Ways Back: Tranter in Wonderland

Robert Adamson reviews
Crying in Early Infancy — 100 Sonnets, by John Tranter

Makar Press, St Lucia, 1977, ISBN 0909354219
[in New Poetry vol 26 no 1 April 1978.]

I

Tranter’s new book has got a monkey on its cover. A grimish brown-faced thing with its baby in its lap . . . Not really that horrible in itself but, with the book’s title, Crying In Early Infancy (One Hundred Sonnets), and the poet’s name on top, it starts to look a bit dark. Add to this the contents and the whole thing does become apparently loaded with despair. On the back cover is a photograph of Tranter looking exactly like a photograph of the author of this book: the eyes are hidden but the mouth is there, and it too has the look of real despair. Queensland flowers from the head.

Rimbaud’s question comes up: What’s on the other side of despair? My answer for today: John Tranter. For this minute, for now, and the histories involved here. The book’s wry title brings the fifties in, when Doctor Spock meant more than now, but ‘now’ is ‘then’ again as Tranter starts mapping it back. Like some of the words that come up in these poems — pert, real bad, clobbered — and how an image has shifted focus: the monkey on the cover would have looked ‘exotic’ or ‘decorative’ on the cover of National Geographic or Readers Digest Animals of the World. It’s a matter of tone. And it’s a fine matter. Words like pert etc. are the shades or colours, the weather of these poems.

Photo of Robert Adamson
Terry Street, Rozelle, 5 July 1985
copyright © by John Tranter

John looks back at his own early infancy and how he has permitted Chronos to darken its memory, and, to get at this, invites an icon through time into his present: Welcome the doll, the terrible doll.

His daughter’s toy is bloodstained by the hardware of new wars (the Sabre jets and MiGs), of memory, and the punk children of the present time. Tranter’s poetry occurs in a landscape composed from his memory which serves like a grid through which to view present action. In these lines the Goodbye is the thing happening at the moment of composition:

it’s goodbye to the trembling Rotarians
and their bereaved children in the light
of stinking kerosene lanterns, it’s goodbye
to the countryside of honourable rifles.

The poem begins with his daughter playing with the bloodstained doll again, then runs through the recent past that has caused the stains, to conclude with what amounts to Rimbaud’s question — like this thing’s here. Now. Well — Tranter’s ironic laughter — it’s ‘Welcome to the moment.’ It’s welcome to exist in the poem’s time.

The Titans, Mnemos and Chronos, fight it out on every page. But John Tranter, being current, writes on, refusing to acknowledge this ‘condition’ as anything other than the space of his work where time and memory apparently coexist.

They don’t, can’t, without the magic of their deities — or, in the language of the grammarians outside E. A. Havelock’s Preface to Plato or Charles Olson — the metaphor they are. Tranter’s time is his intellect and his memory works his imagination. He makes no distinction between imagination and intellect. So, something like Tranter’s honourable rifles is no matter of moral value. In the past they may have been honourable, but Tranter’s time machine doesn’t get back there to know. His memory imagines his past.

Tranter, in this book, has become the humanist imagining what has created the terrible doll; who is torn apart by a rigorous intellect which refuses to be taunted by it. The poems are so open. Written from the other side of despair. The anguish running through these poems is raw, like a joke. Tranter takes the pain, hones it to a fine edge, then drives it through his language.

II

We have lived long in a generalizing time... And it has
had its effects on the best of men, on the best of things.
— Charles Olson, Human Universe

Tranter is being shaken by his history. He shakes us back. Back into our bodies because they alone can shake language.

It’s a continuing act of will for Tranter to write. His poetry is a placement of himself so absolute that his memory takes in ‘the generalizing time’ and splatters it around the space of each sonnet in the book until each one is him. These poems don’t ‘say’ anything about John’s life. They are.

Tranter is a fiction. He is happening. ‘Here’, not ‘then’, or ‘where’. All about. He makes an absolute fiction that rationality can’t shake.

I suppose you could say it’s crazy to conjure a state where the boundaries of reason dissolve into what seem to be lies. A state or space you can go into where to move is to be confronted with all the terrors of language. Remembering the details of your personal history, being reminded of the apparent rationality holding things together outside your self’s dark ring — the active verbs are the only facts.

And, in a world hungry for facts, this kind of abstract activity doesn’t count. The consumers are wary of imaginative life which exists outside their convention of time, even if it takes the form of literature.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice books abound with marvels, but they arise logically from a given imaginary situation. Tranter’s poems almost deny the situations and myths that occur in them. If the poems have ‘subjects’ they are conceptualized, and when a narrative occurs it describes thought-process.

You could say the poems are about themselves, or about their language. This would no doubt please the readers looking for ‘facts’ and ‘things’. The focus would then be adjusted to the pitch of the writing, the tone, rhetoric and cadence etc. But these are only stylistic devices Tranter uses to give his language a semblance of linear progression.

He uses as many words as possible that carry some kind of rational description: words representing ‘things’, though never any of the nouns associated with the occult. In fact, Tranter is very careful to supply a list indicating his totally sceptical attitude towards all forms of ‘magic’:

Cheat, magician, thief. . . their dangerous magic is a cheat, and none can explain its delicate / attraction . . . Move away, leave the cheating magicians / to imitate culture poorly.

This list could be another rhetorical or stylistic device to ‘tone’ the verse down; to make it seem more credible or convincing. Maybe some people will be convinced by what seems to be ‘balance’ or even ‘truth’, but I feel that the lines quoted above, and others like them, are merely John’s frenzy of anti-romanticism.

Tranter clings so desperately to what he sees as the intellect that no act of faith is possible. He is using time and space in the way scientists and magicians would, but as far as negative capability goes:

This book’s a catalogue of dreams
just like my life in which
every day has a beginning,
a middle, and an end
and then you wake up screaming
damaged by ‘reality’
you see how easy it is
and how depressing

‘Waking up’ is just like
going to sleep in reverse
if you need a simile
dreams are similes of life
whose dreams are double images
reflecting everything

It’s the same riddle Lewis Carroll presents us with when Alice meets the Red King, who is dreaming about Alice through the looking glass. According to Tweedledum and Tweedle-dee, if he were to wake up, Alice would go out ‘like a candle’.

Alice takes the same way out of this as Tranter . . . ‘Waking up’ she wonders about the King dreaming about her, dreaming about him, and asks which it really was.

Which is the real image: Alice or the Red King? Dreams are double images / reflecting everything.

The more Tranter tries to resist or deny the ‘forces of magic’ the more he becomes the magician.

Without even having to mention it in his poetry Tranter uses another notion that Carroll used. If we got rid of the International Date Line, Carroll says, ‘there would be no distinction at all between each successive day, and no week, month, etc., so that we should have to say “the Battle of Waterloo happened today, about two million hours ago” ‘. Tranter’s poems are loaded with his ‘imagined’ memory. His memory and intellect are running in time, like Alice and the Red Queen running so fast they were standing still. (Tranter has always been fascinated by Einstein.)

So what I’m claiming here is most incredible. I think Tranter has succeeded in an alchemical experiment in which he has taken two kinds of poetry — one like Lowell’s ‘Life Studies’, the other like Olson’s ‘Maximus’ — and made another.

Tranter has taken Olson’s concepts of time, and Lowell’s ‘history’ of memory, and brought them back in his Porsche, screaming along at 150 m.p.h. towards death — though death happens ‘in time’ — and, in the midst of time, there is Tranter. Triumphant.

Cover of Crying in Early Infancy
design Lyn Tranter 1977