Ann McCulloch
DANCE OF THE NOMAD
A study of the selected notebooks of A. D. Hope.
366pp. Canberra: Pandanus Books. Paperback, Aus$45.
1 74076 168 5
The first collection of poems by A. D. Hope, The Wandering Islands, belatedly appeared in 1955, and consolidated the position he had already established as the leading Australian poet of his time. The book had to appear belatedly (Hope was already forty-eight) because if it had appeared much earlier its author might have been prosecuted. Australia was still a censored country and several of Hope’s poems dared to mention the particularities of sexual intercourse. Without his air of authority, Hope might never have got his book into the shops before old age supervened. But an air of authority was what he had. He spoke from on high. His vocabulary was of the present, but it had the past in it, transparent a long way down. And it was all sent forward like a wave by his magisterial sense of rhythm.
There is the land-locked valley and the river,
The Western Tiers make distance an emotion,
The gum trees roar in the gale, the poplars
shiver
At twilight, the church pines imitate an ocean.
The Western Tiers were in his home state, Tasmania: but you didn’t have to know that. In fact you didn’t have to know that the poems had been written in Australia at all. Most of them sounded as if they could have been written anywhere in the English-speaking world that had two-way communications with Olympus, which was probably why even those of us in the younger generation who were making a point of not reading much avowedly Australian poetry still felt it permissible to read Hope’s. A few people even argued that he had missed a trick by not sounding Australian enough. What nobody argued was that he ever sounded anything less than oracular. His opening stanzas brought his readers to attention like a general walking unannounced into a barracks. I can still remember reading the opening quatrain of “The Death of the Bird” for the first time.
For every bird there is this last migration:
Once more the cooling year kindles her heart;
With a warm passage to the summer station
Love pricks the course in lights across
the chart.
Whatever else you might have conceivably planned to be doing in the next few minutes, going on to the next stanza was what you did, and then to the next, until, in the last stanza, “the great earth . . . Receives the tiny burden of her death”. The diction was unashamedly grandiloquent – born on the border where the grandiose couples with the eloquent – but the narrative drive made it compulsory to keep reading. And everybody concerned with poetry felt the same imperative. There were other accomplished Australian poets in Hope’s generation but they were obliged to acknowledge his primacy even when they weren’t glad about it. He was the governor, and after half a century he still is. Though there are questions to be asked about what happened to his poetry after that first amazing volume, nobody worth hearing from has ever seriously tried to attack him. There is an awkward possibility, however, that if he is short of detractors to take him down, he has admirers who might do the same job.
Burdened with the simultaneously vaulting and diffident subtitle “A study of the selected notebooks of A. D. Hope”, Ann McCulloch’s Dance of the Nomad achieves the rare feat of making you fear for its sleeping subject’s repose before the book is even opened. I should hasten to say that much of the fear turns out to be unjustified. Dr McCulloch, although unusually prone to cultural studies jargon for the pupil of a man who hated the whole idea of a specialized academic vocabulary, is on the whole a good and faithful servant to her master’s memory, and does not deserve to be executed along with her publisher. The publisher is, or are, Pandanus Books, billed as part of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. For purposes of capital punishment, let us call this organization “the publishers”. The publishers need to be told, before they are led out to face the firing squad, the following things, lest they rise from the dead and publish something else without ever realizing what all the noise was about.
Hope’s notebooks are not very extensive anyway, and this selection is quite short. (Why it has to be a selection, embedded thinly in a mass of unnecessary commentary, and can’t be a complete transcription with a suitable but more proportionate scholarly apparatus, we are not told – or rather we are, but not in a way that is easy to understand.) No book with so little in it needs to be this big and awkward. You should be able to carry it in a pocket. You couldn’t carry this one in a saddlebag. The format is huge. The paper is good enough for a glossy magazine: i.e. needlessly heavy. The bulk of the book is set in a sans serif body type. Nobody outside an advertising agency can read more than a page or two of sans serif type without contracting conjunctivitis. There would be no need to put the word “page”, even if it were capitalized, beside the page number on every page even of a pamphlet, let alone of a book 366 pages long. Hope was a master of economy, and here is his acolyte in charge of a book that uses the word “page” 366 unnecessary times.
As for the copy-editing, the publishers should have been reminded that it is traditional to give the author some help if she can’t herself spell or read her own writing, and especially when she can’t read the writing of the man she is supposed to be a student of. Just confining ourselves to the mistakes she inadvertently wishes on Hope through not being able to transcribe what he must have written, we are faced with a steady barrage of misplaced creativity. The man who wrote the words for Mozart was Da Ponte, not Da Pente. Apparently not having realized that Hope is referring to Lucretius, Dr McCulloch conveys the impression that her author thought there was a poem written by Alexander Pope called De Renum Natura, which sounds as though it might have been a versified medical treatise on the proper functioning of the kidneys. What Hope meant was undoubtedly De Rerum Natura. Hope almost certainly did not write the following: “Teaching university students I have found that if Keats were writing the Ode to a Nightingale today he could not rely on his readers knowing what was meant by Bacchus and his bards . . .”. Nor could Hope, alas, rely on his star pupil knowing that Keats was talking about Bacchus and his pards. That’s pards, not bards: only a little letter, but if it was McCulloch, and not the printer, who mistook it, then one would have thought that her spontaneity of response was in no danger of being inhibited by her erudition.
