Geoffrey Lehmann’s Journey

Nicholas Hasluck delivered this speech at the launching in Perth of Geoffrey Lehmann’s new book of verse, Poems 1957–2013

The dates mentioned in Geoffrey Lehmann’s new book remind us that in the early post-war period Australian literature was enriched by the work of widely respected poets such as Judith Wright, A.D. Hope, James McAuley, David Campbell, Rosemary Dobson and Gwen Harwood. Then, towards the end of the 1950s, a younger and equally talented generation began to make its presence felt.

For many readers the publication in 1965 of The Ilex Tree, co-authored by Les Murray and Geoffrey Lehmann, was a significant moment. These were two new poets who would not only be with us for many years to come but also, as editors and anthologists, were destined to play an influential role in shaping our appreciation of contemporary verse. And so, as an admirer of Lehmann’s work, I feel immensely privileged to be involved in the launching of his latest book—another important moment, fifty years further on.

The dates I mentioned earlier make it plain that the author has gathered up the fruits of a lifetime’s endeavour. It will therefore be useful, before turning to the contents of his latest book, to look briefly at certain facets of his life and times.

Geoffrey Lehmann graduated with degrees in arts and law from the University of Sydney where he was associated with Les Murray in co-editing the magazines Arna and Hermes. At that time he was on the fringes of the bohemian coterie known as the “Sydney Push”. It seems that these connections led to a notorious stoush with the young Robert Hughes, who was then winning some faint applause as a would-be poet, not yet acclaimed as the famous art critic he was destined to become.

The stoush erupted in this way. Having noticed that Robert Hughes was borrowing too liberally from other poets, Geoffrey’s legal training prompted him to make the potentially actionable accusation of plagiarism in an ingenious manner. He wrote a piece for the student magazine Honi Soit in which, by adopting a pseudo-scholarly tone, he purported to explore the mysteries of “psychic transference”; that is, the incredibly interesting phenomenon whereby the words and thoughts of one person—an overseas poet such as Dylan Thomas, for example—could, by some amazing kink in the cosmic order, be transmitted to the mind of another person in another country, before popping up in print as an original composition by a local poet—as could be observed in the Robert Hughes line: “I cannot rage against the dying of the light.”

In this case, it seems, these scholarly observations gave rise to a good deal of rage, but not necessarily against the dying of the light. The ensuing controversy led to a Mexican stand-off between the two poets which lasted for some years. According to Ann Coombs, author of Sex and Anarchy: The Life and Death of the Sydney Push:

Lehmann says his expose was not meant to be taken terribly seriously, but it was picked up by the mainstream press … Hughes called Lehmann “a malicious little [expletive deleted]” … “I nearly died when I saw it,” Lehmann says, but then I thought: “Now he can’t sue me for defamation. I was delighted when I realised that.”

This was not the poet’s only experience referable to those years. Early on in the book one finds also “Elegy for Jan”, a poignant recollection of a well-known personality in the Sydney Push:

From the bloodhouses of my youth, vagrant hotels, I see your face

Dead girl (dear Jan!) in smoke-filled rooms glass-littered slimy floors.

Out of those brine-cold years, derelict houses with cracked lino

And crumbling ceilings, poems and obscenities scribbled on the walls,

A humid wind blows from that night we met and loved as strangers …

 In later years Geoffrey went on to employ his legal skills in other ways, as a practising solicitor, and eventually as a specialist in taxation. But the Robert Hughes incident and the passage I have just quoted are reminders that Geoffrey was a contemporary of some of the larger-than-life personalities on the Sydney campus in that era, including Bob Ellis and Clive James. Perhaps this is why Geoffrey has always been conversant with and fascinated by the vagaries of the world at large, and the foibles of those around him.

Something of this is reflected in that section of the present volume containing the frequently satirical “Nero’s Poems” and a lengthy piece—in several parts—called “Meditations for Marcus Furius Camillus, Governor of Africa”.

The meditations begin with the ageing governor describing his personal slave’s infatuation with a school of dolphins in a tone that is world-weary but far from disengaged, a narrator who is ever-curious about the goings-on within his premises:

That night he seized my arm and talked

Of dolphins and their songs and odysseys,

And how their minds excelled our own

And they would contact us one day and bring

Peace to the world.

The palm leaves clashed,

As breezes fanned the peristyle.

Rubbing ash on his face he moaned

For the dead dolphin he had loved,

And spoke about the language they had shared,

The high-pitched music that its blow-hole uttered,

Inaudible to him, but causing dogs

To freeze and listen, muscles trembling …

 

Soon afterwards he vanished. Fishermen

Told stories of him swimming out to sea

One dusk, a strange light in his salt-wet hair.

