Australian Literature Resources - Philip Mead: Kenneth Slessor

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Jack Lindsay’s Southerly essay (1952) provides an eyewitness account of the young Slessor by one of his earliest literary friends and co-workers. It is a small instance of auto-ethnography of Australian poetic culture in the 1920s. But it is also useful for the account it gives of the Vision project and Slessor’s poetry in relation to the history and theory of a national literature. Lindsay’s brief outline of the origins of Australian national culture and its expressive sub-set, literary culture, is couched in triumphantly general terms. Overcoming, with the advent of modernity (industrialisation), the crippling divisions caused by colonial attempts at organic art, the successful national artist is able to embody a “resolution, the fusion of art and life on a grand scale, the re-creation of the great humanist tradition in terms of the new nationhood.” In Lindsay’s symptomatic literary history, Christopher Brennan is the last poet to suffer from the disabling legacy of an imperfect national consciousness, riven as he was by competing forces of colonialism and metropolitanism. And in this national fiction, it is Kenneth Slessor who emerges as the first poet of a triumphant Australian modernity.
     Because of the chronological arrangement of this volume, Lindsay’s essay happens to appear first but in its historicist and culturalist assumptions, however theoretically crude these may now appear and however meretricious his narrative of national cultural progress, it suggests an alternative mode of knowledge about poetry to the mostly formalist responses to Slessor’s work that follow. It also provides an instructive point of comparison with John Docker’s chapter from Australian Cultural Elites (1974). Lindsay was well aware of some of the contradictions and problems of the anti-nationalist program in art that he himself had helped to formulate, just as he was aware of some of its strangely oedipal strains. “Vision showed the failure of what is now often called cosmopolitanism to solve culture problems.” Docker’s reading is a later and fuller analysis of precisely this failure. Lindsay’s essay exemplifies an approach to critical writing about poetry that is prescient of some later developments in cultural analysis. His work is, thus, pertinent to contemporary theoretical and critical work that reads poetry as a form of cultural production, with its own specific institutions, communities and sets of practices.
     Lindsay’s essay also begins with the beguiling image of the young Slessor fiddling with a crystal set, trying to tune it. In its updating of the myth of poetic inspiration into the technological metaphor of radio receivers and broadcasting, this image has some suggestive power in relation to poetry — the figure of the poet and the idea of modernity. Lindsay himself is aware of these resonances: “[w]here did things stand in the early 1920’s, when Slessor and I were trying to pick up world-voices out of that inefficient crystal-set?” This is almost identical to the image of the poet in Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée, a modernised version of the Orpheus and Eurydice story. In Cocteau’s film, Orpheus’s poems are dictated to him through the car radio of a mysterious Princess (Death). Orpheus sits in her black Rolls Royce obsessively listening to his own poetry channel, waiting for the poetic sentences, taking dictée. At virtually the same moment of the early 1950s, Cocteau and Lindsay are saying that the poet, whether ancient or modern, is the mere recorder of mysterious broadcasts from another world. Poetry saturates the ether around us but the poet alone has the receiver and the ability to tune in to narrowcast signals on the mental band of poetry. In the early 1920s though, Lindsay can hardly have been aware of the bitter irony that Slessor’s wife Noela, like Orpheus’s Eurydice, was to be snatched away early by death and that his career would become a backward-looking silence. In his essay Lindsay also makes a brief mention of Dürer as standing at the beginning of the Western Romantic tradition and stretching, in his idiosyncratic version of history, to the Pre-Raphaelites. If this small mention indicates a connection with Dürer in Lindsay’s reminiscence about Slessor, art and national culture, it is a fraction of support for the kind of stress I want to put on the poem “Nuremberg.”
     I have included as an appendix Slessor’s response to Lindsay, “Spectacles for the Fifties: A Rejoinder to ‘Vision of the Twenties’,” published in the following issue of Southerly (also 1952). For all its disingenuousness, it clearly expresses Slessor’s opposition to any aesthetic that doesn’t privilege the autonomy of the art-object (poem) in relation to the matrix of authorship, culture and ideology that produces it. Slessor accuses Lindsay of dethroning “pure poetry or pure literature” with his “pseudo-technical sociological expressions.” Leaving aside the personal antipathy Slessor is expressing, what we have here is a small instance of debate in aesthetics and poetics — high modernist autonomy (Slessor) versus a vaguely Marxist theory of literary discourse (Lindsay) — and some information about aesthetic communities (however small) and how they work. Not the least interesting thing about this episode is its oedipal structure (metaphorically and literally) of fraternal spats (Ken and Jack) and Olympian intervention and judgement (Norman). This exchange is worth representing not only because of the few and scattered resources in Australian poetics and its history but also in relation to the kind of readings of Slessor represented later in this collection by Leigh Dale and Kate Lilley.[Note 1]
     Vincent Buckley’s essay from Essays in Poetry: Mainly Australian (1957) begins with an acknowledgment of Slessor as a pioneer in Australian poetic modernism, although he makes no further reference to how he understands the term “modernism.” Buckley makes the point that the Romantic grotesquerie of the early Slessor survives amongst the hardness and directness of Slessor’s later, more successful poetry. Buckley relies, in his analysis, on Slessor’s own, partly factitious, divisions in One Hundred Poems. Buckley’s charge of there being “almost no humour at all” in Slessor needs to be read in the light of a critical paradigm — severely New Critical — that won’t allow the considerable body of his light verse into any consideration of Slessor’s poetic achievement and that dictates a special distaste for the grotesque. But sensitive to Slessor’s poetic language in the way that few other critics have been, Buckley makes the point that there is a “disturbing air of frenzy about almost all Slessor’s poems.” What Buckley is responding to in Slessor’s poetic practice is evidence of a psyche that understands writing itself as a crucial act of self-forming and self-preservation. Hence, perhaps, Slessor’s fate: so desperate an investment in the act of poetic writing is doomed. Thus Buckley reads both the thematic elements in Slessor’s poetry, like nihilism — his constitutional inability to fake a belief system, even a historical/materialist one — and the obsessive rhetoric of the artist and the poet, into the tensions and diction of his poetic language. Buckley draws back from detailed readings of the poems and identifies the thematic of flux (time) as the ruling one in Slessor’s work. Like many of the critics who follow him, Buckley makes the point that “Five Bells” is “a summing-up” of both Slessor’s poetic achievements and of the themes and technical explorations of his work. The fact that “Five Bells” occupies “pride of last place” in One Hundred Poems is cited as Slessor’s implicit agreement with this reading of his oeuvre. After his obviously admiring reading of “Five Bells” Buckley tackles the question of Slessor’s post-war silence and concludes that having written “Beach Burial” (1942) Slessor “has no further occasion for writing.” Buckley’s concluding observation is that the silence is not surprising: Slessor was never an intellectual poet and thus once the “Romantic desperation of his preoccupations” had been played out, there was nothing left to say.