Dr McCulloch mentions in her introduction the difficulties of Hope’s handwriting, but doesn’t seem to realize that a guess is inappropriate when it comes to a proper name. Thus she saddles Hope with the responsibility of calling Michael Ayrton Michael Ayston (twice on the one page, making it obvious that she has never heard of him). The authority that Hope quoted on Ariosto was Croce, not Groce. (Benedetto Croce was an Italian philosopher. DeJuan Groce is an NFL footballer with the St Louis Rams.) Least impressively of all, McCulloch has Hope quoting Horace as saying “Eheu fugaces, Postune, Postune”. Whoever the mysterious friend was that Horace addressed in the vocative, his name was Postumus, not Postunus. Unless Hope himself managed to scramble one of the most famous lines in Classical literature, “Postume, Postume” must have been what he wrote down. What made McCulloch think that she could guess at Latin?
Thus proving every few pages that she is a bit light on the general culture her learned subject has in such abundance, Dr McCulloch cracks on with the task of bringing out his profundity as a writer of speculative prose. She makes a surprisingly good job of it, which argues well for the potency of his sane influence. He must have been quite a teacher, if he could transmit the virtue of general cultivation in the arts to someone who knows so little, and the value of common sense to someone whose whole instinct is to reach for a literary theory as a preliminary to thinking about literature at all. Hope was a great believer in the merits of what Keats (he of the Bacchic bards) called negative capability. Following his example, McCulloch is a great believer in it too, and proves that she is by advancing a theory in its support.
This theory is a theory of something called the rhizome, which, on her account, was first dreamed up by two sparks called Deleuze and Guattari, in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. As far as I can tell from her expounding of it, the rhizome allows a principle of organization which to the eye of an earthling looks pretty much like a random arrangement of themes. Since Hope’s notebook entries amount to a random arrangement (i.e. no arrangement) of themes, the rhizome can be said to fit, and Dr McCulloch is encouraged to proceed with the self-imposed task of bringing, “in a Deleuzian sense”, order out of chaos. The tolerant reader will go with her, perhaps occasionally muttering to himself that a Deleuzian sense sounds as if it could turn delusional after a few drinks, and that the word “rhizome” has an affinity to the word “rissole”, the classic Australian term, drawn from the culinary arts, for something being reduced to a wreck. (Used as a noun, the word “rissole” denotes a kind of proto-hamburger, but used as a verb – as in “Strewth, we’ve rissoled the Holden” – the same word means that the machinery has ceased to work.)
But in this case the machinery does work, because the randomness was never chaos. Hope was merely making notes, in his shapely, clear, pregnant prose, and as long as McCulloch contents herself with isolating and highlighting his themes, she is on ground so sure that not even the spectre of the lurking rhizome can rissole her argument. Hope’s wide general culture extended to science as well: he had an Empsonian feeling for the poetry of the factual world. Armed with that, he was able to see immediately that Arthur Koestler’s attempt to co-opt particle physics as supporting evidence for the paranormal involved a category mistake. Of Koestler’s restlessly mutating faddism, Hope, either echoing P. B. Medawar or (more likely) simply arriving at the same conclusion independently, devastatingly said “once a journalist, always a journalist”.
Dr McCulloch might have taken Hope’s underlying point further here: Hope was warning against scientism, as if foreseeing a day when pseudo-scientific theory would invade every field, including, disastrously, the humanities. She might have divested herself of her reliance on imported mental snake-oil; but, alas, once a theorist, always a theorist. Still, at least she realizes that he was right in that case. She is commendably ready to concede that he was right, or at least reasonable, in almost every case: a nice instance of negative capability on her part, and a testament to her fundamental generosity, a quality which can’t always have been easy to apply to so awkward, and sometimes plain provocative, a subject. Hope’s celebrated, and eventually notorious, anti-feminism was mainly superficial. You could even say that he conceded women the power, and was always in awe of Eve, as if she carried Delilah’s scissors. His “Advice to Young Ladies” of 1965, celebrating the courage of a vestal virgin who faced the death penalty for being witty, is one of the most effective hymns to female individuality ever written by a male. Feminist critics, however, from the late 1960s onward, found Hope’s poetry a field rich in opportunities to burn him in effigy. The males in Hope’s poems were aroused by the beauty of the females, were they not? Well, then.
