James McAuley: Strength in Weakness

In his book The Catholic Imagination in American Literature, Ross Labrie makes the following important observation about religious writers:

Clearly, for the writer who is a believer, the temptation to distort experience in order to accommodate a religious vision must at least be taken into account by both writer and reader, as it must be in the case of any writer whose point of view has been shaped by a powerful ideology. The best writers will be those who test their ideologies against experience, something that Catholic writers, with their incarnational theology and consequent dedication to the world, ought to, in theory at least, be prepared to do. In these writers, the fiction and poetry will often end with a lingering, unresolved air of complexity—even if the moral foundations of the universe have been made adequately clear to the reader.

James McAuley knew the temptation to distort experience to make it conform to a religious vision, but at his best—and he was at his best a lyric poet, rather than an epic or polemical poet—he resisted it. His poetic power, to recall St Paul, was made perfect in weakness, embodying “the lingering, unresolved air of complexity” of which Labrie speaks. Whereas his public persona was aggressively self-assured, his private and poetical self was questioning and searching, embodying the truth of W.B. Yeats’s dictum that “out of the argument we have with others we make rhetoric; out of the argument with ourselves, poetry”. The outspoken and vociferous public polemicist, McAuley becomes in his best work contemplative and tentative, swayed by a sincere receptiveness to human emotion and suffering, and by the slightest changes in the natural world—of seasons, of light and shade, of day and night—as he becomes one of the finest recorders of its beauties.

He was that rare creature in twentieth-century literature—the public poet actively and intimately engaged in the major political events of his country, on the conservative side of politics. By the mid-1950s, McAuley had been received into the Catholic Church and would become a staunch defender of the faith. A Cold War warrior, he worked at the grass roots of B.A. Santamaria’s movement, rallying support at elections, distributing literature, meeting with politicians, cardinals and archbishops in an effort to rid the labour movement in Australia—which he, along with most of his coreligionists, supported—of its communist elements. And he was founding editor of Quadrant.

All this is a far cry from the young student radical who, years before, had sympathised by turns with the communism and the libertinism espoused at the University of Sydney by Australia’s most famous philosopher, John Anderson; from the jazz-loving, piano-playing agnostic who played the organ for Sydney’s Theosophical “Liberal Catholic Church” and who was almost as enamoured of French Symbolist poetry as he was of young women, and who—one biographer claims—helped one of these women procure the abortion of his own child.

Notwithstanding the major religious and ideological shift McAuley’s life took in the 1950s, there is a remarkable continuity in his poetic sensibility across his career, which draws from and responds to the “despair, older than any hope [he] ever knew” (as he so devastatingly describes it in “Because”). Two short poems, written respectively at the beginning and the end of McAuley’s publishing life—the first the poem of an agnostic, the second the poem of a Catholic—suggest the nature of the essential argument or tension animating his entire body of poetry. The first poem, “At Bungendore”, comes from McAuley’s first published collection of verse, Under Aldebaran, released in 1946:

Now the white-buskined lamb

Deserts his ewe and bawls;

The rain spills from the dam;

A far-off bird-cry falls.

So harsh the bough, yet still

The peach-buds burst and shine.

The blossoms have their will;

I would that I had mine:

That earth no more might seem,

When spring shall clot the bough,

Irised by the gleam

Of tears, as it does now.

The second poem, “Parish Church”, is the last poem from Time Given, published in 1976, the year of McAuley’s death:

Bonewhite the newborn flesh, the crucified,

The risen body; bonewhite the crowding faces.

Green, crimson, yellow, blue and robes are dyed,

The wings and armour, the skies and heavenly places.

We used to sing at Easter in the choir

With trumpet and harmonium and drums,

Feeling within our hearts new-kindled fire.

Now I’m the only one that ever comes.

I bring with me my grief, my sins, my death,

And sink in silence as I try to pray.

Though in this calm no impulse stirs my breath,

At least there’s nothing that I would unsay.

The first stanza of each poem sets a scene. In “At Bungendore”, a lamb deserts its mother and cries; his cry is then answered by that of a far-off bird. In the second poem, the eucharistic flesh of Christ is represented in the major phases of Christ’s earthly sojourn: birth, death and resurrection, and is responded to by the crowding faces of the communicants and by the angelic wings—corresponding to the bird of the first poem—in the skies.

In the first three lines of the second stanza, in both poems, the poet uses images of celebration: in “At Bungendore”, these images celebrate natural fecundity—peach buds “burst and shine” and the “blossoms have their will”; in the first three lines of the second stanza of “Parish Church”, the images celebrate the liturgical, grace-filled fecundity of Easter, as the “new kindled fire” of the Paschal candle fills the hearts of the congregation. In both cases, there is an opening out and triumph of life over death. Just as the harsh bough gives rise to the bursting buds, so the wood of the Cross is followed by and inextricably bound up in the Resurrection. The stages of progression in the second poem parallel those of the first, with the difference that in the first poem it is a natural progression from the birth of the lamb to the hard wood of the bough to the bursting blossom, while in the second it is movement from Christmas (the birth of the lamb of God) to the Crucifixion (and the wood of the cross) to the Resurrection.

