Clive James on Les Murray’s retirement

For health reasons, Les Murray has decided to retire as Quadrant’s Literary Editor, a position he has held since March 1990. A series of tributes to Les, focusing on his work as our Literary Editor, will appear in our January-February issue. Clive James has written the following:

One of the several reasons for admiring Les Murray so greatly was his range of tolerance for other poets who were not like him. If only Yeats, for example, had had the same virtue, Wilfred Owen and all the other First World War poets would not have been left out of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. As things were, Yeats’s eccentric editing managed to distort modern literary history almost as much as his poetry enhanced it.

As an editor, Les Murray had no such baleful effect. His standards were high but comprehensive, and therefore comprehending. Future literary historians will look back with amazement at a time when some other Australian periodicals were rewarded with large grants while proclaiming their intolerance of poets who might disagree with their cherished political line; or, even more reprehensible, had already disagreed with it. Meanwhile Quadrant was deliberately starved of such funds, a political initiative perhaps partly aimed at reducing its poetry editor to the condition of Count Ugolino in his punishment cell.

A million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I was there to watch when Les Murray erupted into the Australian literary scene. There were no excuses for failing to see straight away that he was a creative prodigy. But that he was also a curative genius took time to emerge, and it will probably take even more time for a consensus to be reached on quite how he did it. One of the reasons was that he loved poetry almost as much as it loved him. 

We expect to appoint a replacement for Les early next year. We intend to continue Quadrant’s proud tradition as a literary magazine, maintaining the welcoming catholicity of Les’s approach. We thank Les for his dedicated service and wish him well in his retirement.