     Adrian Mitchell’s essay of 1964, “Kenneth Slessor and the Grotesque,” is an exploration of what might be meant by the “grotesque” in Slessor’s poetry, an aspect of Slessor’s writing noticed by other critics but either not explained or more often condemned by them. Mitchell traces the influence of the grotesque to Norman Lindsay’s recycling, via Vision, of Rubens and a version of 1890s decadent Aestheticism. Mitchell usefully cites contemporary understandings of the term “grotesque” in Pater and Santayana and an analysis of Rubens’s excesses and stylised exaggerations by Victor Hugo. Mitchell’s point is that the grotesque is more than a matter of imagery in Slessor’s poetry. “[H]is themes can also be considered in the light of the grotesque.” He goes on to argue that the grotesque is in fact a product of the tension between the physical and the ideal in Slessor; that’s what pulls the female figures (characteristically) into such distorted shapes in both Lindsay and Slessor. This is a useful formulation because it allows Mitchell to explain the workings of a style of imagery and poetic language and at the same time to point to both the Lindsayesque banality of vitalist Vision decadence and the valuable qualities of the grotesque as an element in Slessor’s aesthetic. Thus, Mitchell argues, a wide array of images of stone and glass in the later (particularly elegiac) poetry are underwritten by the potential of the grotesque to startle “us into new awareness, into fresh perceptions of the experience [Slessor] presents to us.”
     Writing about Slessor in the same year as Adrian Mitchell, Judith Wright also begins with the baleful influence on Slessor of Norman Lindsay and the Vision group and his early seduction by their anti-modernist, artist-hero credo. But unlike the academic literary critics Buckley and Mitchell, Wright immediately shifts to a perspective on Slessor’s aesthetic that emphasises its relations to the largest narratives of Western metaphysics. Wright sees in Slessor’s early work “the whole solipsist problem of modern man,” the post-Nietzschean world of a universe in which the “godhead has been drained away” — she is thinking of “Stars” here — and of the impending collapse of humanism. Wright dates Slessor’s break with the Vision (anti-Wheels) aesthetic and cultural program from the late 1920s when Slessor turned back to the influence of English modernist poets like Eliot and more particularly Wilfred Owen. Wright’s analysis of the relevance of Owen and his experiments with rhythm is a persuasive reading of the shift in Slessor’s work away from Decadence and the grotesque. There was no premium on the idea of experiment in Vision aesthetics. Also working with Slessor’s own divisions in One Hundred Poems, Wright charts the progress of Slessor’s poetry in terms of his character-portraits of men: Cook, Gulliver, Captain Dobbin, Samuel Marsden, John Benbow, Samuel Hickey. While Wright’s sensitivity to this gallery of real and imagery male figures in Slessor hardly amounts to a proto-feminist analysis of the middle period of his writing, it is nevertheless an acute and unique critical observation for its time. Wright’s awareness of the masculinist emphases in Slessor’s writing can be read in conjunction with Kate Lilley’s essay on Slessor’s version of elegy.[Note 2] Predictably, Wright’s most extended analysis is of “Five Bells” and like Buckley she sees a double movement in the trajectory of Slessor’s progress towards that nearly final poem. While his poetic language matures and strengthens, it also starts to fade under the light of its own success. Like Buckley, Wright reads the desperation and rootlessness in Slessor’s poetry as present from the beginning. At the end of that poetry she observes the representation of a merely fragmentary communication between human individuals. Characteristically, Wright reads this as symptomatic of the grand economy of Western metaphysics and in this her version of Slessor resembles Jack Lindsay’s. But where he is materialist and mystically nationalist, Wright is tragically humanist: “[i]n Slessor’s work, the emotional impasse of European civilisation appears as affecting Australian writing directly.” Wright’s particular preoccupation at the time she was writing about Slessor, evident in her own poetry, was that of trying to get poetic language — the expression of an organic, creative self and thus affective, anti-rationalist values — to counter the whole mechanistic paradigm of Western thought which was responsible for man’s failure with language and his destruction of nature. For Wright, at this time, poetry was beginning to crumble under the pressure of her disproportionate demands for it. Perhaps this helps to explain Wright’s frustrated tone with Slessor — his “poetry is something very like inspired reportage.” Unlike Brennan, he represents no “forward-looking” or “forward-urging” solution to the problem of the collapse of humanist belief. In the end, in “Slessor’s poetry the abyss is finally triumphant.” More than any other poet’s work that Judith Wright considers in Preoccupations in Australian Poetry, Slessor’s is a challenge to her own neohumanist preoccupations.
     A.K. Thomson’s essay on Slessor is important for the historical and comparative detail of its readings. The first section of the essay (not reprinted here) is a discussion of Norman Lindsay’s influence on Slessor in terms of 1890s Yellow Book aestheticism and Beardsley. Thomson acknowledges the out-of-datedness of Lindsay’s thought for Slessor in the early 1920s, but nevertheless attempts to explain the attractions for Slessor of the Vision group. Thomson’s complacent account of Norman Lindsay’s nasty, crackpot theories, in Creative Effort for example, now seems indefensible. He also entirely occludes Jack Lindsay’s role in the Vision project and there is an obvious attempt to collude with Slessor’s own rewriting of that chapter in Australian literary history. Clearly Thomson shares Slessor’s antipathy for Jack Lindsay’s post-Vision Marxism. Nevertheless a valuable aspect of Thomson’s essay is its intertextual reading of Slessor’s poetry in relation to its maritime sources. Thomson’s comparative reading of “Captain Dobbin” and Melville’s Omoo is the only detailed work on Slessor of this kind. Thomson’s detailed intertextual sense is also represented in his reading of Slessor poems that draw on Samuel Pepys, Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese, George Boxall’s history of bushranging and Philip Lindsay’s account of Joe Lynch.
     Likewise, his reading of “Five Visions of Captain Cook” is useful for its situating of Slessor — vis-à-vis F.J. Bayldon and G. Arnold Wood — at the origins of the myth of Cook in the late 1920s. This vivid monumentalising of Cook in the culturally prestigious form of writing, poetry, is important for Australian historiography and cultural identity of the mid-century. From this originary point, the poetic inscription of nation broadens out into the “voyager tradition,” an influential and various form of national mythography that was summarised by Douglas Stewart in his 1960 anthology Voyager Poems. Thomson’s reading of “Five Visions” in relation to Cook’s Journals and Banks’s Endeavour Journal, in conjunction with other archival and historical material, exemplifies some of the ways in which a discursive formation operates. Australian culture in the period between roughly 1920 and 1940 was reforming itself in relation to certain narratives of origin, particularly European maritime imperialism in the South Pacific, and poetic discourse in the form of Slessor’s revaluing of historical material, could play an expressive role in that process. The recent debate about Gananath Obeyesekere’s rewriting of Pacific history (and the institutions of national history) is probably the concluding chapter in what began with the collapse of the humanist paradigm for literary artists in the 60s and its reliance on unitary narratives of nation and a myth of British imperialism that was blind to the politics of its own educational institutionalisation. This particular discursive formation is now being dismantled but Thomson allows us to see clearly a fragment of its origins.[Note 3]
     Thomson’s essay also invites a political critique of the voyager tradition and thus a point of origin for a postcolonial reading of Slessor. Such a postcolonial reading, as yet unwritten, might take as it context the voyager tradition (inaugurated by “Five Visions of Captain Cook” [written 1929/published 1931]) and its reliance on a mythopoesis of empire that both depoliticises imperial expansion in the Pacific, displaces the historical fact of white Australia’s origins as a jail and is blind (like Alexander Home) to questions of race. It might also usefully take account of Slessor’s work as a regular film reviewer for Smith’s Weekly in the 1930s and the conjunction of Charles Chauvel’s In the Wake of “The Bounty” (1933) with Slessor’s voyager poems at the origins of this narrative of nation.[Note 4]
