Issue 173, Spring 2005
The dairy farm at Bunyah where Les Murray grew up is located between Forster and Gloucester in the Manning River area of New South Wales; or—to adopt the Aboriginal names—it lies between the districts of Coolongolook and Bucca Wauka. According to one of his most moving poems, "The Steel"—which concerns the death of his mother at age thirty-five, when he himself was twelve—the era in which Murray grew up could be characterized as "late pioneer." An only child, he was born in 1938. Though he has lived in Australian cities for much of his adult life, he returned to Bunyah in 1986 and reestablished his roots there.
Apart from the death of his mother, the most scarring experience of Murray's childhood was the relentless bullying and name-calling ("a plethora of fat-names") he suffered when, in the mid-1950s, he attended school in the town of Taree. Later, as a student at Sydney University, he concentrated less on prescribed reading lists than on a serendipitous exploration of the university's library stock, and was, he says, blase about the examination system. Nonetheless, his brilliance as a linguist won him a position as a scientific and technical translator at the Australian National University in Canberra. By 1971, while working in the Commonwealth Department of Education, Murray had resolved to forego secure employment and to seek his literary fortune; his subsequent earnings have come from his work as poet, essayist, reviewer, and editor. Grants from the Australian Literature Board and the earnings of his wife, Valerie, as a teacher made a vital contribution to the household for many years. The Murrays, who married in 1962, have three sons and two daughters. When their son, Alexander (born in 1978, and the subject of the poem "It Allows a Portrait in Line-Scan at Fifteen") was diagnosed with autism, it prompted Les Murray to realize that he himself displayed mild autistic traits. Throughout his life, he has also suffered from bouts of debilitating clinical depression. A particularly severe breakdown ended in Newcastle's John Hunter Hospital in 1996 when, in his fifty-eighth year, he recovered consciousness after a three-week coma (resulting from a liver abscess) and found that his depression had lifted. His poem "Travels with John Hunter" credits his surgeons with having killed "the Black Dog . . . with their scalpels".
His twelve poetry collections extend from The Ilex Tree (1965), copublished with his friend Geoffrey Lehmann, to Poems the Size of Photographs (2002). He has also written two verse novels, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) and Fredy Neptune (1998). The Paperbark Tree (1992) contains a selection of his prose writings. Received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1964, he has prefaced several of his books with the dedication "To the glory of God." "Over Mount Euji and the North Pole/I'm bound for Europe in a reading role," Murray writes cheerfully in "The International Terminal"; and it is evident that he feels quite missionary about readings, regarding them as the most accessible and enjoyable way of introducing poetry to a general nonacademic audience. It was on one such reading tour by Murray—in November 2003, shortly after his sixty-fifth birthday—that I caught up with him in England. Ironically, the location, Oxford, could scarcely have been a more academic one and he had given a reading the previous evening to the Oxford University Poetry Society. The setting Murray selected for the interview, the Quod Bar & Grill on High Street, is part of a former Barclays Bank building, now converted into The Old Bank Hotel. We were the Quod's first customers of the day; Murray, having explained to the manager that we had "some paperwork to do," selected a round wooden dining table, at the edge of the stone-floored room.
When the volume of the Muzak, and the chatter of the waiting-staff as they rehearsed the Iunchtime specials, began to overwhelm Murray's surprisingly soft-spoken remarks, we retreated to an adjoining courtyard. Although fierce in his convictions, Murray is enthralling company; even his most querulous sentiments can suddenly prompt some droll analogy or witty anecdote on his part, culminating in an explosion of hearty, high-pitched, contagious laughter. Wearing a black "Country Road" baseball cap on the day of the interview, his brightly striped shirt was visible above a round-necked slate blue woolen sweater flecked with gray and orange. He informed me that the sweater—which was hand-knit by the poet Jennifer Conipton (who had named the garment "The Vasty Fields of France")—is his favorite "traveling sweater": "It can absorb any amount of spilt gravy; it's very forgiving!"
A natural storyteller (or "yarner," as he terms it), Murray speaks quickly but clearly: He is a man with much on his mind and a rich vocabulary—drawn both from Standard English (Sir James Murray, who pioneered the Oxford English Dictionary, is a kinsman) and from the Scots dialect of his settler ancestors—in which to express himself with characteristic candor and a refreshing absence of cant. A poet with a panoptic vision of—and for—Australia, he has not only enhanced the literary standing of his country but has also contributed to the shaping of its destiny: influencing its arts policy, proposing a design for its flag, drafting its vote of allegiance, celebrating its indigenous plants and creatures, urging fellow Australians to shake off what he regards as their colonial mind-set and to allow their country to mature into a republic.
Often spoken of, along with Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, as one of a select group of major contemporary English-language poets who emerged from outside of the established literary centers, Les Murray told me that, while feeling "some fellowship" with Heaney and Walcott, "it irks me that that category of outsiders is still forced on us, as if the 'centers' had some sort of validity."
INTERVIEWER
In "The Year of the Kiln Portraits," addressed to your wife, you pay tribute to her artistic gifts; but the poem ends in bewilderment: "But it's / crazy: you're not driven. Not obsessive" you say to her. Are you driven and obsessive?
