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John Scott — Language Under Water

John Tranter reviews

From the Flooded City, John A. Scott

Makar Press, Brisbane, 1981, $5.95
This piece was first published in Scripsi vol 1 nos 3 and 4, Summer/ Autumn 1982.
It is 1,000 words or about three printed pages long.

The Case of the Missing Sibling

Like an isolated backwoods community, Australian poetry is in need of a fresh injection of foreign genes from time to time, lest inbreeding should turn us into a race of mongols, our speech flat, guttural and intelligible only to ourselves.

John A. Scott, Broadway, Sydney. See note below.

We build on the English tradition, of course; we have no other. But we borrow from other cultures, as English has always done. One example: Malory welded large pieces of Greek, Spanish and French works into his Morte D’Arthur, together with lumps of North English alliterative verse and other dialects; they sit together uneasily for most of that great book, as do the New York patois and the American-in-Paris Gallicisms in Frank O’Hara’s work.

Closer to home, Brennan and Mallarmé: promising, in theory; disappointing in execution. And apart from Slessor’s superficial debt to German Romanticism, we find no Australian poet willing to face the kind of problems that European poets have felt compelled to deal with. In general, we have followed Menzies’s lead, and kept a sentimental attachment to the Home Counties while acknowledging the realities of American firepower.

Why does John Scott’s new book look so strange to an Australian reader? Because it has no siblings, no older brother or sister with whose accents and idiosyncrasies we are already familiar. It’s not like Nigel Roberts, we say, nor John Forbes. Scott is part and parcel of the generation of late 1960s poets; Robert Adamson handed him the Poetry Society of Australia New Poetry Award in 1970, yet he’s nothing like Adamson. He’s nothing like anyone around here, in fact.
A French reader of poetry, on leafing through this book, might mutter to himself ‘Ah, yes, Desnos. Or Michaux, definitely Michaux. And a little of St. John Perse in this marine imagery, and some Supervielle here also. And the angels... Cocteau, almost.’

Angels? What’s going on?


On the Subject of Angels

English poetry is not comfortable with angels. There are the visionary angels of Blake and Ginsberg, leaping out of the holy books to justify the grandest delusions, and the pallid consumptives of Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite domestic dreams. The Europeans are more at ease with these apparitions. Rafael Alberti peopled his psychoses with exact types: the angel of numbers, the angel of coal, angels of the sand, of the wine-shops, and so on. Cocteau’s indecent angels refused to explain anything to the police; ‘naturally’, their author says. We Australians aren’t given to visions of this sort; the nearest we come to angelism is our worship of the Royal Family.

But in John Scott’s litanies (‘litanies constructed and / the dismantling of litanies...’) creatures appear who., like Cocteau’s angels, suffer and die in a way that is more than human, less than divine. In a stanza that specifically calls up Henri Michaux’s haunting poem ‘I am writing to you from a distant country’, a character is ‘telling a woman his foreskin conceals angels. The machine of angels’. In the background, the shrieking monomania of pinball fills the night air.


Getting Wired: some phrases from the book

Objects not yet threaded with darkness, faces wound with fine dark cloth, the face becomes ribboned with lightning, scratched in glass by nightfall, your face is bound by wired light, this web of storm drains, the meridian wires of her pulse, her veins are bound in sheaves across the belly, their fine nervous reeds, scarves of rain, the sky riddled with green cable, their pulse restrained by cords, their hands sewn with metallic thread, their bound limbs rocking on the perch, the sifting underbelly of wire, the wound’s closing: suture, sliced out bust beneath wire, he joined her there, curing the wire-weals, I watched her feel the borderlines as if she were on wire, the thousand lines beyond her control, burrowing on the stave of fine wire.


The Labyrinth

In the poem ‘Even Their Stories’ all the threads that run through John Scott’s work are drawn together. The camera, as it were, takes in the ocean, the sky, then a room in a tenement, then down the steps, to an underground urinal, then below the surface, storm drains that lead to the Bay and the ocean again. ‘The bodies/ of children are used to float messages to/ the Bay. Upon the breast of a young girl/ You ask, Why this fear of love?

The Minotaur devoured maidens; Theseus entered the Labyrinth to find an answer, to kill, to deliver us all; Ariadne gave him the thread he would use to find his way back up into the clear Grecian sunlight. Man, woman, sacrifice, riddles.

Women are the literal embodiment of language in these poems, and are disfigured by it, for it is the language of men. It is the man, the poet, who sees a terrible question in the pattern of experience, who demands an answer in the feminine gender, and who searches for its conclusion in flesh. But naming a thing destroys it, even as it enables us to grasp it. So we have poems that search for the name, yet deny overt naming (‘as if with You speech had left the world, as if You alone could restore it’). The poems bear elisions like scars, names replaced by blanks, people deprived of particular characteristics and packaged into the lineaments of myth.

Yet the experiences these poems graduate from are concrete, urban, as common as a divorce, as basic as a traffic accident.


Sexual Oppression and The Odyssey

It is an odd route that Scott has taken. The central concern of his book is twofold: sexual politics, in the deepest sense, and language itself. Both are current and essential concerns for any writer, and lie across the surface of our discourse with poetry and with our personal destinies. Yet in this book they are concealed, overlaid with myth, sabotaged by elisions, ruptured by metaphors as discordant as a litany in a brothel, masked by sub-languages (volleyball, pinball, girlie-magazine bondage, the Odyssey). A crime-thriller format places the poet as a murderer using language to maim and kill; an elegy mutilates its own sense of longing.

What does Homer have to do with Divorce in Contemporary Australia? What does the structure of myth have to do with personal pain? What do the Mid-Twentieth Century French Poets have to do with the sexual oppression suffered by and imposed by your own actual girl-friend today?

Everything, Scott says, everything; and goes on to prove it.

John Scott’s watch

Note: The photo of John Scott above by John Tranter was taken at about the time From the Flooded City was being written. The office is Lyn Tranter’s typesetting bureau, Pavilion Press Set, 1st floor, 2 Buckland Street, Broadway NSW 2007; the photograph behind the subject shows John Tranter’s children. A close examination of the negative (Technical Pan 35 mm.) reveals that John Scott’s watch shows the time as 2:34; the angle of the sun thus indicates that he is facing due South.   — J.T.

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