The Prose Behind the Poetry

THERE is a conventional wisdom, not entirely without foundation, that poets ought not to write their memoirs. The life, so the argument goes, is already there in the poems and more vividly so than it is likely to be in prose. No matter how “objective” the poetry may seem or how extensive the use of personae and dramatic monologues, the “personality” is still there. T.S. Eliot argued that “personality” is what the poet needs to escape from but, of course, his own poetry is redolent with it.

Leeward: A Memoir
by Geoffrey Lehmann
New South, 417 pages, 2018, $34.99

On the other hand, it is the poetry and not the personality that matters in the long run—to all but the poet’s closest associates. According to some theorists, poetry should stand on its own and be read without annotation or context. Sadly perhaps, the appetite for more detail about the poets whose work we admire seems insatiable. The letters of Sylvia Plath or Philip Larkin are just two examples. The information in autobiographies and memoirs does form part of a larger whole but after reading them we return, only slightly altered, to the poems themselves and their own strange self-sufficiency.

The American poet William Carlos Williams begins his own Autobiography with:

Nine tenths of our lives is well forgotten in the living. Of the part that is remembered, the most of it had better not be told: it would interest no one, or at least would not contribute to the story of what we ourselves have been.

Williams, as it happens, is mentioned briefly in Geoffrey Lehmann’s new memoir, Leeward, as an influence, especially on Lehmann’s Spring Forest poems—and as a much stronger influence on his friend, fellow-poet and anthologist, Robert Gray. Leeward, however, is not primarily about influences, strong though some of them were, but about the poet’s (and tax lawyer’s) understanding of his own life, the parental and grandparental forces that shaped it, and “mistakes” he admits to, in both personal and professional life. And the successes too, it must be said.

Although subtitled “A Memoir”, Leeward is in many ways an autobiography. It deals with the lives of the poet’s grandparents and parents as well as his own. The book is divided into chapters, often named after a particular person—or sometimes a house in which they lived. Lehmann’s own life story, from birth to his later seventies, advances by steps and is successively interrupted by the stories of his forebears. It’s a reasonable strategy, even if frustrating at times.

Thus, progressively, throughout the book, Lehmann leaves us with portraits of his maternal and paternal grandparents and of his parents. All of these people, often in very different ways (and sometimes indirectly), left their imprint on their descendant. One important element that emerges in all cases is class, something which is not supposed to exist in Australia but, of course, does. We just have looser, and less agreed upon, ways of defining it compared to the British.

In Lehmann’s case it would seem that his mother’s parents were on the way down from the upper middle class and his father’s parents were on the way up from the artisan working class. His mother’s parents seem to have been relatively reckless with their money and his maternal grandfather was a drug-using doctor who died of a morphine overdose. His paternal grandfather was a skilled carpenter who was persuaded, during the 1890s depression, to oversee the building of a mission in New Guinea and died (just before Lehmann’s father was born) from the malaria he caught there.

Lehmann’s father, Leo, ran his own boat service across the harbour from McMahons Point to Balmain while also doing untaxed watch repairs on the side. By cautious frugality he amassed enough to buy a group of three houses on McMahons Point when it was a working-class suburb. His daughter and son were sent to private schools despite the parents’ feeling somewhat awkward in the presence of its other parents.

Iris, Lehmann’s mother, had a relatively chaotic, would-be-genteel, childhood from which she never really recovered. At the age of thirty-nine, after a two-year courtship, Iris married the forty-four-year-old Leo Lehmann because, she told her son, “he made me feel safe”. Although the union produced a daughter and a son, five years apart, it was not a happy one. Lehmann traces his own initial misapprehension of what marriage involves back to his parents’ example and expectations.

For those who might be reading Leeward for what it says about the poet and his poetry, these “family” chapters are not irrelevant. They suggest a variety of reasons for a certain shyness and/or aloofness many of his friends notice throughout the book, even to the extent where at one point, Les Murray suggests to Lehmann’s daughter, Julia, that Lehmann himself might also be somewhere on the “Asperger’s spectrum”, as Murray considers himself to be.