     It is not until John Docker’s Australian Cultural Elites (1974) that a seriously critical analysis of Norman Lindsay, Kenneth Slessor and the Vision group appears. Docker usefully traces the Nietzschean, Romantic and sub-Platonist strands in Lindsay’s vitalist aesthetic and explains clearly where Lindsay departed from those European aesthetic models. In Lindsay’s eclectic philosophy, “‘desire’ unifies [his] sexual and artistic theory, offering the free individual the ground of both a life-style and an artistic method.” Central to his reading of Slessor is Docker’s identification of the elitist ideology of the image in Lindsay (Madam Life’s Lovers, 1929). “The ‘image’ mediates between the artist and life (women), and hence creates moments of Life.” One of Docker’s major points is that Lindsayism is a characteristically and influential Sydney phenomenon: “the expression of a new self-sufficient urban intelligentsia in Sydney, and, as Lindsay saw it, Australia.” It is worth noting that Docker is entirely uninterested in the history of modernism in Australia and so completely elides Slessor’s time in Melbourne in the mid-1920s which, as Greg Badcock argues, is important to Slessor’s version of modernism and thus anti-Lindsayism. Docker reads some early poems of Slessor’s — “Heine in Paris,” “Earth-Visitors” and the later “To the Poetry of Hugh McCrae” — within the frame of Lindsayan doctrine and goes on to instantiate the persistence of Lindsay’s influence in a number of later poems of Slessor. Docker suggests, for example, that the insistent questioning of the speaker in “Five Bells” resembles the rhetoric of “Richard,” the figure of scepticism and despair in Madam Life’s Lovers, and that the unanswered questions about an otherworld of existence towards the end of “Five Bells” have an implicit reply in Lindsay’s theory of “a continuum with eternity.”
     Andrew Taylor’s chapter on Slessor in his Reading Australian Poetry (1987) has done much to reformulate the critical framework of Slessor reception. Apart from Taylor’s essay (and Humphrey McQueen’s groundbreaking The Black Swan of Trespass [1979] and Julian Croft’s essay “Responses to Modernism, 1915-1965” in The Penguin New Literary History of Australia [1988]) critics have largely ignored the question of Slessor’s relation to modernism — as is evident from the earlier critical responses in this collection.[Note 5] Indeed, the whole question of modernism in Australia, in literary critical discourse as opposed to artistic and poetic communities and their practices, doesn’t seem to have emerged until the late 70s. As well as this fact, a history of modernism in Australia, from its beginnings at the turn of the century, would somehow have to account for the scattered, informal and non-institutional nature of its emergence and evolution, including the temporalities and politics of its relations to other modernisms. Andrew Taylor’s late contribution to the literary/critical discussion is to redraw the map of literary history preparatory to his discussion of Slessor by describing modernism and postmodernism as “points on the trajectory of romanticism (now properly labelled post-romanticism) as it moves through time, constantly conserving and re-presenting an originary romanticism by its acts of displacing and destroying it.” This kind of consideration is not unusual in Australian literary history as it tries to cope with the temporalities of a large movement like modernism and its metropolitan and non-metropolitan inflections. Julian Croft puts it succinctly: “Modernity, like time, was relative after 1915” (410), the year of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and he suggestively compares the tangled emergence of modernism in Australia (as a cultural colony of Anglo-America) to the precise advent of modernismo in Brazil in 1922.
     The history of Slessor’s writing is bound up, from the beginning, with powerful anti-modernist forces in Australian culture. The success of these forces can be measured by the extent to which Slessor rethought the modernist influence of Anglo-American poetry (Wheels, Owen, Joyce, but also Frank Wilmot [“Furnley Maurice”] and Henry Handel Richardson) as a way of allying his “nineteenth-century vitalist inheritance (which stressed the determined structure of the world) with the relativity and uncertainty of the modern world” (Croft 414). Deploying a version of Bloomian mythopoesis, Andrew Taylor reformulates the critical consensus about Slessor as “Australia’s first strong poet.” His close readings of “Elegy in a Botanic Gardens,” “Earth-Visitors,” “The Night-Ride,” “Five Visions of Captain Cook” and “Five Bells” reformat both the terms and vocabulary of Slessor criticism and his narrative of Slessor’s arrival at modernism is more intricate and searching than any in the critical reception of his work up until this point. In Taylor’s deconstructive reading Slessor’s agon with language and tradition is dramatised to the point where his “double parricide [exhaustion of earlier poetic models and displacement of them with the imagination] left him an orphan, the true role of the modernist who can expect meaning, order, significance neither from nature [...] much less from God.” Taylor’s final point is about “Beach Burial” and the failure of language represented in that poem, about the literal insignificance of the written word.
     Until very recently critics of Slessor have either drawn a sharp distinction between his “serious” poetry and the considerable amount of light verse that he wrote, mostly occasional light verse for newspapers, or they have completely ignored this aspect of Slessor’s work. One of the purposes of this critical volume is to dissolve further that convention of Slessor criticism, enforced by Slessor’s own selection in One Hundred Poems, but recently undermined by various editorial inclusions of the light verse within Slessor’s œuvre. Another related purpose is to analyse the continuities between Slessor the serious poet and Slessor the journalist and writer of light verse. The conjunction here between Andrew Taylor’s rereading of Slessor, which continues to privilege the well-established canon of Slessor poems, and Greg Badcock and Peter Kirkpatrick’s essays demonstrates the necessity of reassessing “some ingrained critical and biographical assumptions” of the old two-Slessor policy.
     Greg Badcock argues that the heavy emphasis on Slessor as the poet and man of Sydney has blinded critics to the considerable interest that Slessor’s time in Melbourne, when he worked for Punch, has for an understanding of his poetic development. His starting-point is a careful uncovering of Slessor’s arrangement of his poems under dates that rather speciously establish a tripartite structure for his poetic career. Badcock’s research work here is crucial to understanding the full context of a frequently-discussed and pivotal poem like “Stars,” which first appeared in Melbourne Punch. With an understanding of modernism that takes into account both Norman Lindsay and Zygmunt Bauman’s theories, Badcock draws attention to the contradictions between the journalist Slessor of the modern city and the aesthete of Vision. In this regard, Slessor’s move to Melbourne and the work on Punch brought him directly into contact with popular modernity as it was embraced in 1920s Australia. Punch carried articles and illustrations on “heavier-than-air flight, the wonders of electricity, and the miraculous wire-less transport of information.” Badcock also details some of the genealogy of Slessor’s comedy, particularly his references to transformations scenes, in French and theatrical traditions of pantomime. Badcock uses James McFarlane’s suggestive analysis of modernism as the condition under which things fall together, rather than apart, as a way of understanding the life that journalism brought to Slessor’s writing. This allows him to sort through the brief time that Slessor spent in Melbourne and to point to the poems that represented new directions in Slessor’s very personal and independent discovery of poetic modernism. This essay also suggests that what might lie behind the excessively chauvinist comments by Slessor and closely-identified Slessor critics about Melbourne may in fact be an anxiety about how important Melbourne and Punch were to Slessor’s invention of Australian poetic modernism.
