`The Great Feral Novel'

Thanks to Dave Lull for sending a link to “King Lear Had Alzheimer’s,” a poem by Les Murray published in the April 11 issue of Commonweal. The Australian poet turns 70 later this year, old enough, perhaps, to know something of Lear’s madness and final devastation from the inside. Having recently read Peter Alexander’s Les Murray: A Life in Progress, I know the poem is drawn in part from a dreadful event in the poet’s father’s life. Here it is:

“The great feral novel
every human is in
is ruthless. It exists
to involve and deflate.
It is the meek talking.”

“The great feral novel
is published, not written
(science bits may be written).
Media grope in its shallows.
The Real Story is their owner.

“The feral novel can get you
told the lies about you,
let you hear the Line about you.
It may even tell the truth
if truth is the cool story.

“Any farmer who breaks
and suicides, some lot’s
politicians wanted him
o don’t say dead. Gone.
Dead doesn’t always die.

“The folk novel’s eyes
did register the barbed wire
and how to get behind it.
Being in the novel helped
a lot in, it says. Some out.

“A father jealous of one son’s
bush skills failed to prove
himself the better man, and caused
a young son’s death trying.
When the skilled son complained

“at being kept dependent
and dirt poor for punishment
only other listened
and other don’t back you
in plots not their own.

“In theirs, they may be hero
even to acquaintances
but then if they rise
into notice, into print,
fellow convicts eye them.

“The man next door
cursed our builder’s noise.
He was writing a book,
so we scoffed, through the hedge,
Shops would sell him a book.

“The great feral novel
heaped up streetsful of flowers
for the faux-demure princess
then sniggered them away.
What survives, survives this.”

“Great feral novel” appears, with variations, four times in the poem’s 10 five-line stanzas. Lear’s name is not mentioned beyond the title. I’m reminded of “Diagnosing Lear,” published last year in The New Criterion by Dr. Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple):

“…the medicalization of Lear’s behavior deprives it of moral significance. If only Lear had taken the right pills, everything would have been all right, and Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia would have been like the Andrews Sisters. The only question Lear raises for the modern mind is how to get him, or anyone like him, to the right doctor on time, before it is too late; presumably absolute monarchs carry adequate health insurance.”

To read King Lear in the manner of a diagnostician (or psychologist, or political scientist), in a manner like anyone other than a thinking, feeling man or woman, is worse than obtuse; it compounds aesthetic sin with a moral one. Consider what Samuel Johnson wrote while preparing his edition of Shakespeare:

“And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia's death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.”

Do I imagine a thematic continuity here? Consider: Lear, Johnson, Murray. Let me add another link in this mortal chain. In 1911, the English poet Alice Meynell published a volume of selections from Johnson’s work. Her friend G.K. Chesterton contributed an introduction in which he writes:

“For Johnson is immortal in a more solemn sense than that of the common laurel. He is as immortal as mortality. The world will always return to him, almost as it returns to Aristotle; because he also judged all things with a gigantic and detached good sense. One of the bravest men ever born, he was nowhere more devoid of fear than when he confessed the fear of death. There he is the mighty voice of all flesh; heroic because it is timid. In the bald catalogue of biography with which I began, I purposely omitted the deathbed in the old bachelor house in Bolt Court in 1784. That was no part of the sociable and literary John, but of the solitary and immortal one. I will not say that he died alone with God, for each of us will do that; but that he did in a doubtful and changing world, what in securer civilizations the saints have done. He detached himself from time as in an ecstasy of impartiality; and saw the ages with an equal eye. He was not merely alone with God; he even shared the loneliness of God; which is love.”