Lisa Gorton interviews Chris Wallace-Crabbe, 14 May 2007
LG: There’s a group, often called ‘the Melbourne group of domestic writers’. That description emphasises what binds you together, though of course the differences are probably more notable. Still, I wondered, who you would have put in that group of Melbourne poets.
CW-C: I would have put Ron, Alex Craig, Evan Jones, Peter Mathers, not really Vin Buckley, although he overlapped with it. A bunch of those people before a slightly younger generation came on in. And we’re talking not only about the domestic; but we’re also talking about the cities and their suburbs, which are being celebrated in Melbourne, so notoriously suburban, as against Sydney, where people could pretend that they still spent their lives in the inner urban pubs.
LG: What was the story of you coming together?
CW-C: Some of us, as was held fiercely against us, had met around the University, where Bruce Dawe—who of course I left out a moment ago, is the paradigm domestic and suburban poet—Evan Jones and I had all met under the friendly eye of Vin Buckley, and Jennifer Strauss too. We’d all met in that area. And then it spun out from there in different ways because first, Ron Simpson went off to England for a number of years and came back in, I think, 1959 and I remember being invited to Max Hotel, the old coaching house inn in Franklin Street, to meet him for the first time, to meet Ron and Pam, and immediately a contact was struck up because he was interested in the kinds of writing that were in some sense kindred that were taking place in London with such different poets as Peter Porter, Alan Brownjohn and John Wain over there. He’d come back to look for a metropolitan poetry. He didn’t have much time for the notion of what the scions of squatting families were writing.
LG: Would you have said it was a friendship of letters, of poetry? Is that what you talked about?
CW-C: It was that, because under the influence of David Martin, who was or had recently been still a communist, and Vin Buckley, who was a fierce anti-communist, the notion was built up that a bunch of us should get together and work at our poetry and bounce our poems off one another. That was a group of about eight, of whom about three were Marxist or quasi-Marxist and the others of us holding different positions, right through to Alexander Craig who was probably a straightforward conservative.
LG: And where did you meet?
CW-C: In people’s houses, alternately.
LG: I find this intriguing because that is often the first audience for a poem. I wonder how, in imperceptible ways, that shapes the writing the poems. Do you think you did influence each other in that way?
CW-C: Some of the time, yes. Some of the time the poems were written to confront or bounce off other poets. Sometimes we also knew that our occasional group represented poets who ranged all the way across from, say, Overland to Quadrant, so we were aware that we came there wearing our team jumpers, discernibly. But some poems were obviously written to engage with the others. And there are paradigm poems of that time, that are thinking about where we are, above all Ron Simpson’s sestina, ‘All Friends Together’, which is thinking about where we all are and what we’re all doing. And by stripping away people’s surnames and just giving given names: Don and Nan and Nancy and so on, Ron is trying to give a sense of la ronde, la ronde, the circulation of names, poems, kinds of poetry; in the case of his poem, not only inside Melbourne but all around the country. And we were all aware that poetry was an art without, in Australia at least, present glamour: a modest, quiet, uncelebrated and little paid art.
LG: The Sydney poets wouldn’t have seen it that way, I don’t think. They were seeking out, at the time, glamour …
CW-C: They were only beginning to exist, of course; but yes, they would have thought about it differently. For them, we were probably squeezed out because we were neither the great poets of the squattocratic ascendancy: Geoffrey Dutton, Judith Wright and David Campbell and so on; nor were we adequately drugged, as they were soon to be.
LG: People often group you in that way against the Sydney scene …
CW-C: Can I say something at this point? It’s hard now to realise how expensive it was to get from one Australian capital city to another. Nowadays, airfares are so cheap. And universities are so well paid, no matter what the academics say. But in those days, if you went to Sydney or Adelaide or Brisbane: A, you have to pay for your train fare and B, you had to find someone in whose house to stay. So there was a sense that Melbourne poets and Sydney poets met one another rarely and briefly. And there was no real understanding of what the others were doing.
