John Tranter: Prose

Australian Poets in Profile
4 : John Tranter

Southerly magazine, Number 3, 1981

Previous “profiles”, of poets Bruce Dawe, Rosemary Dobson, and Gwen Harwood, appeared in Southerly No. 3, 1979 and Nos. 1 and 3, 1980. Southerly is published by the English Association and the English Department at the University of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
This piece is 2,600 words or about 8 pages long.

1. A Typical Bush Poet

As he wrote mainly of things he knew from personal experience, it might be worth looking at his background. He was born on the Monaro, an area of the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales noted for its freezing winters, its summers like a breath from a blast furnace, and its endless winds. The huge pines near his first home were permanently crippled by the wind, the meagre eucalyptus scrub crouched to avoid it, the grass was brown and always blowing in waves across the low hills. Huge knobs of granite pushed up from the ground, waiting for Kenneth Slessor to write a magnificent last line about them in “South Country”.
     His family moved, when he was four, to the [New South Wales] South Coast. On that voyage, late at night, he fell from the moving car and smashed across the gravel road into a blackberry bush. He remembers the warm blood running down his face, the sight of the car’s tail-light disappearing around a bend in the road — his father was in shock, and took a while to stop — and the darkness dropping like a blow. There’s no darkness like that of the bush on a cloudy night, and that darkness — or something analogous — was a thing he returned to in his writing time after time. A psychologist friend of the poet’s has a theory about that experience — darkness, loss, betrayal — but he’s keeping tight-lipped about it. Let’s pass on to happier scenes:
     He grew up on a small farm — some dairy cows, and mixed crops — and by the age of twelve could milk a cow and drive a tractor as well as any man, or so he said. He once shot a wild duck through the head at eighty yards with a .22 rifle, but that was a lucky fluke; he once dropped a fast-running kangaroo at about the same distance [with a twelve-gauge shotgun], and that was deliberate. He learned how to kill a trapped rabbit quickly, and shot perhaps a hundred parrots. He trod on a [poisonous] black snake when he was about ten. He was barefoot, and carrying a shotgun, but he was too surprised to use it. At the age of fifteen, he stopped killing animals.
     He attended an agricultural high school as a boarder for the last three years of his school life. He learnt to smoke and drink, to defy authority, to pick locks, to use a metalworking forge. At the final exams he became the first student at the school to gain Honours in English for twenty-five years. He failed Agriculture.
     His father was bitterly disappointed. His son was turning into a country lout — failing exams, drinking wildly, driving like a maniac, going out — God knows where — with loose country girls and staggering home at dawn.
     His father died a year later. The bush poet went to Europe. The farm went to sleep, and never woke again.

Question 1. Given the bush themes present in Tranter’s early life — vast uninhabited stretches of gum forest, a familiarity with farm animals, a deep immersion in the rituals of country people (Tranter was an acknowledged expert at the “Barn Dance” for example), explain the general avoidance of such themes in the poet’s mature work.

Question 2. “He grew up in the country, and as a result he felt his schooling inadequate; he lived as a young man in Sydney, worked on and off at journalism for a number of years, and travelled to London to escape the provincialism of his background. His politics leaned to the left, he drank too much, he was subject to fits of crippling depression, he married and had children.” Henry Lawson [1867–1922] is one Australian poet to whom the above description could be applied. Name one other.

2. “Behind the Coloured Scenery”: the Average Reader interviews John Tranter

With your sort of background — growing up on a farm, going to an agricultural high school — you should have developed into a typical Australian poet. Yet you turned your back on Australia and became an internationalist. Why was that?

I think I’m a typical Australian, that’s why. I did travel overseas — most Australians do that in their twenties, if they can afford to. I watch American, English and European movies. I see TV ads. I read books, most of them by overseas writers. Most Australians of my socioeconomic class do those things. And all of that goes into my poetry. It has an almost purely Australian ambience, a day-to-day local content.

Well, that’s content. But the tone — that seems more American modernist.