     Peter Kirkpatrick’s point is that the Smith’s Weekly poems provide a “bridging medium between the poet’s earlier Vision phase and the later, more mature collections Cuckooz Contrey (1932) and Five Bells (1939).” They are also importantly part of Slessor’s modernism, in the literal sense. “Slessor’s girls on motorbikes, in cars and planes, or at the theatre are enjoying themselves — in fact they are metaphoric of the modern world,” of jazz age Darlinghurst. Following Bakhtin, Kirkpatrick defends light verse as a form of cultural expression that allowed poets like Slessor (and Ronald McCuaig) to have a dialogic (rather than elite and monologic) relation to their society. Kirkpatrick questions a strong critical orthodoxy about Slessor (the “gloom thesis”) that emphasises his “nihilism” and despair (and usually dwells on his falling silent in the 1940s, ie. his failure) and thus misrepresents the history of modernism in Australia and particularly Slessor’s version of it. Together with Adrian Caesar’s recent critical volume on Slessor, these two essays indicate a new direction in Slessor criticism that is about trying to read the sometimes radically different discursive registers in Slessor’s work in relation to one another, rather than ignoring them in favour of the neatly-edged oeuvre of One Hundred Poems.
     Julian Croft, a knowledgeable and perceptive critic of Slessor, begins with the fact of Slessor’s “nihilist impasse,” his poetic silence after 1948. Croft then details the biographical facts about Slessor and his wife Noela’s unhappy relationship, in so far as these are known from Dutton’s biography and from Slessor’s own war diaries. Alongside this direct autobiographical reading, Croft contrasts the thematic of time in Slessor’s poetry, particularly in poems like “Five Visions of Captain Cook,” “Out of Time” and “Five Bells.” This detailed reading relies on contemporary expressions of fascination with the newly-envisioned Einsteinian universe as well as on a varied series of internal references to time and the measurement of time in the poetry. Modernist poetry, Croft argues, at least in Slessor’s struggle with it, seems unable in the end to express a relativistic universe in which the meaning of “space/time [...] is based on nothing and location on co-ordinates which are neither long nor short.” Cutting back to Slessor’s relationship with Noela in the Middle East, Croft sees a significant shift in Slessor’s cosmography which occurs at this point and which is expressed powerfully in “Beach Burial:” “now, instead of a disjointed and futile search for Joe, there is a journey to a defined location in a Newtonian world of time and space, a ‘landfall,’ which also exists in another world of the dream, the idea, of spirit, which [J.W.] Dunne would have argued is space/time.” Croft’s conclusion, then, is that Slessor’s great subject in poetry was absence, or nothing, and that once the war took this away — along with the 1930s and Noela — his subject had been spirited away too. Croft’s is a resonantly Orphic reading of Slessor where the poet looks back in the moment of emergence from elegy only to lose everything, including his life as a poet. The intuitive skill of Croft’s reading — its use of particular biographical material and its avoidance of other critics’ commonly misogynist view of Noela — is far superior to other readings of Slessor along these lines.
     Turning from this kind of reading of Slessor to Dennis Haskell’s present contribution to the reassessment of Slessor — a close reading of some archival sources in relation to the accepted canon of poems — demonstrates some of the variety of current work in Australian literary studies. The importance of Haskell’s study lies not just in its exegetical work on a poem, “Full Orchestra,” which has been almost entirely passed over by critics, but also in the substance it gives to Slessor’s reputation as a craftsman and the presentation of some more immediate traces (than the published poem) of the creative process. As Haskell notes, the “use of manuscript drafts is rare in Australian literary criticism.” Haskell’s work on the notebook drafts allows him to focus on the symbolist elements in “Full Orchestra”’s language, but also on the specific draftwork of Slessor’s music-related vocabulary. Haskell relates this thematic focus to poems carefully placed on either side of “Full Orchestra” by Slessor in Poems (1957). If nothing else, the reproduction of the almost entirely blank page from Slessor’s notebook with the two words “waifs” and “veils” pencilled in the bottom left hand corner is a testament to the fragile and solitary nature of poetic artifice (see figure 8).
     The final two essays in this collection both reread Slessor in terms of sexuality and gender. In this, Leigh Dale and Kate Lilley bring an entirely new understanding to Slessor and his work and radically question the overwhelmingly masculinist culture of Slessor’s work and its critical reception. It is now possible to read all those male bodies in Slessor that are transformed into disembodied voices speaking about the metaphysics of time — previously construed in New Critical terms — as transformations of sexuality. Leigh Dale’s essay, “The Submerged Self: Slessor and Sexuality,” recognises that an important question about Slessor is about how and why his work becomes the ground for particular sets of theoretical (“modernism, aestheticism, realism, romanticism”) and institutional (Australian literature and the academy) questions. In relation to Slessor, Dale draws on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work to question the role of sexuality which intersects with and transforms the language of modernism (crisis) but which is also repressed and disavowed. In her reading Dale usefully reminds us of the dead-end of formalist analysis that characterises the pedagogical economy within which Slessor circulates: hence her illustration of the student-annotated copy of Slessor’s Poems. In her discussion of some early poems, Dale points to Lindsayian sentimentality in Slessor’s poetry that “represents an encounter between the male self and emotional experiences which are culturally regarded as female.” This encounter though is expressed in poems like “Sensuality” and “Sleep” by blurred and ambivalently gendered speaking subjects. Dale’s larger project, by way of the example of Slessor, questions how controlling narratives of national culture (like Jack Lindsay’s) that rely on whig progressivism of one kind or another are threatened by “cultural, sexual, and racial diversities.” Dale’s essay is a valuable set of first moves in the as-yet-unrenovated discourse on poetry and nation in Australia.
     Kate Lilley’s intense and allusive reading of Slessor and the cultural capital of the genre elegy, particularly in relation to “Five Bells,” begins with the claim that the inscription of death and the relation between elegist and elegised motivates Slessor’s poetic career. Noting the pre-eminence of “Five Bells” in major assessments of Slessor’s work (McAuley, Stewart, Buckley), her essay is concerned with the fact that the “discursive meaning and affect generated by, and attributed to, Slessor’s elegy exceed the boundaries of even the most expansive consideration of Slessor the poet, while also being disconnected from an analysis of genre.” Lilley argues that masculine elegy is bound up with “homosocial desire under the aspect of lack and oedipal crisis.” This argument includes close, deconstructive readings of “Marco Polo,” “Mangroves” and “Five Bells” (the Australian Lycidas) but also attentive readings of expressions of homosocial feeling between Slessor, McCuaig and McCrae (and by implication Norman Lindsay) — the micro-community of Australian male poetic modernists and their deeply-structured father-son/uncle-nephew relations. What Lilley means by a nostalgia in Slessor for “living backward” is uncovered in Slessor’s repeated elegies for a past male authenticity in life and literature: Marco Polo, John Benbow, Captain Dobbin, Cook, Home, Joe Lynch, Laurence Sterne ... the list goes on. Like Melville, Slessor celebrates in his poetry the exclusively homosocial world of maritime discovery, shipboard life and male camaraderie, from “Five Visions of Captain Cook” through to “Beach Burial.” Hence the work’s ready availability, as poetic discourse, for patriarchal narratives of nation. (Lilley points out that even the actual scene of Joe Lynch’s death — a group of drinking men taking a ferry to a party — fits this elegiac and oedipal model.) One of the powerful aspects of this reading of Slessor is its close attention to the circulations of meaning within and between a number of different discursive economies: Australian literature, genre studies (the elegy), English poetry (Milton, Gray), queer theory, Slessor’s oeuvre, communities of writers, history.

