Back to this writer’s Contents page

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

in conversation with David McCooey

¶ David McCooey: Let’s begin with drawing. Your drawings are non representational and organic looking. Does this come from surrealism?

Chris Wallace-Crabbe: It comes a little from surrealism; a little from artists as different as Paul Klee and Arshile Gorky but particularly from the fact that I wanted to do something that wasn’t an imitation of what I did in writing but was parallel to it. I wanted to sit down in front of blank sheets of paper and invent a language, and over the past fifteen years or so that I have been drawing I have developed a kind of language of forms; a set of little biomorphic shapes that constitute the language of that world.

¶ In ‘Drawing’ you say ‘I can’t draw squiggles that would make you weep’. Is drawing, then, a sabbatical for your mind, a kind of diversion?

I don’t know. It might also be a general point about the visual arts; they less often manage poignancy, let alone tragedy, than literature or music. Though there are some artists who are incredibly poignant: Vermeer and Van Gogh, perhaps, and Francis Bacon. They can all be extremely poignant. Very moving.

¶ Is that because of the particular stylisation of the visual arts or something about writing and music?

It’s to do with the stylisation. It is also to do with the fact that it is hard for the visual arts to seem pathetic or tragic unless they show recognisable human actors involved in a narrative situation that generates deep pathos. It is very hard for abstract painting to do much that is full of pathos, although there are a lot of interesting arguments, particularly about Mark Rothko whose work is held to be deeply religious.

¶ He wanted us to hold that didn’t he?

That’s right, and the question I often ask is would we have ever have dreamt it had we not been told by him that these abstract patches of colour were religious.

¶ So is your drawing purely decorative or is it saying something about — I don’t know — your psyche, to get back to surrealism for a moment?

I think it’s saying something about the psyche. I want them to be decorative and pleasing, but I think there are also ways of exploring what can be said. My diction is extremely mixed and the kinds of forms in my drawings, even though they partake in some sense of one language, stretch that language gracefully at one end of the scale and bizarrely at the other end.

¶ That mixture of modes is one of your most obvious stylistic features. I imagine that one of the drawbacks of having a definable style would be self parody. Do you ever find yourself saying ‘that is a bit too Wallace-Crabbe’?

Yes, certainly. Auden says somewhere that in one’s later years the danger is of on the one hand self parody and on the other hand wanting to be taken for a prophet. Certainly self parody is something I am pulled up by sometimes and sometimes it results in a poem simply being discarded or put away in the back superannuation folder. These poems often do the same things as the better poems: often a mixture of small landscape or diurnal townscape details mixed with psychological or metaphysical questions but often they are so jagged and fragmented that they seem to me not to be shapely.

¶ You are a cataloguist aren’t you?

I suppose there is a bit of cataloguing in what I do. I would like to know the names of everything.

¶ Does this have anything to do with knowledge? putting the world together piece by piece?

It does, and I sometimes get distressed when I find there is an area of knowledge that I don’t know enough about. I don’t know enough of the names I use say in physiology. Geology I am not too bad at.

¶ Is there anything you are not interested in?

Anything I am not interested in...? Managerial practice.

¶ Childhood has been a major concern of your writing. Is it your own childhood in which you are interested, or the condition of childhood generally?

We all go back into what raw materials we can. For me, childhood is an inexhaustible fount, a period in which I suffered no damage, an age of wonderful stories (and verses, like Stevenson’s) which were larger than our mere lives. Then we had four-and-a-half years of exotic letters from Asia and the Middle East, with my father’s drawing of things oriental, and also exotic gifts; it was as though Father Christmas lived in Delhi or Beirut, all the year round. But I also have a deep interest — via Wordsworth, Freud, van den Berg, Foo Davies, and co — in how the childhood twig contrives to shape all our trees. It’s interesting that childhood is followed by adolescence, which is an especially grim period.

¶ Do you feel that a childhood like yours could only have happened in Australia? Were you born at a propitious time?