 

Geoffrey Lehmann’s capacity to be inspired by and assume the stance of a personality other than his own was borne out by a remarkable sequence of poems he wrote in the 1970s. These are presented to us in the voice of his then father-in-law, Ross McInerney, a farmer who had married the talented photographer Olive Cotton and brought her to the property they named Spring Forest in central-western New South Wales. In a lengthy piece published in Australian Book Review in July-August 2013, Helen Ennis described the straitened circumstances of the married couple in the years that followed, but that isn’t quite enough. For the full story, in order to catch the laconic tone of Ross McInerney’s voice, to grasp the nature of close-knit but impecunious family life in a small rural community, the ways of the bush in that era, the flow of time and chance, we must turn to Geoffrey Lehmann’s evocation of Ross’s voice. As in “Getting Started” where it is said:

When we first came our house

was two weatherboard rooms

in a bare paddock.

I was just back from a war.

There were no trees

and I chose the name Spring Forest.

It was dark when we drove up

and lit our pressure lamps and unpacked.

Our children found potatoes sprouting

on a wire mattress of a large iron bed.

What were they doing there my daughter kept asking.

We burned iron bark

in the old brick fireplace,

rubbing etherised hands into warmth.

At dawn Sally and Peter were out

calling in the frost, exploring.

A long icicle hung from the tank.

That day five cars passed on the road,

and the children ran out every time.

In “Driving at Night” we hear the distinctive voice again, but on this occasion in a mood of rumination:

The earth loses its childhoods,

wood houses with their hearths and willows

flow away into the sky,

fathers and their horses,

mothers with iron pots

are going, and wives

who were warm

when dew formed on tin roofs

leave a crater of coldness in their beds.

We learn more about Ross’s neighbourhood and his laconic outlook from a poem about a local train called “The Daisy Picker”, well-known for its eccentricities:

Send my corpse home on “the Daisy Picker”

and bury me in my pyjamas—

per “the Daisy Picker”

because it’s so hated and loved

for its procrastinations.

Passengers alight

and pick wildflowers by the railway line.

Then with a shuffling of buffers

and whingeing of couplings

with no logic it startles away.

The shadow of our “Daisy Picker”,

crossing a bridge

intersects the sun,

as I float on my back,

ears tingling with pressure in the Lachlan.

Cow’s toenails and bones would sink.

It’s a matter of displacement.

We’re judged by quantities.

But don’t give my measurements yet

to our local undertaker—

carpenter’s rule in his pocket,

as he sells me canaries.

I’m going more trips

on “the Daisy Picker”,

journeys with an end

but no destination,

as a red dragonfly paces the train.

You’ll see my face lean from a window,

shaded by a hat brim from the sun,

observing summer rocks and weeds

advance as they recede.

The final section of the book is called simply “Later Poems”, and here the reader will discover a fascinating array of poems about domestic life (from the mundane to the marvellous), the enjoyment of travel (from Florence to Lima) and about the indignities of ageing. In a poem called “Self-Portrait at 62”—which appeared first as a full-page spread in the Weekend Australian—we are given glimpses of the office-bound professional man. In that poem, quite contrary to any credo propounded by romantic poets, a stanza commences: “I answer phone calls and emails”, as if, in the end, Coleridge’s “Person from Porlock” had not only disturbed the poet’s reverie by knocking loudly on his door but shoved the poet aside in order to take over his in-tray and his desk.

A wry tone and understated humour are to be found in many parts of this section. I responded particularly to the opening of the poem “Parenthood” with its parodic echo of Allen Ginsberg, high-priest of the Beat Generation:

I have held what I hoped would become the best minds of a generation

over the gutter outside an Italian coffee shop

watching the small warm urine splatter on the asphalt—impatient to rejoin

an almond torta and a cappuccino at a formica table

… I have been pouring wine for women I was hoping to impress

when a daughter ran for help through guests urgently holding out

her gift, a potty, which I took with the same courtesy

as she gave it, grateful to dispose of its contents             so simply

in a flurry of water released by the flushing of a button …

But now, as I come to the end of these remarks, I will return to the romantic poets for a moment, and to something said by John Keats in particular. Let me introduce it in this way.