4

I’d like to turn from that last chapter of Slessor’s poetic career to a point near its beginning. “Nuremberg” was first published in an issue of Art in Australia for 1922, the year Slessor turned twenty-one and the annus mirabilis of modernism, the year of The Waste Land, Ulysses and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The poem appeared below a reproduction of a self-portrait by Max Meldrum captioned “A painting that has met with much hostile criticism, but is considered by many to be one of the finest portraits recently painted in Australia.” This mixed-media page of artist’s self-portrait (Max Meldrum) and verbal portrait of the artist Dürer (Kenneth Slessor) was preceded by an article and drawing by George W. Lambert, “The Wool Waggon,” and followed by a reproduction of “A Valley of the Tweed” by Norman Lindsay’s friend Elioth Gruner, a landscape of ringbarked trees and land degradation that won the Wynne Prize for 1921. The poem is printed with the first two of its five stanzas range left and the next two range right and the final stanza appearing below, centred (see figure 1).[Note 6]

     Nuremberg

So quiet it was in that high, sun-steeped room,
So warm and still, that sometimes with the light
Through the great windows, bright with bottle-panes,
There’d float a chime from clock-jacks out of sight,
     Clapping iron mallets on green copper gongs.

But only in blown music from the town’s
Quaint horologe could Time intrude . . . you’d say
Clocks had been bolted out, the flux of years
Defied, and that high chamber sealed away
     From earthly change by some old alchemist.

And, oh, those thousand towers of Nuremberg
Flowering like leaden trees outside the panes:
Those gabled roofs with smoking cowls, and those
Encrusted spires of stone, those golden vanes
     On shining housetops paved with scarlet tiles!

And all day nine wrought-pewter manticores
Blinked from their spouting faucets, not five steps
Across the cobbled street, or, peering through
The rounds of glass, espied that sun-flushed room
     With Dürer graving at intaglios.

O happy nine, spouting your dew all day
In green-scaled rows of metal, whilst the town
Moves peacefully below in quiet joy . . .
O happy gargoyles to be gazing down
     On Albrecht Dürer and his plates of iron!

This poem clearly announces the modernist theme of time that persists throughout Slessor’s poetry and it does so in conjunction with a representation of an artist. “[T]he most striking preoccupations of modernist and post-modernist aesthetics in literature is the question of time” (Connor 117). This poem, from the originary point of Slessor’s entry into modernism can be read in conjunction with “Five Bells,” from the other end of that engagement. Both poems express a double version of time and the world. “Nuremberg” represents a still moment beyond time; “Five Bells” represents time as “the flood that does not flow.” As Steven Connor argues, even modernist writers “who followed Henri Bergson’s counsel that time should be rendered as pure and fluid process rather than artificially frozen into instants [...] found themselves condemned to spatialize or suspend time in attempting to be true to it” (Connor 117). In this sense, Slessor’s “Nuremberg” is closely related to Virginia Woolf’s moments of vision and Joyce’s epiphanies, “both instances of the distillation of time into spatial significance” (Connor 118). Slessor’s Dürer is not only remote from the everyday world, utterly absorbed in the practice of his art, but almost (“you’d say”) sealed off from the “flux of years” through some mysterious chemical or preservative process, above and beyond time. Only the sound of time in the form of chimes from the town clock floats into the room while everyday time and change are relegated to the distant marketplace, Nuremberg’s Hauptmarkt. Time only faintly intrudes on the artist’s workplace as “blown music from the town’s/Quaint horologe.”
     The obvious metaphorics of time-pieces — clocks, horologes, watches — to express this theme also persists in Slessor’s poetry (Arnold and Kendal in “Five Visions of Captain Cook,” the “little fidget wheels” of “Five Bells”). Slessor’s choice of Nuremberg as a metaphorical focus for his modernist thematics of time has a coincidental analogue in the fact that it was in Nuremberg that the world’s first watches were made by Peter Henlein (Poltorak 18). So in Nuremberg, as Slessor revisits it, there is the question of the relation of time to art and technology, the Tag Heuer equation. Nuremberg’s “[q]uaint horologe” had in fact been built and installed in the Frauenkirche by Dürer’s fellow craftsman, the sculptor Adam Kraft. The chimes and music that Slessor’s Dürer hears as the traces of a mechanical and aestheticised measurement of time are in fact produced by a publicly-funded work of art commissioned by the patriciate of an imperial city. Dürer himself was both supported by and subject to the conditions of Nuremberg arts funding; in 1510 he was commissioned by the city to do paintings of Sigismund and Charlemagne for state ceremonial purposes, and there were other city commissions. The mechanical figures of Kraft’s horologe were in fact the “seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire, who would file ceremoniously before the figure of the emperor every noon.” They were a daily reminder of the political arrangement of the empire, with its federal constitution (Zika 32). Perhaps what Slessor’s Dürer wants to ignore in the reminder of these sounds of time are the political tithes on art and artists. As Slessor represents it, then, Nuremberg is the source of modernity’s obsession with the calibration of time, public and private, and of time’s relation to both artistic work and the institutions of political life.
     There are a number of evocations of Sydney in Slessor’s prose writings that are closely related to his poetic representation of Dürer’s loft apartment above Nuremberg. There is the description of living “in the sky over Sydney, seven storeys higher than the top of William Street” in “A Portrait of Sydney” (1950) (Slessor, Bread and Wine 3) which dwells on the effects of light, both the sun and neon illumination, in Slessor’s flat and the muffled sounds and life of the city below. Peter Kirkpatrick draws attention to a piece of journalism from Punch “The Alps of Darlinghurst” (1925) which mentions the moss on “leaden spouts” and the same muffled noise of the city traffic floating up from below.[Note 7] These versions of the city, including the poems “Winter Dawn” and “William Street,” have the same lovingly detailed quality as Nuremberg in the poem. One thing suggested here is the complex relationship between the modern artist and the city. Dürer stands (as per Jack Lindsay’s history) at the origins of the modern era in two ways: he belongs to the emergence of the modern city in Renaissance central Europe and he also represents, as a print maker, the emergence of the individual artist as he sheds the anonymity of the medieval craftsman (Landau and Parshall 33). Thus his relation to Nuremberg is both analogous to and a source of nostalgia for Slessor. On the one hand, the artist is obviously supported by the city and its commerce, and his work (engraving) is part of the new high-tech industries of Renaissance Nuremberg, a powerful European administrative and industrial centre in Dürer’s lifetime. The poem suggests a utopian relation between city and artist, modernity and commerce, private subjectivity and collective organisation, economics and artistic practice.
     On the other hand, the nostalgia that obviously motivates the poem is a strong index of Slessor’s own alienation from the city within which he worked not as a poet, above and beyond the daily life of Sydney, but as a journalist with the popular press, a profession of specific everyday involvement in the life of the city as well as ruthless economic subjection to wealthy proprietors. Slessor is writing, then, as a typically alienated modernist in both his imaginary Nuremberg and in his home city of Sydney, at one remove from both. For, as Terence Hawkes explains, “some sort of organic link with the imagined past continues to be one of the central fantasies of modern society” (40). This helps to explain the double, contradictory move the poem makes in its representation of art, modernity and political structures: on the one hand it occludes the individual artist’s relation to his community, and on the other it depoliticises the economic relations between artist and the oligarchy that governs the city. Slessor removes Dürer from the actual workshop of early Renaissance Nuremberg, a new marketplace of collaborative and inter-generational work between “artists, writers, scholars, printers and booksellers” (Zika 30) and elevates him into the atelier of the solitary Altgermanen artist of what is in fact the twentieth-century city. He depoliticises the Renaissance city — the town “Moves peacefully below in quiet joy” — and aestheticises what was the “inherently commercial nature” of etching and engraving (Landau and Parshall 6). In fact Dürer’s career is marked by the considerable stresses and strains of trying to make a living as an individual artist within a state-controlled system of art and craft, where the Nuremberg patriciate “lavishly patronised [the city’s] cultural life and sought to keep cultural expression subservient to what it saw as the city’s political and economic interests” (Zika 29). What’s more, the stasis in time represented by Dürer in his room is an expression of the “modernist requirement of aesthetic autonomy; for, if the passage of time is what threatens every achievement of stasis, every moment of significance seized from the flux, then the denial of time is what might seem to guarantee the unyielding, unchanging permanence of the work of art” (Connor 118).
     The richest context for this poem, then, is the history of the city, art and modernity. And perhaps the most influential reading of this complexly filiated history of individual subjectivity, modern built environments and artistic expression is Walter Benjamin’s prismatic collection of writings about Baudelaire and Paris, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. This fascinatingly complex book can shed much light on Slessor and the origins of Australian modernism. It suggests, for instance, that the history of Slessor the artist as the conflicted (tragic) hero of private life and national history, the flaneur of the inner harbour, remains to be written. Of special relevance to later poems like “Five Bells” is Benjamin’s discussion of the relations between time, memory and the city in Bergson and Proust.[Note 8] But one aspect of Benjamin’s criticism that is particularly relevant in the context of Slessor’s representation of Dürer is his discussion of Baudelaire and the mid-nineteenth-century engraver Charles Meryon. At one point Benjamin focuses on a famous stanza from “L’Invitation au Voyage” in Les Fleur du Mal:

      Vois sur ces canaux
     Dormir ces vaisseaux
Dont l’humeur est vagabonde;
     C’est pour assouvir
     Ton moindre désir
     Qu’ils viennent du bout du monde.

     (See, sheltered from the swell
     There in the still canals
Those drowsy ships that dream of sailing forth;
     It is to satisfy
     Your least desire, they ply
     Hither through all the waters of the earth.)

                       (Benjamin 95)

In his extraordinarily intense reading of this stanza, Benjamin moves from noting the rocking rhythm of the language, to the rocking movement of the boats, then to a kind of reading of the epistemology of empire in the same rhythmic terms. The alternation between greatness and indolence “governed Baudelaire’s life. He deciphered it and called it ‘modernism.’ When he loses himself to the spectacle of the ships lying at anchor, he does so in order to derive an allegory from them. The hero [of modernism] is as strong, as ingenious, as harmonious, and as well-built as those boats. But the high seas beckon to him in vain, for his life is under an ill star. Modernism turns out be his doom” (95). The relevance of this to a reading of “Five Bells” is apparent but just before this passage, Benjamin has been discussing the elective affinities between the colour-blind etcher Meryon and Baudelaire. Charles Meryon (1821-1868), the illegitimate son of an English physician and a French dancer with the Paris Opera, trained as a naval officer before his brief full-time career as an artist. In fact, on his third voyage as an ensign with the French navy on the corvette Rhin to the South Pacific he visited Sydney at the end of 1843 and again from October 1845 to January 1846 (Burke 5; McCulloch 482). (This French warship would have ridden darkly on the waters of Sydney Harbour.) Benjamin describes the strange fraternity between Meryon and Baudelaire:
     They were born in the same year, and their deaths were only months apart. Both died lonely and deeply disturbed — Meryon as a demented person at Charenton, Baudelaire speechless in a private clinic. Both were late in achieving fame. Baudelaire was almost the only person who championed Meryon in his lifetime. Few of his prose works are a match for his short piece on Meryon. Dealing with Meryon, it is a homage to modernism, but it is also a homage to the antique aspects of Meryon. For in Meryon, too, there is an interpenetration of classical antiquity and modernism, and in the form of this superimposition, the allegory, appears unmistakably (87).
     What Benjamin understands as Meryon’s antiqueness here is his loving record in black-and-white art of pre-Haussman Paris. A project which never eventuated was a volume about Paris with etchings by Meryon and text by Baudelaire (Burke 9). So, like Meryon, what Slessor is fashioning in “Nuremberg,” in the poetic figure of an engraver and his city, is the peculiarly modernist nostalgia for the pre-modern city. If Slessor’s Dürer is an originary moment in Australian modernism that exemplifies a connection between the South Pacific (Slessor and Sydney) and European modernism, it has as its ghostly forebear Charles Meryon and the lifeline that connects his voyages in the South Pacific with the origins of modernist Paris.[Note 9] It is unlikely that Slessor would not have known something of Meryon’s work, even in 1922; it was certainly famous and the Mitchell Library held an original Meryon view of Sydney Harbour. And as it turns out “Meryon” was also the name that Lionel Lindsay (Norman’s older brother) gave to his house at Wahroonga in homage to the French etcher (Thomas). “Nuremberg” was written at the point where Slessor was just getting to know Norman Lindsay and there is little doubt that the technical and art-historical aspects of etching and engraving would have been of intense interest to what became the Vision group. Also, as in Nuremberg and Europe generally in the last decade of sixteenth century, etchings were highly desirable luxury items in the 1920s. Jack Lindsay’s Fanfrolico Press, publishers of Slessor’s second book, Earth-Visitors (1926) were also publishers of “many limited editions” of Norman and Jack Lindsay’s text and etching series A Homage to Sappho during the late 1920s (Thomas).[Note 10] Norman Lindsay contributed etchings to literary publications by Hugh McCrae, Leon Gellert, Kenneth Mackenzie and of course Slessor himself. Slessor’s “Nuremberg,” then, is not simply an ekphrastic representation of an historically distant art form. In fact, just like the Max Meldrum painting on the same page, the poem is a self-portrait.
     The identity of poet and engraver that is enacted in this poem has some oddly resonant details and its language of heavy metal is one of these. Slessor’s Albrecht Dürer is engraving plates of iron and the poem is dense with images and sounds of metalwork: “iron mallets” clapping on “green copper gongs,” “leaden trees,” “golden vanes,” “nine wrought-pewter manticores,” “green-scaled rows of metal.” Dürer’s father, a goldsmith, had been born in Hungary and migrated to the world trade centre of Nuremberg, where he prospered and eventually rose to be city assayer of precious metals (Hutchison 52). Slessor’s father, Robert, was born in England and trained as a civil and mining engineer and, in the opposite career move to the elder Dürer, came out to Australia to work in mining ventures in the Auslandins of Western Tasmania and New South Wales (Dutton 3-4). If Slessor’s Dürer is “graving at intaglios” on the eve of the Reformation — as his work with iron suggests — then perhaps he is also pondering the fact that Martin Luther, an intellectual hero to Dürer, was the son of a miner. We know that Dürer’s family certainly held shares in mining ventures. Both first generation sons of skilled Gastarbeiters, both initiated into different kinds of metalwork by their fathers, Slessor and Dürer end up working in humanist and value-adding multicultural industries. Whether Slessor ever tried his hand at etching or engraving isn’t known, but he must certainly have observed the Lindsays doing etchings. Dürer, on the other hand, certainly wrote poems and was centrally involved in his friend Johannes Pirckheimer’s School for Poets in Nuremberg in the years 1498-1509. It is likely then that the conjunction in Slessor’s mind of metal (particularly iron and copper) and father underwrites “Nuremberg”’s suggestion of an affinity of ancestry.[Note 11] In this sense the “old alchemist” of line 10 is both Slessor and Dürer père. Since alchemy has the minor sense (as a verb) of, to plate or alloy (OED), Slessor’s father, like Dürer — his artistic father — knows the trade secrets of the chemical alteration of metal, but also the secret chemical and metalworking knowledge of how to seal off artistic work (platemaking) from “earthly change.”