Indeed the figure of Les Murray looms large in Lehmann’s account of his student days at Sydney University. Lehmann claims he sensed Murray’s genius from their first meeting and the two collaborated on editing various student literary publications. Eventually they published their first book together—The Ilex Tree (1965). Murray later wrote a long epithalamium for Lehmann and Sally McInerney’s ill-fated wedding (which included the risky line: “The depth in this marriage will heal the twentieth century”). Despite the truth of another remarkable line in that poem, “Good friends are blood relations that you choose”, Murray and Lehmann eventually fell out.

Lehmann’s account probably differs from Murray’s and centres on a negative review Murray wrote in the Catholic Weekly of Lehmann’s Nero’s Poems (1981) which, Murray declared, “consistently reads as the grubby moral fantasies of a fourteen-year-old trying to shock himself”. Murray took particular exception to the poem “Mother” (dealing with Nero’s matricide) saying, “Even the most pedestrian Robert Graves got further into Roman and human darkness than this.” Murray has always felt deeply about his mother, who died when he was ten. Lehmann describes “falling out of love” with his when he was roughly the same age. Lehmann’s atheism and Murray’s Catholicism may have been another factor, though they hadn’t been earlier on.

Around the middle of the memoir, Lehmann begins to concentrate more on the other poets, painters and composers he came to know, and offers a number of anecdotes which reveal how the older poets of the time, such as Kenneth Slessor, Judith Wright, A.D. Hope, David Campbell and others were generally more supportive of the younger talent coming through than is often the case now.

Slessor particularly, with whom Lehmann had many dinners in the last ten years of the older poet’s life, is particularly well portrayed. Wright and Campbell, though more briefly treated, are also greatly admired. Francis Webb, whom Lehmann visited several times in mental institutions where Webb was being treated for schizophrenia, is also movingly recalled—in his suffering and in his generosity.

Lehmann goes back even further historically when he describes a meeting with Norman Lindsay at Springwood and resurrects the sad shadow of the symbolist poet Christopher Brennan (1870–1932) which still hung over Sydney University when Lehmann was doing Arts/Law there in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, Leeward as a whole is, among several other things, an affectionate portrait of the Sydney poetry tradition going back to Brennan and ending perhaps with Lehmann himself (and maybe Robert Gray). Melbourne is given relatively short shrift and the takeover of the Bulletin’s poetry editorship in 1961 by Melbourne’s Vincent Buckley from Sydney’s Douglas Stewart is seen as a disaster.

Another important (or should that be “notorious”?) Sydney tradition Lehmann examines is the ultra-libertarian collection of drinkers and thinkers called “The Push”. Lehmann admits that he was initially considered an “Alf” by this group but, to some extent, worked his way into it—while being less than enthusiastic about its excesses, particularly in regard to the women, who had a tougher time with the “free love” ethos than the men did.

Situated poignantly in the centre of all this is an account of Lehmann’s relationship with Jan Miller—to whom he lost his virginity when he was twenty-one. “That night,” Lehmann writes, “I met the girl with a face like a Noh mask. Her name was Jan Miller.” In a student house in Forbes Street, Woolloomooloo, Lehmann listened to her life story. Initially from Melbourne where she’d already had a child and given it up to “good parents”, Jan had moved to Sydney and had had an affair with one of the students in the house—which was over by then. She had scars on her wrists. At Jan’s request, Lehmann recited an early poem of his about Adam and Eve.

After that, Lehmann recalls, “I offered to leave,” but soon they were in “her small bedroom at the back of the house. She pointed with embarrassment to the scar on her abdomen from the caesarean.” The tenderness Lehmann subsequently came to feel for Jan is somewhat belied by the bald sentence which follows: “We had unprotected sex in her narrow single bed and fell asleep with the light on.”