“Parish Church” charts the movement of faith already inscribed in and implied by the forces of the natural world in “At Bungendore”. Natural joy corresponds in the first poem to supernatural joy in the second, climaxing respectively in line seven of each poem, in the bursting buds and the Easter fire. As each poem continues, however, from its eighth line (the fourth line of stanza two), joy gives way to anxiety and introspection. At the precise same point in these two poems, therefore, written almost thirty years apart, in the fourth line of the second stanza, the poet introduces the first person—the “I” of the poem who, meditating upon the scene, recognises his essential separation from its unfolding joy:

The blossoms have their will;

I would that I had mine.

                        (“At Bungendore”)

Feeling within our hearts new-kindled fire.

Now I’m the only one that ever comes.

                        (“Parish Church”)

Although Easter in the southern hemisphere is celebrated in autumn, its seasonal liturgical images continue to be drawn from spring.  It is therefore the full joy of spring—natural and supernatural—that the speaker feels unable to enjoy, and this becomes the theme developed in the third and final stanza of each poem.

In “At Bungendore”, the third stanza expresses the will of the poet:

That earth no more might seem,

When spring shall clot the bough,

Irised by the gleam

Of tears, as it does now.

He cannot look on the clotting, bursting joy of spring except through tears—the earth is “irised by the gleam / Of tears”, an image the suggests that the tears are not an incidental feature occasioned by a grief unrelated to the season, but that they emerge with the season each year, even in response to it.

In “Parish Church” the dynamic is slightly different—the speaker’s sadness arises from his isolation and from the memory of earlier Easters when the parish church seemed more vibrant and alive with the joy of the season. But there are similarities, again, between the poems at this point. The tears in “At Bungendore” through which he sees the earth have their counterpart in the catalogue of offerings the speaker brings to the liturgy in “Parish Church”—“I bring with me my griefs, my sins, my death”. These colour his experience of Easter, as the tears in the earlier poem colour his experience of spring, and are realities more usually associated with Good Friday than Easter Sunday. In “At Bungendore”, the speaker expresses a wish unfulfilled—almost a prayer—and here, in “Parish Church”, he tries to pray. As the irised gleam of tears simultaneously reveals and distorts the spring world around him, so here the attempt to pray simultaneously connects him with the supernatural Easter—he objectively recognises the significance of the feast—while showing his distance from its animating spirit. It is an attempt to pray, rather than a prayer (“No impulse stirs my breath”). The only consolation for the speaker is small but profound: “At least there’s nothing that I would unsay”.

When one reads “Parish Church” in relation to “At Bungendore”, one may be inclined to ask: What ostensible difference did Christianity and the Catholic faith make in the life, thought and feelings of James McAuley? There is little separating the essential mood and atmosphere of each poem; if anything, the despondency of “Parish Church” is greater than “At Bungendore” because it is contrasted not merely with natural joy but with the virtue of hope. Indeed, McAuley offers his readers little consolation—the great drama and joy of the Christian life seem reduced here to, at most, a sigh of relief—“at least there’s nothing that I would unsay” (a double negative at best)—rather than an exhalation of the Holy Spirit. The observation of spring in the first poem, and the memory and lived experience of Easter in the second, are overwhelmed by pathos, radically altering the usual associations we have with these seasons. How should we interpret this?

It’s important to recognise, I think, that just as the task of the lyric poet differs from that of the novelist or dramatist, so it differs from that of the priest or the teacher. The Christian poet is not under any ethical obligation to articulate positive, comforting thoughts, nor to express the feelings we might believe he, as a Christian, ought to feel. Helen Vendler’s musings on the subject of ethics and lyric poetry, from her study of Shakespeare’s sonnets, are worth bearing in mind:

As I see it, the poet’s duty is to create aesthetically convincing representations of feelings felt and thoughts thought … Whether or not we believe that such should have been the speaker’s feelings and thoughts is entirely irrelevant to the aesthetic success of the poem … The ethics of lyric writing lies in the accuracy of its representation of inner life, and in that alone.

The authenticity of “Parish Church” as a representation of inner life is confirmed by the way it so clearly disrupts the moral and spiritual certitudes of the poet’s public persona, even as it inevitably extends our understanding of what it means to be a person of faith in a world increasingly faithless. It is clear also that the emotional drama of both poems lies precisely in the speaker’s sense that his emotional response to the situation before him is somehow awry. He does not “will” his feelings. Tension is created by the separation of the objective and subjective elements represented. To return to Labrie’s idea, the moral foundation of the universe is abundantly clear—the objective element resides in the conventional connotations of natural and supernatural springtime in each poem—while the “lingering unresolved air of complexity” resides in the speaker’s sense of distance from this foundation. McAuley felt and represented the tragedy of this distance like no other Australian poet.