No, I don’t agree. I remember an argument with David Malouf, about twelve years ago [say, 1970], on that topic. I was going on about how we should all try to break away from Australian traditions — I was very self-consciously internationalist in those days. And Malouf rightly pointed out how Australian I really was, especially in my tone. That dry, laconic, slightly cynical approach is peculiarly Australian, and I learned that in the bush, listening to country people talk, and at high school with a mob of tough country kids. My dislike of pompousness, my ambivalent attitude to authority — look, I learned to drive fast on gravel roads in the bush. One of my best mates at school now races motor bikes, another drives stock cars. I write fast poems. I’m just a country lout at heart.

You mentioned movies; they seem to occur quite often in your poetry — one of your books is even called Red Movie. What’s your favourite movie in real life?

Oh, I don’t know. But talking about growing up, I suppose American Graffiti is the film I identify with most. Every character in that film could have stepped out of my own adolescence. It was like watching someone steal my autobiography.

You’re not exactly a typical bush kid, though.

Oh, I don’t know... Frank Moorhouse, Robert Gray, Les Murray, Geoff Page, they’re all country kids. Even A. D. Hope. He was born in Cooma, like me. A little earlier, of course.

But not every farmer’s son ends up with a reputation as an intellectual. Writing articles for Southerly and all that.

Oh, I’m not a real intellectual. They’re all in Paris, arguing about the death of Structuralism and drinking Calvados.

What about the anthology you put together, The New Australian Poetry [1979]? The general feeling seems to be that its main purpose was to push all those poets into an intellectual oubliette labelled “Modernism”.

No, no. Certainly parts of the Introduction seemed to do that, but I did take pains to spell out how various the poets were. People don’t seem to see sentences they don’t want to read. And perhaps I should have prefaced that essay by the quote from George Homans I used to preface a similar essay in New Poetry [magazine]: “To overcome the inertia of the intellect, a new statement must be an overstatement, and sometimes it is more important that the statement be interesting than that it be true”.

Why did you put the anthology together, then?

Two reasons. To show how rich and various the work of that generation was, how solid its achievements were. (And I didn’t coin the phrase “The Generation of ‘68”, by the way. I think Andrew Taylor and Tom Shapcott had both used something like it in the early 1970s.) The other reason was simply to preserve and make accessible a large number of valuable poems that were difficult — or impossible — to get hold of. “The Rumour” [by Robert Adamson], for example, was out of print. It’s a flawed poem, but I think it’s a lot more valuable and interesting than most of the “successful” poems of the period.

Why were there so few women in that collection?

Well, for a start, they had their own huge anthology, Kate Jennings’s marvellous Mother I’m Rooted. [On second thoughts, the actual poems in that book are mainly less than marvellous.] And there were no men in that. Second, I really think that the male chauvinism we suffered under for so long, until about the mid-seventies, prevented many young women poets from writing their best. There was a kind of internalized doubt at work: “I can’t try to write big, adventurous poems; I’m not good enough; I’m only a woman.” Frankly, I looked very hard through a lot of women’s poetry for that collection, and I honestly felt there just weren’t enough successful women’s poems around in the area I was looking at. But over the last five years — thanks mainly to Feminism — there are a large number of women poets and prose-writers doing really good things — things that work in their own terms, as well as in a general sense. About ten years ago at a reading in Canberra a woman yelled at me from the audience: “Why do you hate women?” Well, I don’t hate women. In fact, I think I generally like and respect women more than I do men. Not that I want to offend Gay Lib. I think men are okay, too.

Going on those remarks, you seem to think everybody’s okay.

Well, I don’t like Malcolm Fraser [at that time the (conservative) Australian Prime Minister] that much. [I have since changed my opinion: Malcolm Fraser seems to me to have been basically decent and humane, and a man of principle.]

You said in the Introduction to your anthology that you felt the “new poetry” was finished. Why did you say that?

No, what I actually said was “a historical period in our writing that began around 1968... I feel is now drawing to a close”. It’s the historical period that’s finished, not the writing. And the close of that period has to do with shifting age patterns, demography, economics, politics and so forth. I’m not suggesting that it’s all over for the poets.

But there is an almost elegiac tone to the phrase “that I feel is now drawing to a close.”