LES MURRAY
I am obsessive, I fear. It goes with being mildly autistic. There is so much of life we Aspergers are inept with, we often overdo the aspects we can manage. I'm also fascinated to discover just what I can play on this marvelous instrument I picked up at the end of my teens. It was a very great epiphany for me to realize that poetry is inexhaustible, that I would never get to the end of its resources.
INTERVIEWER
Do you agree with Czeslaw Milosz that poems should be written "under unbearable duress and only with the hope/that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument"?
MURRAY
I think Professor Milosz dramatizes the matter a bit, speaking of "unbearable" duress, though maybe he was also thinking of a cumulative effect, the withdrawal symptoms we get when we don't write any poetry for too long a while. That's a duress that's hard to bear. I agree with his second line, though: Evil spirits do have to be driven out, and may leave their names in a line or two as they fly forth. Duress again, there.
INTERVIEWER
You mention the "withdrawal symptoms" associated with not writing. Did the depression you suffered for years interfere with your writing—or did it sometimes stimulate it?
MURRAY
If inspiration stays away for too long, I begin creating nets of words in the hope of catching it, hanging bottles on low bushes to attract it. I may not be able to see whether or how depression interfered with my writing, in the years when it gripped me. I suspect it did make me a bit stupid, slow to learn things, slow even to see that depression was what had me in its grip. When I got sick enough, I took the only weapon I had, the poetry, and started trying to write the bad stuff down, and out. Poetry can work as the highest form of talking cure, but you have to tell the absolute truth, so far as you can dredge that up. I'd always disapproved of the idea of poetry as therapy; but get sick enough and you'll shed any such snobberies! I said to the Black Dog: "You bastard, you make me cry, I'll make you sing . . . "
INTERVIEWER
A few years ago, Les Murray: A Life in Progress by Peter F. Alexander appeared, with your full cooperation. It must be a strange experience to read an account of your own life.
MURRAY
I did provide information by the cartload—but I kept right away from the writing of Professor Alexander's book; and Valerie and I resolved not to censor anything. Others managed to get a few things suppressed by the use of that word lawsuit, which turns publishers to water. But the book itself, well, it was me objectified and represented, inevitably lacking dimensions that I guess only I fully live in.
INTERVIEWER
Such as?
MURRAY
One such was necessary forgetting: all the unutterable gaucheries and lunacies of my earlier lives, things I'd shuddered at and grown out of. We do compose a soul for ourselves, I think, an inner biography that has this grace of selection—the poem of ourself, if you like. I don't think I suffered much pain from reliving old episodes apart from this process I've just spoken about—and there I do suffer a fair bit, from unconquerable memory. People hear me babbling to myself as I try to blank out some forty-year-old gaffe with verbal noise. Among things learned from the book, which I hadn't known at all, was an aspect of my mother's death, which Valerie had in fact sussed out by herself. I hadn't fully realized just how much of my poor father's lifelong grief at Mum's tragedy was guilt at having muffed the job of getting a dopey town doctor to send an ambulance for her when our old car was broken down and she was hemorrhaging from her third miscarriage. I'd written a poem, "The Steel," detailing all I'd been told about her death; and Peter Alexander discovered crucial bits I hadn't heard. I decided to discard the poem, but an Aboriginal cousin of mine—a professional historian—made me keep it and rework the inaccurate bits. Dad had been incapable of breaking the taboo he'd grown up with, against discussing women's matters, especially when the gossip he most loathed was certain to be listening in on the phone exchange, since she ran it. He could only say, "She's having a bad turn" with desperate urgency and hope the doctor would understand. The appeal fell into a linguistic chasm between social classes. "Aboriginal people die that way all the time," my cousin Vicki told me. Dad was dead five years when the biography came out. Perhaps that was merciful for him; but I was sorry I hadn't fully known the sources of his plight. Peter was very good, I'd add, in bringing to light the whole long tragedy Dad and his father were trapped in. That's more of a story than my bookish career.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a sense of a shaping fate at work in your life, a sense of things pointing, in retrospect, to a significance that wasn't necessarily evident at the time?
MURRAY
I get a sense of having been protected, sometimes, and given better than I deserved; but no sense of fate. Looking back, what I see are themes here and there—among them, a sense of repeated deep moral shock at the things that can be done. I'm cursed with a strong sense of the dark side of everything; I was brought up on the idea that whatever you do will fail, that sooner or later it will crash. One thing I dare to be proud of: I managed to wrestle life onto my terms without ever rising socially.
INTERVIEWER
What aspects of your life were most crucial to your development as a poet?
MURRAY
I was a freak, but happily my freakishness was in language—not, say, in classifying antique crankshafts. We seem to get a word-freak once or twice a century in the Murray family. Sir James Murray of the Oxford English Dictionary was my cousin, for example. When I'd argue points in the OED with my Russian fellow-translator at the National University in Canberra, I'd tell him we Murrays owned the damn language! Being some other kind of freak has its attractions, mind you. I envy painting its impasto and sheer color-play, how it's not held in by that stubborn insuspendable lexicality that words have. I get out into nonsense as far as I can. Lord knows, though never for nihilist ends . . . There's also the wonderful advantage of music and painting and sculpture, that they don't have to be translated.