`But They Die'

Les Murray: A Life in Progress, Peter F. Alexander’s biography of the Australian poet, is an education. I’ve admired Murray’s poems since first reading them 25 years ago, especially his audacious sense of language, so expansive and brave compared to the anemic wordstock of contemporary American poetry. You sense no linguistic diffidence, no acknowledgement of limitation. His poetic confidence is staggering. To this degree, at least, his enterprise is Shakespearean.

What I knew of Murray’s life and the culture that formed him was sketchy and inadequate. It’s good to learn, for instance, that Murray’s Scottish ancestors settled in Australia in the mid-19th century, and that Sir James Augustus Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, was the poet’s fifth cousin “many times removed,” as Alexander notes. Even educated Americans know embarrassingly little about Australia and its writers – in my case, Christina Stead, Patrick White, David Stove, Clive James, Gwen Harwood, Murray and a few others.

After reading of Murray’s childhood in New South Wales, I’m unable to think of another noteworthy poet -- perhaps John Clare -- born into such unrelieved poverty and hardship. Much of the blame goes to his paternal grandfather, a despotic alcoholic. One month before the poet’s birth in 1938, he ordered Cecil Murray, the father-to-be, to fell a large tallowwood tree on the family farm. Cecil declined, saying the tree was “dozy” (OED: “Of timber or fruit: In a state of incipient decay”) and dangerous. Cecil’s brother, Archie (“who knew little about bush work,” Alexander tells us), took over the job. The falling tree struck another, snapping the treetop and killing Archie. Father and son blamed each other for his death, but the father (the poet’s grandfather) had his revenge (this family drama, too, is Shakespearean): He charged his son exorbitant rent, refused to help Cecil and his family financially or repair the hovel in which they lived. Here is Alexander’s description of Murray’s childhood house:

“It was of `slab construction,’ meaning that its walls were of thick pit-sawn slabs of wood, often cedar in the early days, set vertically, covered with a roof of shingles, later corrugated iron, and having a floor of stamped earth covered with linoleum or (later) with wooden planks. The shingles leaked, and the slabs of the walls shrank as they aged, leaving cracks that admitted the wind at all seasons in spite of battens nailed over them, and that darkened with blown rain. There exists a photograph of Cecil in the door of this shack, and behind him sunlight streaks through the generous gaps in the walls.”

Murray’s mother died when he was 12. When his grandfather died, Cecil, still a tenant farmer, was dispossessed of the family land. He died in 1995, age 85. His son wrote an elegy, “The Last Hellos,” which begins, heartbreakingly:

“Don’t die, Dad –
but they die.”

Murray came from Scottish Presbyterian stock but converted to Catholicism as a young man – a fact central to his character and work but one that bothers easily offended readers. Murray concludes “The Last Hellos” with a pithy rebuke to Richard Dawkins and other vulgar atheists:

“Snobs mind us off religion
nowadays, if they can.
Fuck thém. I wish you God.”

Note the colloquially correct accent on “thém.” Alexander says: “Poems like this, and the great sequence on his mother, made it clear that in the poetry of human grief he had no modern peer.”

Murray’s work reminds us that literature is, among other things, a repository of wisdom. From the words of great and fallible men and women, we learn to be human and how, on occasion, to transcend mere humanity. Like Murray and his poetry, this is a deeply unfashionable notion. Arthur Krystal, in an essay titled “What Do You Know?” (collected in Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature), observes:

“Whenever I go back to Montaigne, Robert Burton, and Samuel Johnson, it occurs to me that they know more than I do now, despite my knowing them.”

Add Murray’s name to the list, and Shakespeare’s.