     There is the question of whether Slessor was describing an actual engraving in “Nuremberg.” A manuscript copy of the poem in the National Library has the inscription: “inspired by a picture by Durer” (Haskell and Dutton 332). In fact there is no self-portrait of Dürer where he is working as an engraver. A number of commentators on this poem tend to assume there is. (Nor is there a print of Dürer by Meryon or Philip Lindsay, that I have been able to discover.) “Inspired by” needn’t imply “after” and Slessor is most likely taking off imaginatively from Dürer’s “St. Jerome in His Study” (1514), transposing this engraving into an ekphrastic self-portrait of Dürer. This print shows the old man in his study working at a writing-stand while sunlight streams through high, round-glass-paned windows to his right. It is interesting that James McAuley is the one Australian poet to have been drawn very closely to this poem. McAuley begins his essay on Dürer, “Albrecht Dürer: Self and World,” with a detailed discussion of the artist’s use of iron plates for engraving. McAuley surmises that Slessor read about Dürer’s use of iron for etching in T. Sturge Moore’s Albert Durer (1905) (235). We know that Dürer only did six iron etchings, and that he did them in the three years between 1515 and 1518. (There are no iron engravings, as Slessor’s poem suggests — “Dürer graving at intaglios” — by Dürer.) It may be that the technique of etching on iron, the earliest form of etching, was known from the decoration of armour (Landau and Parshall 323). Part of McAuley’s interest in Dürer is bound up with that flashpoint of aesthetic debate in Australia, the Ern Malley hoax of 1944. In the Dürer essay, McAuley goes out of his way to mention that
when a ‘come-on’ poem was needed at the beginning of Ern Malley’s The Darkening Ecliptic, it was Dürer’s watercolour of Innsbruck that came to mind to provide subject-matter. This poem was meant to be one of two or three on the boundary-line dividing the end of a supposed middle-period from the poet’s triumphant breakthrough into his final phase. What the poem claims is that the poet had often a pre-vision of Innsbruck before seeing Dürer’s picture: not a very credible assertion (McAuley 46).
“Pre-vision” needn’t mean much more than unconscious memory and it is curious that for McAuley Dürer seems to provide the focus for a set of anxieties about the poetic father-figure Slessor, the eruption of the unconscious skills of the mind in Ern Malley (that need to be undermined) and about Trakl and German modernism. Perhaps McAuley sees in Slessor’s fascination for Dürer a way of understanding his own fascination with Trakl, a poet of as radically divided a self as McAuley.
     The mention of armour, and therefore war, but also of the excess of meaning generated by the word “Dürer” in Australian literary discourse, reminds us of how much more the name “Nuremberg” has come to mean than Slessor could possibly have imagined in 1922. To go back to the city’s origins: the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, adorned with imperial eagles in Hartmann Schedel’s Chronicle of the World, Nuremberg’s financial district was in fact founded on the site of a pogrom. “The Hauptmarkt [...] originated with a licence granted by Emperor Charles IV in 1349. It was established on the site of the Jewish quarter, which had been razed to make way for it after a fierce pogrom in the same year. Five hundred and sixty-two Jewish lives were sacrificed to the city’s economic expansion” (Zika 32). In an act of genocidal revenge worthy of Reinhard Heydrich, the Frauenkirche, which housed the “town’s/[q]aint horologe,” was built on the site of the former synagogue. From its beginnings then, the history of Nuremberg over a period of more than 500 years is the history of a site of repressive imperial power (against the peasant uprisings of the 1520s), sunrise industries, arts patronage, violent anti-Semitism, Nazi state theatre, and international military judgement. Slessor’s poetic toy-town allows us to forget Nuremberg’s actual violent and even apocalyptic history. Slessor’s poem represents one tiny daylight moment in this tumultuous history, a moment of subjective autonomy and timeless art. In Dürer’s time there was another expulsion of Jews, in 1498, “perhaps not incidentally the year that Dürer brought out his illustrations of the Apocalypse” (Landau and Parshall 338). In 1933 Hitler declared Nuremberg the city of the Reich party congresses and they were held there until 1938. In April 1935, Hitler’s National Socialist government promulgated the Nürnberger Gesetze (Nuremberg Laws) to protect “German-blooded” individuals and to strip Jews further of their civil rights (Raff 285). In November 1938, the most memorable of modern pogroms, “Kristallnacht” was organised in Nuremberg by Goebbels (Raff 286). During the second world war, Nuremberg became “one of the sacred altars of Nazi Germany,” of crucial strategic and industrial importance (armaments and engineering), as it had been in Dürer’s lifetime (Taylor 4). It was on the outskirts of Nuremberg, where the most elaborate rallies and parades of the Third Reich were staged. Then in November 1945, Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice became the venue of the International Military Tribunal’s trials of German war criminals. So the Nuremberg epilogue of recent European history has invested the city’s name with the sense of judgement and retribution.
     Perhaps it is relevant here to think about the colourlessness of poetry, an exclusively black-and-white textual practice, and its analogies with visual forms. For many of today’s readers, Nuremberg exists only as Leni Riefenstahl’s grainy monochrome images of Parteitage. Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935), with its Wagnerian soundtrack and staging, is the most famous documentary of the pre-war Nuremberg party congresses (1934). Riefenstahl’s images have become hard-wired into the consciousness of post-second-world-war generations such that the word “Nuremberg” instantly conjures up footage of dark vistas of marching, uniformed men, swastika’d banners and brief close-ups of the Führer’s contorted face. For Slessor in 1921 Renaissance Germany may have had none of those political associations, but it was nevertheless powerfully imaged in the reproductions of Dürer’s sharply-etched black-and-grey art, a visual world also influenced by Charles Meryon’s colour-blind proto-modernist graphic art. So as the words of this poem take on their own post-1920s life, it is the monochrome material textuality of poetry that turns out to be as much a part of its modernist context as of its political shadings.
     Nor is the history of the figure of Dürer immune from the barbarism that sometimes engulfed his city. From the 1870s (the beginning of the modern era of Franco-German conflict) Dürer is appropriated into the propaganda of the Second Reich. The German writer Julius Langbehn, who sounds at times uncannily like Norman Lindsay, wrote a book titled Dürer als Führer (1904) which helped form the popular view of Dürer’s art as a “‘two-handed sword’ fit for slaying those twin dragons of French Impressionism and Art for Art’s Sake” (Hutchison 198-99).
By 1928, the four-hundredth anniversary of his death, Albrecht Dürer was so indispensable a member of every middle-class household and so powerful a political ally that a simple two- or three-day festival no longer seemed adequate: both 1928 and 1971, in consequence, were officially designated “Dürer Years,” like Papal Jubilees (Hutchison 199).
