Remembering David Malouf
David Malouf, award-winning writer, librettist, public intellectual, winner of multiple prizes, and member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities has died aged 92.
I first knew David Malouf when he became a lecturer at Sydney University in 1968. I was in my MA year when he started and my first impression was that he was a brilliant and incisive mind that had little time for students’ love affair with complex theory, perhaps guessing that this was the postgraduate student’s way of establishing an identity rather than trying to get to the bottom of things. I remember the wry look on this face when some student was in the flights of theoretical fancy in a seminar. Since his time at Sydney University, we met several times over the next fifty years and in interviewing him I was always struck by the sharpness and clarity of his thinking, and his determination to answer the question rather than offer some preconceived statement. While his novels have been his most recognisable trademark, he was in fact a man of many skills: a poet, an essayist, a dramatist, a public intellectual – a man of prodigious and varied talent. He had first been published as a poet in 1962 and saw the different genres requiring a different type of energy. In his words:
Poetry demands one kind of energy which is immediate; when you sit down and write that first draft it’s often in a burst of energy, although you might spend a long time — weeks, months, years even — before you’ve got that first draft in the shape of what you think of as being not a finished but a final poem…
The energy that’s required of you for a novel is quite different; it’s very patient work where you sit down every morning at the desk and gradually discover what the shape is that you’re dealing with and that might be over months or even a year or two before the work is there.
But while his perception of different energy was clear, Malouf is exceptional because the poetic infuses all his writing. I would go so far as to say the poetic is present even in his non-fiction as well. He is celebrated as a novelist but saw himself, in his heart of hearts as a poet.
A child of a Jewish English mother and a Lebanese father Malouf was ever alert to the subtleties of cultural difference. His was a very productive ambivalence that understood the deep complexities of Australian cultural life. He didn’t speak the Arabic of his grandparents, but he nevertheless developed a fine perception of the nuances of language. His mother fostered his love of books but remained resolutely English. “We were brought up like little English kids,” he says, “We would have never been allowed to go to school barefoot, and we weren’t allowed to use Australian slang.” Brisbane, the scene of his first novel Johnno was a place from which he had to escape. His verdict on 1950s Brisbane is excoriating, – “a place where nothing happened, and where nothing ever would happen, because it had no soul…. It was too mediocre even to be a province of hell.” Nevertheless, Johnno established Malouf as an Australian novelist. His subsequent novels and prizes established him as a major one.
Consequently, he turned his back on Brisbane and lived a peripatetic life. He moved to Sydney to teach but in 1978 he resigned his university post and went to live in the Italian village of Campagnatico, his idyllic stay there captured in a film called An Imaginary Life. When in Australia he lived in various places in Sydney, such as Mosman, Newtown and eventually moved to the Gold Coast in Queensland.
His writing won many prizes: An Imaginary Life based on the life of Ovid won the 1979 NSW Premier’s Award; Fly Away Peter was named the Age book of the year in 1982; The Great World won the 1991 Miles Franklin Award; Remembering Babylon made the Booker Prize short list. He won the Australian Literary Society’s (ALS) Gold medal three times, joining Patrick White and Alexis Wright with that number. He won the Order of Australia and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2000), Other prizes include the Prix Femina Étranger and the inaugural International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1989. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (2008) and won an Australia Council Award for a Lifetime Achievement in Australian Literature (2016). Malouf’s cultural importance extended beyond prizes and in 1999, with Jackie Huggins, he co-wrote the draft Declaration for Reconciliation, and he was a lifetime ambassador of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.
Australianists are regularly asked who is their favourite author, and despite the difficulty of this with so many wonderful Australian writers, my choice was invariably David Malouf. This was partly because he was the most inspiring author to teach university students but mainly because he mastered the two most important aspects of literary writing: to show the world as it really is and to show what it might be. I remember him saying something that seems extraordinary when talking about fiction, that while it is invention, when you are writing it is absolutely happening, absolutely true, absolutely real. This, I think, explains how he can communicate that reality so powerfully.
We find this in Malouf’s ability to take us into the early settlers’ encounter with a strange new land. In Remembering Babylon when they consider the Absolute Dark that lies beyond the fences of their paddocks, we find ourselves sharing the moment of strangeness and wonder
Occasionally, in the dead light of a paddock, all bandaged stumps and bone white antlers, there would come a flash of colour, red or blue or yellow, and it would strike a man, but in a disconcerting way, as his heart lifted, that a country that was mostly devilish could also at times be playful, that there might be doors hidden here, hidden as yet, into some lighter world. (10-11)
This is the achievement of the consummate writer as he allows us to open the door to some lighter world. What the early settlers sought seemed beyond language. But at this moment we experience the settlers’ sense of wonder. One of these settlers, Jock McGivor, reaches a point at which he might have broken through to a form of knowing the country, a knowledge beyond words:
Wading through the waist high grass, he was surprised to see all the tips beaded with green, as if some new growth had come into the world that till now, he had never seen or heard of.
When he looked closer it was hundreds of wee bright insects, each the size of his little fingernail, metallic, iridescent, and the discovery of them, the new light they brought into the scene, was a lightness in him – that was what surprised him – like a form of knowledge he had broken through to. It was unnameable, which disturbed him but was also exhilarating; for a moment he was entirely happy. (107)
The unnameable is in fact the province of the poet and this is the other gift of Malouf’s writing, the ability to show what might be.
This gift is the gift of poetry, or more precisely of the poetic, which can be found in all Malouf’s writing. When, in the opening chapter of The Great World Mr. Warrender rises to make a speech at his son’s wedding he offers a poem of his own, which captures the place of poetry:
Beyond the never-death into ever after, being
In love with what is always out of reach:
The all, the ever-immortal and undying
Word beyond word that breathes through mortal speech. (236)
The line “in love with what is always out of reach” describes not only the function of literature to take us beyond that which we think we can reach in our rational minds, but more specifically describes the central function of poetry in Malouf’s work. By poetry I mean that created moment, either in narrative or verse, when image or word captures us, however fleetingly, and slows us down long enough to receive a vision of something beyond the boundaries of our lives. In Malouf these are the boundaries of our imagination, but they are also the boundaries of culture, the limits to our way of being in the world. The ‘word beyond word’ that breathes through mortal speech is the word that poetry is designed to speak. But in Malouf it is always a word that breathes possibility, the possibility of a different world.
In The Great World we seem to hear Malouf speaking directly. I can’t do better than take Malouf’s own words to describe the poetic dimension of all his work. The speaker at Mr Warrender’s funeral explains that poetry captures
all those unique and repeatable events, the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the very beginning. (283)
The horizon of the possible, then, is not just a matter of perceiving what lies beyond our minds or imaginations, but of perceiving that which is hidden to them
To find words for that; to make glow with significance what is usually unseen, and unspoken too – that, when it occurs, is what binds us all, since it speaks immediately out of the centre of each one of us; giving shape to what we too have experienced and did not till then have words for, though as soon as they are spoken we know them as our own. (284)
This, ability to speak to the centre of each one of us, to give shape to our experience and to provide words for the assurance of what is possible is David Malouf’s abiding gift to us.
Emeritus Professor Bill Ashcroft
UNSW
