Worth the lifting and stacking: further thoughts on James McAuley. (Literature).(Biography)

I HOPE that this paper supplements the article by Geoffrey Lehmann in the December Quadrant and contributes to a further appraisal. The difficulty of an agreed appraisal is illustrated in the two recent biographies, Michael Ackland's Damaged Men and Cassandra Pybus's The Devil and James McAuley.

McAuley was born in 1917 in Lakemba, New South Wales, and alter attending Fort Street High, he gained an MA at Sydney University for his thesis "Symbolism: An Essay in Poetics". He died of cancer in Tasmania in 1976. After initial surgery for bowel cancer, he wrote to Gwen Harwood (then not yet well known as a poet), "At least it was only a semicolon and not a full stop!" I met Gwen Harwood when I lived in Tasmania from 1991 to 1994 and I assume that someone harvested her personal knowledge of McAuley before her own death.

There was a flourishing memorial tree, a blue spruce, dedicated to McAuley, on the lawn outside the Arts Faculty in Sandy Bay. He had become, at first, Reader in Poetry at the university. Among considerable publications from his Tasmanian days, A Primer of English Versification and A Map of Australian Verse indicate sources for his considered views on how poetry should be written, and on the formal structures by which the power and beauty of content could be liberated from the merely conventional, the prosaic, the contrived or even from the particularities of mere image or instant.

I pick out one poem here, "Credo", from his 1969 collection Surprises of the Sun:

 
   That each thing is a word 
   Requiring us to speak it: 
   From the ant to the quasar, 
   From clouds to ocean floor-- 
 
   The meaning not ours, but found 
   In the mind deeply submissive 
   To the grammar of existence, 
   The syntax of the real; 
 
   So that alien is changed 
   To human, thing into thinking: 
   For the world's bare tokens 
   We pay golden coin, 
 
   Stamped with the king's image; 
   And poems are prophecy 
   Of a new heaven and earth, 
   A rumour of resurrection. 

This poem is overt in its theology, philosophy and faith. To say "each thing is a word" is a very significant claim. It can be pushed to mean, with the author of John's gospel, "He spoke and all things came to be." This metaphysic of creation redolent of Eric Mascall's "openness of being" imparts or responds to a literal truth in his phrases "the grammar of existence, the syntax of the real".

I would like to move to a poem that is simply descriptive of the observed world and which "naively" embodies the more theory-laden aims of "Credo". It is the very beautiful and rather more image-laden and "particular" Tasmanian poem, "In the Huon Valley":