Slessor himself died during 1971, an official Dürer Year (five hundredth anniversary of his birth) and the occasion of the largest and most expensive Dürer festival in history (Hutchison 202). Writing this poem in the minor Dürerjahr 1921, exactly fifty years before, Slessor could hardly have guessed how Dürer and Nuremberg would become caught up in the culture of Hitler’s Third Reich and how the title of his poem and its subject would come to signify in relation to twentieth-century German history. Dürer was declared “so racially pure as to be featured on the cover of the Nazi publication Volk und Rasse,” while Nuremberg was declared by Hitler “‘the most German of German cities’” (Hutchison 200-01).[Note 12] The taint of Nazism hung controversially over the various occasions and publications of 1971. The antithesis of Slessor’s modernist Nuremberg, the apocalyptic Nuremberg was revived in modern memory during the grand Dürer year: a “1.75-million-mark multi-media show, Noricama, produced by Josef Svoboda of Prague, offered a fifteen-minute history of Nuremberg in which projections of Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse woodcuts were juxtaposed with film footage of the air raids of 1945” (Hutchison 203). In Australia, in the early 1920s, though, all that lay in the future, yet to be precipitated out of the chemical solution of history and furred, like copper, around the iron plates of Slessor’s antipodean Norimberga.
     All the same, in 1922, versions of German culture could be both celebrated (in Slessor’s “Nuremberg”) and vilified, by Norman Lindsay, between the covers of the same Australian magazine. Or so it seems. In the issue of Art in Australia in which “Nuremberg” first appears Norman Lindsay published a 15 page rant entitled “The Inevitable Future.” This typical piece of Lindsay rhetoric, a spin-off from Creative Effort published the previous year, characterises the history of Western modernity as an apocalyptic conflict between “savagery” and “Civilization.” It especially targets the savagery of the Germans. Only a “higher morality” (articulated and represented by the artist) can save humanity. But in fact, Lindsay and Slessor are expressing very similar beliefs. The horrors of the First World War that haunted Lindsay so badly were caused by a German “gentry” which made “moral weakness its first virtue” (27, 36). In Lindsay’s farrago of cultural history these lower forms of (bourgeois) life were, like much French literature and 90s Aestheticism, the “result of devitalized energy” (31). The higher vision of humanity, the only means by which civilization will survive, is represented in the creative efforts of great artists like Plato, Shakespeare and Beethoven (31), and presumably, by implication, Dürer. But it is in a moment of specifically aesthetic theorising in this piece that Lindsay expresses his anti-historical-materialist view of art:
     The process of civilization, therefore, must be a static one, conditioned by its intention, which is to keep mind in action. Its problem is one of stimulus, not change. Man not only cannot be changed, he must not be changed. Change would disorder the direction of his being here, which, once again, is to develop mind and produce life.
     The creative mind comes to earth completely regardless of any earth theory of progress as a forward movement in time. Indeed, the creative mind is the prime evidence before us that time is not a condition of movement from any fixed point of earth experience, but a condition of equality of mind.
This Ridley Scott-like theory of creativity is Lindsay’s real subject and it becomes clear that what “Germany” (also, variously, the “Goth” and “Tamerlane”) represents for him is “commercial [bourgeois] barbarism” (38), the antitheses to his transcendent artist-heroes. Lindsay’s essay expresses, in an incoherent and illogical way, what Slessor’s poem presents with considerable clarity and resonance: the (Australian) modernist anxiety about crisis and change and the nostalgia for a eurocentric otherworld of artistic timelessness that can provide an idealist haven from politico-economic reality and the onrush of history.
     The year in which Slessor’s poem was published in Thief of the Moon, 1924, was also the year in which the Bayreuth festival was held for the first time after the First World War. Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was performed at that festival and at the conclusion of the opera, Hans Sachs’ final words: “Therefore I say to you:/Honour your German masters./Then you will call up good spirits!/And if you favour their endeavours,/Even if the Holy Roman Empire/Should vanish in mist/For us would yet remain/Holy German art!” were greeted by the audience with a standing ovation (Millington 254). “[A]t the end of the performance the national anthem was sung and shouts of ‘Heil’ were also reported. Die Meistersinger had been taken up from the early years of the Second Reich as the ideal festival opera for patriotic occasions such as parades, commemorations and consecrations. In the Third Reich the work became almost obligatory to celebrate important events, including the party congress” (Millington 254). There is no evidence, of course, that Slessor was interested in German political developments in the early 1920s, although he was certainly aware of Wagner’s music — the second poem in Earth-Visitors, “Music,” written in 1926, makes several references to Wagner operas — but in so far as he is obviously fascinated by Nuremberg and Dürer, there is an important question about this poem, and for that matter about Australian modernism, Walter Abish’s question: how German is it?
     For Slessor in 1921, then, the word “Nuremberg” was already a powerful signal being broadcast by German history and at least some of its resonances for the Australian poet listening in on the twentieth-century with his fragile crystal-set, must have been audible, even if only subliminally. Who knows what secret or repressed affinities of nation and ancestry, or oedipal tangles of name and male subjectivity, attracted Slessor to Nuremberg and Dürer — Kenneth Adolphe Schloesser as he was until 1914 when his father had to change the family name. One thing that the German ancestry of this poem underwrites, however faintly, is its modernist (and Wagnerian) separation of politics and art and the repression of the one in the interests of privileging the other. In 1922 the word “Nuremberg” already carried with it the ideal of a glorious past, a culture more recently under threat and an unconscious sublimation of politics into art. It was to go on to accrue much more leaden associations, the ones it has for us today. In writing this poem, in taking down the dictée on his modernist receiver, Slessor made himself into Australia’s Meistersinger of Nuremberg.

Philip Mead

Kenneth Slessor: A Lyric Poet in the Era of Modernity

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Notes

Works Cited