LG: I’m interested in the way the Melbourne group worked against each other and with each other. How did you get along when you were reading poems to each other? How did you comment on each other’s work? Was it commas and full stops or was it challenges to the style and approach?
CW-C: It was challenges to the style and approach. In our meetings in one another’s living rooms or verandahs or whatever, we didn’t talk much about the commas. Ron Simpson was the master of commas and I was the master of verb forms but we didn’t do much of that then. There was always the sense that we were playfully working out the communist and anti-communist or the pastoral and inner urban mythologies by which we lived. We didn’t do much close reading in our gatherings: more cake than syntax.
LG: And can you tell me about that with one of your poems?
CW-C: In my until recently most anthologised poem, ‘Melbourne’, I sardonically look on Melbourne as a paysage moralisé, a landscape that represents the landscape of those within. The final line of it was originally: ‘though much has died here, nothing has been born’. A later member of the group, Kel Semmens, said: ‘Chris, the final line of your poem is not true: Melbourne is one of the great centres of the world in medical sciences’. I bowed to him and changed that final line to: ‘though much has died here, little has been born’. And that, in miniature, is an example of the kinds of exchanges that we took on, rather than close metrical or syntactical critique.
LG: And what were some anecdotes from the meeting?
CW-C: Ron’s giggle, David Martin’s gravitas, and the seriousness with which we took his most benign poem, ‘To My Daughter-in-Law Unknown’: “I send his love though it be much too soon”, about a child who at present plays in mud and rootles with an old spoon. That was one thing that struck out. It was very striking when we went out to Noel Macainsh’s house in very rural and very mud-bricky Warrandyte because that drew the poets Vin Buckley and his antitype, if you like, David Martin, out into the muddy, arty perimeter of Melbourne. You felt something very different going on there.
LG: Would different people come, then? Was there a group who almost always went?
CW-C: Over this period, there was an attempt to establish it as the Eight by Eight group. For some reason, the Marxist members of the group ruled out Bruce Dawe, who was soon to be by far the most famous poet in Australia, and Evan Jones similarly wasn’t actually a member of the group. Somehow, like the way relations are laid down between Palestine or Israel, or the different categories of the Balkans, or something like that, an agreement is laid down which seems bizarre, but got laid down at a certain time. And afterwards you wonder: how the hell was that the case? But I think when we first formed, Bruce Dawe, though already having written some of his finest poems, had not produced a book. That kept him out for the time being, so there were curious paradoxes about the Eight by Eight lot.
LG: And who designed the group?
CW-C: I think Vin Buckley and David Martin did it between them. And then later there was spin-off to the Twelve Poets book, which the now much neglected Alexander Craig put together. In it, he drew together these poets and poets from other states into an anthology of 12 what he saw as leading poets of the current generation.
LG: His letters are missing from the papers.
CW-C: Whose?
LG: Alexander Craig’s.
CW-C: Very private man, very private, very suburban man. People were famous for teasing him.
LG: People such as Chris Wallace-Crabbe [you]?
CW-C: And Evan Jones. The novelist, Thea Astley, particularly, was a repeated teaser of Alex. She used to hide his lunch box at Macquarie University so he couldn’t find it. But Evan’s teasing of Alex was perhaps the most celebrated because Evan had written a long poem called ‘Lines at Nightfall’ in terza rima, like Dante, and each rhyme has to occur thrice. And at the end, there is one that only occurs twice. And the poem ended grandiosely: ‘Life echoes in the falling of the leaves/And light plays on the face of history’. Alexander Craig, who is a serious man, said, ‘But Evan, you haven’t completed the set of rhymes.’ Evan said, ‘That’s easy, Alex, Give me a pencil.’ And he wrote down: ‘I pinched it all. I am the Prince of Thieves’. And Alex said, ‘You’re not serious are you, Evan?’ And Evan said, ‘Yes I am.’
LG: Well, did you tease Ron?
CW-C: A fair bit, but he could tease back.
LG: Could he?