Well, you may be right. Australia was a magic land of childhood, in the days when everyone had a garden, of sorts. With a bit of garden or back lane and an old tennis ball, you could create the world. (‘Like God himself, but without the horsepower.’) And the climate in any Australian city, except for the Deep North, is so good: you can do things in the open, all year round. I was born in the Baby Slump, the arse-end of the Depression, so there weren’t too many of us around.

We were inertly happy. Perhaps my deepest childhood image is that of slipping into the deliciously cold sheets in Aunt Violante’s sleepout at Black Rock, under a row of windows which gave onto apple trees, their leaves as bright green as European culture itself; beyond the apple trees were flowering gums, yellow cape broom, bougainvillea, and chooks.

¶ I’d like to talk a little about your brother [the artist Robin Wallace-Crabbe] who published an autobiography earlier this year [A Man’s Childhood]. Did he ever give you advice about drawing?

No, not really. I did one year’s drawing at RMIT in the evening. Robin did encourage me to think about print making and etching, so I pursued that with Tim Bass at the VCA and spent a day doing a few etchings and liked the result so that’s something I might press on with.

¶ Did you ever talk to Robin about writing?

I told him which books I liked and what I liked about them. But much earlier, when we were teenagers to young adults, we talked together quite a lot about our writing and painting and our shared interests.

¶ Well let’s talk about his autobiography, A Man’s Childhood. You had no idea he was writing.

I had no idea he was writing it so it came as an astonishing fact. When I read it I was intrigued by the kinds of things that autobiography does and the relation it has to a life that one has substantially shared with the autobiographer because it seemed to me (and this might be a commonplace about people’s lives) that there were whole areas of experience which he remembered as near as dammit exactly the same as I would have remembered. Some of the things about my Aunt Violante, some of the things about settling into the partly-new suburb of East Ivanhoe with a lot of bush along the river banks and swimming in the river and that kind of thing about being plucked out of an inner-suburban environment and put out in the suburbs: about many of those things I felt exactly the same as he did or as near as dammit.

¶ Has Robin’s account of his childhood made you revise the way you view your childhood?

As you must have seen, Robin views much in our early lives differently. His world is/ was so much sexier. And poor old Dad emerges as a rival for Phyl’s affections. Our understanding of landscapes is remarkably close: our Black Rock, our East Ivanhoe, really match. No wonder, then, that we started out liking the same painters: Klee, Matisse, van Gogh, Piero della Francesca, Modigliani. But you can’t get over the fact that I was the big brother, competing with adults, whereas he could use me as a decoy duck or stalking horse, while remaining the Young Lord and Master, himself.

¶ Was the persona recognisable as your brother?

The persona is recognisable as my brother but was surprising in some of the directions he took and the intensity of some of the experiences that he had passed through. Some of the more extreme of these experiences, the sexual ones or the brush with death, were ones that I really hadn’t known about. On the other hand, other things like the teenage idyll were things that I had glimpsed the exterior of so there are a whole range of things. And because the book is made up in such a cubist way or such a collection of tesserae I found that one whole chapter would be a very familiar Robin and another would represent a part of him that I could only have guessed at before then. Although at least one critic hasn’t liked this, most critics have seen (justly, I believe) that this is exactly the strength of his way of representing the complex and divided self.

¶ A big difference — as you have mentioned — is the descriptions of your parents. The return of your father from the war occurred at an earlier age for Robin. Do you think that was the crucial difference as to how you both responded to your father?

I think it is absolutely crucial. For me he was someone whom I had known and whose letters and drawings and so on had come steadily back during the four or five years overseas manifested himself and seemed like a harmless brother; whereas for Robin who had only been an infant when his father went away to the war, here is this stranger whose absence has made his mother unhappy and who now comes back and enters her life intrusively and talks about a war and international travel that are meaningless to Robin as a young boy. So for Robin there is a kind of tyrannical cuckoo in the nest whom he deeply resents.