Lehmann later goes on to describe Jan Miller’s distinctive and well-regarded situation in “The Push” and how, while she had other attachments from time to time, he and Jan had many dinners together over the next couple of years. Eventually, at the Circular Quay Overseas farewell for Paddy McGuinness (later editor of Quadrant), Jan, according to Lehmann (who wasn’t there) “may not have eaten for some days, or may have been drunk. She stood up on the railing and fell through perhaps 9 metres of air onto the concrete wharf.”

I go into this sort of detail here because Jan is also the subject of “Elegy for Jan”, one of Lehmann’s best earlier poems. Its last six (long) lines are a good illustration of the difference between the memoir’s prose and the emotional force of Lehmann’s poem written from the same material.

Out of those tangled nights, backyards of stunted weeds and cinders,
Damp walls. rain spitting through an open window, blowing curtains,
Dear Jan I see you so the whole world radiates around you,
Compassionate for all living things, forgetting your own body,
In bare and draughty rooms undressing slowly to the night
To hold us whimsically and tenderly upon dank beds.

A comparable contrast can be felt between the prose account Lehmann gives of bringing up his three young children in shared custody after the breakup with Sally McInerney, his first wife. Lehmann’s classic poem, “Parenthood”, some of it apparently taken from other single fathers’ experience too, is significantly more intense, even while the readers of Leeward will still be impressed with the courage and determination (and the vulnerability) the poet displays in both accounts.

Leeward also covers, but not in the same detail, Lehmann’s career as a lawyer, public servant, tax expert, university lecturer and so on. I suspect other poets of his generation, also with day jobs, took such accomplishments a bit lightly. Although he doesn’t boast, Lehmann’s tax work does seem to speak for itself and includes quite a contribution to earlier versions of the GST and important textbooks on taxation law.

In this connection, Lehmann speaks approvingly of the American poet Wallace Stevens and other major poets such as William Carlos Williams who held down demanding jobs (in life assurance and medicine respectively) while creating poems that are still central to the tradition more than fifty years after their deaths. In this regard, it’s tempting to ponder what the market for Leeward might have been if Lehmann had confined himself to tax matters alone and not poetry.

Lehmann’s memoir is described on its back cover, quite reasonably, as both “lyrical” and “honest”. It’s certainly lyrical but is rarely (as one would expect) at the same level of lyricism as his best poems (even though “lyrical” may not be the best word for Lehmann’s poetry anyway). It’s even arguable that Leeward is not as lyrical as his friend Robert Gray’s memoir (The Land I Came Through Last, 2008) which is intended more consciously as a work of art and has sections which are as distinctly memorable and self-contained as short stories tend to be. It benefits too from addressing a central question—Why was Gray’s father an alcoholic?—though he does become sidetracked from time to time. Interestingly, Gray is thanked by Lehmann for advice on the structure of Leeward and may perhaps have been responsible for the “parallel progress” idea of interrupting the author’s story with the stories of his forebears.

As far as honesty goes, it is probably best to say Leeward is more explicit in some parts than others. On the marriage breakup with Sally McInerney, Lehmann seems relatively impartial and realistic about the role played by expatriate poet Peter Porter. On the other hand, Lehmann also gives some graphic details about his parents’ sexual life (or its beginnings anyway). He remembers his mother telling him that “on the wedding night Leo … was surprised at how hard she was to penetrate. (It may have been her peculiar way of letting me know she was a virgin when she married. It was not something I wanted to know about.)”

It’s one of the problems of memoir that the narrator somehow feels bound (or free?) to repeat this information after the people involved are dead but is not free to mention comparable details about people still alive. It’s perhaps worse again that a reviewer can go on to draw even more attention to them. Complete and comprehensive honesty is not something we should expect from a memoir and it is probably silly (or voyeuristic) to desire it.

It is probably best then to regard Leeward as an absorbing, well-written, informative but not indispensable accompaniment to Lehmann’s more important Poems 1957–2013 (2014). No matter how much detail is retrieved and beguilingly narrated in prose, the poetry is where the centre must remain.

Geoff Page, who lives in Canberra, is a prolific poet and frequent contributor to Quadrant.