I have endeavoured to provide an overview of Geoffrey Lehmann’s life and times and a taste of the poetry he has written over the past fifty years. A bystander listening to this would probably be intrigued to know how it comes about that a man who has spent the greater part of his working life practising law, adhering to the rigours of that discipline, the adherence to rules and precedents and statutory provisions, was able, simultaneously, and so successfully, to work as a poet, exploring the mysteries of imagination and the layers of self that such a vocation requires.

It comes about, I surmise, because the author of this book is a true poet, and very close to the paradigm of a poet praised by John Keats in a famous letter:

As to the poetical character itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing. It has no character—it enjoys light and shade. What shocks the philosopher, delights the chameleon poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than its taste for the bright one.

To paraphrase a leading poet of a later generation, T.S. Eliot, poetry is not the expression of personality, it is an escape from personality.

Indeed, in a memorable rejection of the French critic Sainte-Beuve’s methodology, Contra Sainte-Beuve, Marcel Proust spoke of the duality of self in creative artists. As he puts it: “A book is the product of another self than that which we display in company, in our habits, or in our vices.” Patrick White spoke of the words blowing through him, as if the book was writing itself.

This is the facility that the finest poets possess: they can, by intuition, or by uncanny insight, venture beyond the daily round, or enter the lives of others, or chance upon the music of the spheres.

And so I come finally to what might be called the transcendental quality in Geoffrey Lehmann’s work, the way in which even apparently mundane subjects are transformed by the poet’s other self. The way in which apparently random events are infused with a deeper meaning. In many cases we can sense within the poet’s tone unsettling intimations of what lies ahead in changing times, or the real value of what we long for, or have left behind. These are the insights that only a skilled poet can provide: the feeling of authenticity, of unmistakable truth.

With these thoughts in mind let me close by taking you to the poem “Roses”, dedicated to the artists Charles and Barbara Blackman, which is but one example of the elusive quality I am speaking of. A few excerpts from the poem will suffice.

We left our bodies and we dreamed of roses,

But woke to shrapnel whining over the tundra,

Faces drained in the time of great bombardments,

Staggering through gas and mud, eating from tins.

 

Clutching a crumbling edge, our deafened minds

Reached for the tiny bursts and pops of space.

Then the guns fell silent, men climbed from their holes,

We laboured back along exhausted roads

 

To find the house and village of our birth,

Veterans of all denominations, ranks

Erased, the convoys thundering back at sunset

To a place of weeds, cattle munching wild peaches …

A man is coming back along the roads

Of crumbling bitumen, thistles in potholes,

Wading a river where a bridge has fallen.

Dossing at night by trees in empty barns.

 

A man whose papers have been burned is coming,

Mud-stained, baked to the colour of the country,

Coming through passes, crossing plains and borders—

But all the guards are gone, the gates collapsed.

 

He briefly smiles at strangers as they pass.

Walking past blackened villages, his eyes

Look straight ahead, and still with bandaged feet

He seeks a hearth he knows, a weatherboard house

Amongst the medlar apples, airy verandas

With currants hanging from a trestle, insects

Drifting like dust, air bitter with roses …

 

The characters, their history, who remembers?

The plots and scripts are interchangeable,

Who knows who threw what spear or fired which rifle?

The earliest cottages are under clay.

 

What matters is a rose grew in wild places

And that all space is immanent with roses,

And strangers, who had little, cared to bring

The grafts and cuttings to a southern climate,

 

Who suffered, cared for roses as a notion

Of excellence in rugged, lonely places.

Damask and hybrid tea, rambler and moss,

The precious amber hips wrapped in brown paper.

 

There was no comfort in the heath and sandstone,

But still they built their huts and brought their plants,

To scatter fragrance by cold bays and mountains

Growing roots from the centre of the world …

The soldiers see their wives reflect the light

 

Of wheat-fields, faces given shape by hardship,

They find each other quickly in the dark.

The voices of the dead touch sleeping foreheads,

And when they wake they will not be consoled.

 

Old earth, moss-rose, rambler rose in space,

Pinching between your polar caps this garden,

These fleecy blues and greens, this fist of life,

This whorl of petals where we meet and part.

There is much else by way of poetic wisdom in this book. Teachers and critics can say what they wish, but for people who appreciate poetry the crucial test is whether in a quiet moment one is inclined to take a particular book off the shelves because the poetry speaks to one’s inner self. For me, the works of Geoffrey Lehmann have always been of that order, and this book will assist us to measure his achievement.

As the poet himself puts it, with characteristic modesty, in an author’s note: “This contains all of the poetry written by me that I think is worthwhile including in a book.”

We are privileged to have among us one of the finest Australian poets of his own or any generation.