CW-C: Yes, in his funny way. He’d been through the Christian Brothers system, probably found it pretty horrible. His father had died when he was young. He was a very vulnerable only child. But a great sense of humour: he was always chuckling. And he would bounce back in the teasing and joking. He was also immensely sympathetic to people who came from the wrong corners, like Laurie Collinson, who was the one discernibly homosexual member of our group. Ron who sympathetically but ironically pointed out years later that Laurie, while in London, had had a virtual breakdown because his budgerigar had died.
LG: How long did the Eight by Eight go on meeting?
CW-C: Only a few years. So after that, it split more and more. Bruce Dawe, who only attached to the group at the end, moved back to Queensland. The Buddhist chap who wrote a poem which Evan swore began ‘I danced before I had two heads’, but didn’t; he died. People drifted in different directions. But Ron and I remained very close. Ron remained fairly close to Vin Buckley. Then Ron drifted on to become poetry editor of the Bulletin, and then of The Age, so he was in the middle of what was now emerging as a new poetic generation. I and my then wife saw a great deal of Ron and Pam in those days. We were all drinking like billy-oh.
LG: And was it fun?
CW-C: Yes, it was, because it was in the years just before poetry began to become a career. We all had jobs. Everyone had jobs. No one had Australia Council grants, or virtually not. They were not thought of. Travelling overseas was too expensive to do except someone would do it once in a decade or something like that. So a web of connections would set up in a particular city and thus there were a handful of us in Melbourne and cognate clusters in Sydney and briefly in Brisbane, where a lot of the gifted poets came from, but no one stayed.
LG: Intriguing, isn’t it? The Barjai and so many people …
CW-C: And the generation after Barjai that included Peter Porter, David Malouf, Rodney Hall, Judith Rodriguez, Tom Shapcott. That’s quite a cluster. And none stayed.
LG: But if it was a time before there were careers to be wanted or careers to be made in poetry, how do you think that affected the nature of the grouping and the nature of the friendship? Were there rivalries and competitions?
CW-C: Probably not as much, because we had the benefit of no future. There wasn’t the sense of people who were going to make it. Nor was there the sense that came with cheap airfares of getting around the world and appearing at the Rotterdam Festival or whatever. And if you were published, there were almost no firms to be published by. There was Angus & Robertson, basically. University of Queensland Press was just beginning. Edwards & Shaw were doing its very beautiful books; but they were virtually a private printery. And there was very little else. Some books came out from Melbourne University Press for a while, rather beautifully done. But they quickly put the kibosh on that. And, of course, we were all connected to the journals.
LG: Well, that’s what I was thinking. It gave the journals, presumably, some clout.
CW-C: That’s right, and they all survived, you see. They all survived for extraordinary lengths of time. One read about journals in the old world coming and going but our journals lasted a long time. Meanjin and Southerly both began at the very beginning of World War II and lasted more or less forever.
LG: Gwen Harwood in her letters said Clem C. wouldn’t know poetry from donkey shit. And Judith Wright seemed fiercely, courteously opposed to him after a while.
CW-C: Though he was the editor who first supported both of them
LG: Yes, I wondered about that.
CW-C: That’s a very complicated story because Clem had a mix of beneficence and paranoia, and kept falling out with poets. But certainly, Judith Wright was the pillar of Meanjin from the very beginning although she drifted away from him. You would have to be a genius to dissect the interactions between Gwen Harwood and Clem. And Clem of course was also a great supporter from very early on of Alec Hope.
LG: In the Simpson papers, there’s a letter from Thom Gunn to Ron Simpson, which is quite forthright and blunt, and a little bit wrong, I think; but it must have been instructive. And I was taken aback to see it because so often we receive more courteous and edgy kinds of advice. What kinds of advice would you give each other in the group? Was it more the Thom Gunn style?
CW-C: I don’t think so. I think the fact of us meeting in a house with cakes and wine and so on engendered a degree of courtesy to one another’s poems or a virtual silence in front of the poem you didn’t like very much; so it didn’t have much edge or bite, most of the time. I’m interested in this letter from Thom Gunn. Ron must have made contact with him through his fellow New English poet, John Wain.