Well, I suppose there is. That’s probably a personal thing. I felt that my own work was finished.

Would you amplify that?

Well... I felt I’d reached a point... where the public side of my writing — the visible experiments, the polemics — had done their job. And in my own work I’d reached the stage where I’d stretched the verbal surface and the conceptual structures to the limit, and it was time to stop, to withdraw into myself, to find — underneath the dazzle — something of real personal value. To put that up front, not behind the coloured scenery.
     Let me put it another way. When I was seventeen — this was at a dance in the RSL Hall at Moruya, the little country town where I grew up — I got into a drunken discussion with the local cinema owner, a man of about fifty. I remember saying that Australian poetry was dead, finished, second-rate, boring — and by God it was, in 1960. I said we needed a poetic revolution, and if no one else was doing to do it, I would. He thought I was mad. [Well, he probably thought I was drunk.] And I think at least half my energies over the intervening twenty years have gone into that struggle. The New Australian Poetry [1979], to me, is half the proof and justification that it could be done. The other half is my own work up to Dazed in the Ladies Lounge [1979], but that’s a personal thing. And I sometimes despair that most people under thirty can’t understand how bad things were up till 1968 — how conservative, repressive, boring.

You said your own work was finished?

Well, that side of it is. The battle’s over. We won. What do we do now?

What are you going to do now?

Write. Read a lot of Cavafy, a lot of Auden. I want to find out how to put all the things I learned over the last twenty years into a poetry that doesn’t appear to be conscious of them.

So, like Rimbaud, you repudiate your “experimental” phase?

No. It was fun to write, it should be fun to read. And some of my earlier poetry was very personal. Full of anguish, all that stuff.

Have you done much of this other type of poetry? Are you happy with what you’ve done recently?

No, and no. Not much at all, and I’m not very happy with it at the moment. I’ve always done about ten or fifteen drafts of any reasonably complex poem; now I find myself on my twentieth draft, and it’s not getting where I want it to go.

To get personal, people say you’re a politician, a manipulator. You form groups, factions. True?

Bullshit. They’ve obviously never met me for more than five minutes. Look, sometimes an argument’s good to clear the air, to get important issues discussed. And sometimes you have to hack around persuading people to be in something — a poetry reading, a magazine, an anthology — because it’s going to be useful to themselves, and to a whole group of readers. But I’m not good at politics, and I hate the smell of manipulation. I once resigned from the Poetry Society because a few people thought I was after the job of editor of New Poetry [magazine]. I didn’t like the thought of being thought of as a back-stabber. I suppose I was rather priggish in those days.

You’ve criticized Leavis, and what you call “Common-Room Humanism”. Are you an anti-humanist?

No; if anything, in my personal feelings I’m more humanist than anything else. If my beliefs could be reduced to a simple phrase, it would come down to the fact that other people matter. But I happen to think that poetry should be left alone by politics, even humanist politics. Otherwise you get people telling you what to write, what it’s naughty to write, and so on. I can’t stand prescriptive or proscriptive criticism. And I think moral seriousness is the enemy of poetry; its deadly enemy. Poetry should make you think about the poem, of course; and make you weep, or make you laugh aloud. It should never make you think: “Oh God, I really must try to be a better boy tomorrow.”[...]

What about negative criticism?

Oh, most of it’s fair enough and done in a gentlemanly fashion. That’s okay.

But you have been savaged in print a few times.

I’ve had — I think — four or five critics really hack into me. And — I suppose this sounds a bit strange, but I’ve met most of them in a casual social way, and they seemed a little [....] socially maladjusted. Unhappy. And they tend to hack into a lot of other people, not just me. So I let these things go. And most of the critical attention I’ve had has really been quite reasonable in its tone. I’m happy to get reviews, even bad ones, because at least the issues are being raised. The “modernism” thing — it’s a false issue, really, but it does make people think about poetry in a useful and important way. I hope that all my writing — poetry, reviews, anthologies, even articles like this — has helped to do that.

E N D        The Internet address of this page is http://johntranter.com/prose/1981-sth.html