M, biography (AustLit): https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A8536

Elliott, Ralph, biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Elliott

Hall, Phillip, biography: https://recentworkpress.com/product-author/phillip-hall/

Jensen, Dorothy, biography (AustLit): https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A72061

Millett, John, biography (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Millett_(poet)

Murray, Les, biography (Wikipedia); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Murray_(poet)

Perry, Grace, biography (National Library of Australia) (from back cover of Jensen's bio): https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/246069520?keyword=grace%20perry

Perry, Grace, biography (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Perry

Robinson, Roland, biography (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Robinson_(poet)

Tranter, John, biography (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tranter

Tranter, John, poems: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-tranter#tab-poems