LG: I think that’s right, from memory.
CW-C: Gunn I didn’t meet for another twenty years when I met him in Boston. By then he was famous and had become Californian, and was looking at a handsome young man at the next table.
Can I just add that my friendship with Ron lasted for years. When we came out of that group, I had one kind of friendship, inspiring but often difficult, with Vin Buckley, a close friendship with Evan Jones, and a friendship that sometimes intersected with that one, with Ron Simpson. He remained a very close friend.
LG: I wondered about Ron’s poems. I found them intriguing; more intriguing than I had thought on first reading actually, for the way they seemed to have always a kind of triangle, this buried drama, in them.
CW-C: I was reading one of the books, The Impossible and Other Poems, on the way to work in the tram this morning. I was thinking there’s always this going on, that is not always declared by the poem; but the poem finds a kind of cubist angle or hard-edged angle.
LG: And not with a quickness. Your poems can pivot quickly or leap out sideways. He doesn’t have that. But his have a sense of mass, because of the different perspectives, probably.
CW-C: I think the mixture between the Catholic childhood and the lost God, the father dying when he was about thirteen, the alcohol: all these things mean that the creative tension is there and wound up to hair trigger and yet he’s finding declared and discreet small forms in which to do this. I mean of all people I’ve ever met he would have been least able to write a novel because he couldn’t have let all this stuff out.
LG: It’s interesting because in a way that plays into this sense of the group. For instance, in that sestina, there is the sense of being in it but also out of it. I wondered whether that came into the interactions in the groups. You’re often, in history, the Melbourne Group, but I felt there must have been this shifting ground.
CW-C: Yes, others moved to and fro. Jenny Strauss moved in and out a fair bit, probably because she had some study to do overseas and also because women didn’t inhabit the pub-based culture that some of us were so closely involved in. Bruce Dawe moved interstate. There was this shifting quality in the different kinds of poets who were practising. And of course one aspect of this ‘outsiderishness’ is that all of us had careers to pursue. There were no creative writing studios internationally. There were virtually no writing fellowships. We all had careers. Ron Simpson was at first a school teacher. Then he worked for the educational magazine. Then he taught art and later art and literature at Chisholm Institute, which became Caulfield Institute, which became Monash University, etcetera. So all of us were fitting out poetry into these interstices of getting on with our lives. And for those who worked in a university there would be time taken out when that person went on study leave overseas. Thus Vin Buckley went overseas, first up in the mid-’50s for some time and certainly did a little bit to promote some of us over there including Evan and myself, and Randoph Stow. And so there were these tos and fros cutting across what you might call a poetic career.
LG: Did it make it more free?
CW-C: I think it was freer in a way though a new generation would say it was much duller. Because we were part of that generation of broadly the ’50s to early ’60s who felt that after the excesses of Nazism and Fascism and Stalinism, what you needed to do was to make the hard-hammered, clear-headed, rational poem. We placed too much trust in rationality in a way. As I wrote: ‘Our greatest joy to draw an outline truly/ And know the piece of earth on which we stand’.
LG: Yours too, would you say? I read your poetry as much more fantastical.
CW-C: Well, I was much more fantastical than Alex Craig or Ron Simpson, less certain of where I was going than Vin Buckley, and interacting more with modernist painting and things like that in a way. But we were all part of a slightly cautious, mildly optimistic 1950s.
LG: Would that have been your manifesto, if you’d had one as the Melbourne Group?
CW-C: Well, the poem in question is called ‘A Wintry Manifesto’ and the others are rather like that.
LG: Did you read that in the group? Was that an Eight by Eight poem?
CW-C: I must have read it in the group. I think it was in Eight by Eight or in Twelve Poets. But it’s a poem of that period, I can tell you that. Then there’s the overlap between that and the pub culture, which gets stronger and stronger as time goes on.
LG: Pub culture as opposed to the pop culture? I’m just making sure I heard you correctly.
CW-C: The pop culture came to us from Adelaide, I think. Adelaide had to produce something. It hadn’t done anything for a hundred years. It had to produce something.
LG: Who carried pop culture out of Adelaide?
CW-C: Richard Tipping.
But things were changing and more money was going into writing. As first the Gorton and then the Whitlam Government built up the Australia Council, there was a whole new attitude to the creative arts; and the job of Federal Government and federal funding to give some impetus to the creative arts beyond merely theatre and ballet and dance companies and things like that. With those two governments there was a whole turnaround, the advantage of which is that far more writers now get a reasonable income; the disadvantage is that they think they deserve it.
LG: Where did you get books?
CW-C: Books we got at Cheshire’s Book Shop in Little Collins Street, The Hill of Content Bookshop at the top of Bourke Street, a handful of other places. There was a bookshop further up Little Collins that actually had a few American paperbacks although there was an embargo on them so we sneaked in there and got books of essays by Allen Tate and other American commentators and copies of a few American journals. Otherwise we skulked around bookshops to find things that came in here and there, but the availability of poetry on bookshelves was nearly as bad as it is now.
LG: Did you pass them round at your pub sessions?
CW-C: Yes, we did pass books around. For instance Evan found a copy of Anthony Hecht’s first book, A Summoning of Stones, soon after it was published and passed it on to me and thereby I got to know Hecht’s poetry for the next fifty years before he died last year.
LG: Vin Buckley is intriguing ... I don’t remember meeting him as an undergraduate.
CW-C: Maybe not. He was very angry in those days. Very pissed off with the Department, very angry with Howard Felperin, with Simon and David and so on, all carrying the lance of anti-literature in the Department.
LG: Yes, it seems weird, what’s going on there now. But it sounds as though he [Vin] was a kind of genius of the group, a spirit of the group.
CW-C: Evan has got a piece of prose, which I found down the coast and which he’d never finished. But he said what Vin offered was charisma. And Vin would think in a group: that one deserves to share in the glow. And some of us would have been picked out along the way to share in the glow and you never knew why some of us were. I mean some like Peter Steele and myself obviously were because of our poetry, Peter because of his faith, Evan because of his poetry. You never knew where that approval would fall. It often would fall towards those who saw the light from English poetry from Wyatt and Donne to the present day, though when you get after about Keats and Wordsworth English poetry means Irish poetry; and he would have liked it to be proved that the Bronte sisters were really Irish writers because of their father. He would have liked it to be thought that John Dowland was really Irish and we could think of him as John Doolin. And so on. But he had the charisma and the panache to pluck people out and lead them and the moment for me was in second year just before he went away to Cambridge. I wrote an essay on Auden, MacNiece and Spender and about half the way down the second page he just wrote in the margin: ‘O excellent Bombados’, a quotation from Ulysses, and gave me the only high mark I had until I got to final Honours or to MA Prelim, but he would pluck people out and approve of them.
LG: And not Ron?
CW-C: Ron he approved but Ron he hardly knew because Vin didn’t move far beyond the University. Vin had something of a small, slightly paranoid man’s anxiety about the world outside the University. He didn’t like to go to pubs although his culture was essentially a pubbish culture.
LG: He had gatherings in his rooms?
CW-C: Yes. And there was often a gathering over at University House one day of the week, in which enough tutors and younger poets and so on would be gathered around who would be able to drive him home. He had the creative artist’s cunning not to have a driver’s licence like his painter friends, Leonard French and John Brack. A number of other clever creative artists took care not to have driver’s licences.
LG: And would that work as a kind of salon, over at the University?
CW-C: Yes.
LG: With artists as well?
CW-C: Very seldom. He didn’t actually know very many visual artists but he did single Len French out as one he approved of.
LG: And what did Ron say about the link between his art and his poems?
CW-C: I think he saw them as pared away. He saw them as essentially modernist. He was passionately concerned with the arts of the twentieth century. In poetry he was passionately concerned with Eliot and Robert Graves and John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell, probably William Carlos Williams. His was a twentieth-century aesthetic and while he admired, say, Yeats, he knew Yeats belonged beyond that. And in the visual arts, he liked the cubists. And he liked those who sprung off from the cubists. He was passionate about Matisse, Picasso, Juan Gris, Braque, the School of Paris; and later, in the last ten years of his life, the American School. He got more and more obsessed with American painting and tried to go to America whenever he could. He had a friend with a flat in New York and he could stay in that flat and look at the great collections of modern art there. So for him, he was very much a passionate modernist, and a slightly reductive modernist: small tight things. Loved Pound, too.
LG: It’s a strange thing, isn’t it, which poets get taken up by the next generation and which ones get forgotten. You said Alexander Craig has largely been overlooked, and I don’t really know his work. Of course, I’m not the litmus test of contemporary knowledge of poetry. But Ron Simpson, too, I think, perhaps, gets overlooked.
CW-C: I think the shadow of Vin falls over Melbourne. Because from thereon the two noisy schools are both in Sydney: Les Murray and the people who pretend to be on the land; and John Tranter and the Generation of ’68. And they’re both warring for space and things like that. And they can both adopt someone like Frank Webb who moved back from Adelaide and Melbourne and overseas to New South Wales; they can adopt him. So to be in Melbourne was to be unfashionable. And there’s an unbelievably bad anthology by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray in which I am grimly admitted as being a Melbourne poet although Melbourne poets are too interested in ideas.
LG: I think I’ve seen that. Very few women, too.
CW-C: Very few women, that’s right. Exactly. So that for someone like Jenny Strauss, to be a woman and to be in Melbourne would have been a long way out from where the reputations were being made. And that thing has slightly swung back even though some of those visible and exciting poets like Adamson and Tranter are still very much around and Forbes leaves a great shadow in his wake. For a long time there was this strong sense that it was all happening in Sydney, even though the Lehmann and Gray anthology wasn’t leaning so much towards the Generation of ’68 Poets. But generally it was being felt that it was all happening in Sydney. We only had painting.
LG: And winter.
CW-C: And winter.
LG: Did that define styles? Was it something to think about: how to handle that Sydney–American style?
CW-C: The irony that I, and others, have referred to beforehand is that nothing so much as the Vietnam War made us pro-American in cultural styles. So that in protesting against our participation in that war, a certain generation became overwhelmed with American styles. That has intrigued me for decades, how that should be the case. But that’s one of the things that happened. But then gradually—and here I think I have to say a word in praise of Australia Council funding—Australia Council funding helped to redress the balance that was based on being famous for being famous. It did mean that money went out to the different states. Tasmania, for instance, has a extraordinarily strong creative writing world, and that can’t be based on the state economy, which is wretched.
LG: But it’s intriguing, isn’t it, how the sense of where poetry is moves from state to state like that? And how groups come up and influence each other?
CW-C: The toughest state, I think, to be in, for all its money, is Western Australia because it is so physically remote. You know, it’s tolerably close to Adelaide and Jakarta but it is an incredibly remote, small cultural community in a tiny corner of a gigantic state. They have produced impressive writers, certainly, but there must always be this anxiety at being a long way away from where reputations are built and made. They have Tim Winton, certainly. And they had Elizabeth Jolley, who was amazing.
LG: But it’s strange how someone such as Vin Buckley could foster a group and, though it was a group of poets who wrote in many ways in very different styles, give it enough sense of connection to feel that it constituted what American ’60s culture would have called a happening.
CW-C: Well. I think that if you count the heads that didn’t last for long. But for some writers such as Ron Simpson, Vin was always there. Vin was always seen as a mentor, a contact, a conduit. Vin passed on a literary editorship of the Bulletin to Ron; and there was something going on in Ron’s admiration for Vin that cut very deep and mattered a great deal in the whole formation of poetry culture.
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