¶ For him, too, it seems to be bound up with definitions of masculinity and the importance of particular parts of the family. I’m thinking of your father’s relations in particular. That doesn’t seem to have bothered you in the same way.

Well the definitions of masculinity are strong in my father’s family. My father grew up with a different set of imperatives from my mother. My mother came from working class Fitzroy and Clifton Hill and for her culture, music, poetry, essays and things like that were always climbing out of that working class and putting it utterly behind her. My father came (like her) from a Scottish background, but a Scottish background that was racketeer and was in one sense classless in that it went up and down but certainly wasn’t working class. It was military, journalistic, a bit artistic and so on, so there must have always been this sense for my mother that my father’s family were putting her down and she was grimly holding onto gentility which they didn’t have to affect because they were confident in their noisy selves.

¶ Your brother’s autobiography also highlights strongly your mother’s response to this. He even says that she has the ‘power of madness.’ Is this the same mother that you knew?

Yes it is the same mother, but he is putting it somewhat differently. I also sometimes saw her adopting a kind of guerilla-warfare policy. That is, my father would set out to tell one of his stories or to expand upon the history of the world or something like this and she would just giggle destructively and cut him off at the knees.

¶ So if this is madness there is method in it. Is that right?

Yes. Sometimes there was method in it. I’m sure frequently she was depressed and lonely and she gritted her teeth and soldiered on.

¶ Despite these differences it seems to me that there are a number of interesting stylistic similarities between you and your brother.

I’d like to hear about those.

¶ Well, I think there is that nice mix of facetiousness and pathos particularly at the end of the autobiography; there is the lack of regard for authority (perhaps more pronounced in Robin); there is the love of digression; there is interest in the tragi-comic mode...

Yes, I can see a number of these things in common and sometimes when we are talking together I can see the same kind of subversive humour playing off in both our tones as we say to one another in most decorous tones, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good idea to give them all hell’.

¶ Let’s return to your youth. When did you first start writing and who were you reading?

Did I decide to be a poet? I never made it into the school magazine, that’s for sure. I read some poetry while at the Mint, more in the Air Force — Hopkins, Eliot, Rilke, Baudelaire, Dorothy Sayers’ Dante. And then, like a mighty storm, Yeats. Some time in that decade I turned my back on writing free verse, seeing it as part of the Fascist past; accordingly I put Pound on hold for a while, though I was intrigued by Marianne Moore. At some stage I’d heard Slessor, Manifold and Judith Wright on the wireless, and it suddenly came to me that modern verse could be written in one’s own country, using ironbarks and pepperinas.

¶ Since we’re clearing a little space in the bush, let’s talk about landscape and place a bit. Let me quote a couple of things that you have written that in retrospect take on an interesting resonance. ‘The world of the imagination suffers without fairies — none in the Australian landscape, alas’ (Journal: Jan — May, 1968). ‘What we have lacked is an Adamic namer’ ( Melbourne or the Bush). You have tried to remedy both lacks haven’t you? How did you come to writing your ‘Puck’ series? (And please don’t say, ‘sheer genius’). You were, I take it, trying to avoid the Vision school of fairies...

If landscape is deeply meaningful, or even — dare I say it? — sacred we want to find ways to talk about it, to denote its aura. What I wrote in the sixties and still feel, despite the changed visibility of Aboriginal art and poetry, is that our deep, ancient, available stories come from Europe and not from the lovely Australian landscapes. And conversely, when one goes to Europe the landscapes have depth of cultural meaning but look physically twee, as though they merely imitated art. The gorgeous banksia can’t have the same range of meanings as rose or foxglove. I took on Puck because he struck me as an energetic larrikin fairy, liable for transportation.

¶ The point about an ‘Adamic namer’ is, I suppose, related to the one regarding seeing the European landscape as ‘overwritten’. But how do you avoid the myth of Australia as empty, ageless and without history? Or is it rather a way of seeing the relationship differently?

The danger of seeing antipodean landscapes as uninscribed is that you then fall back into weak postcolonialism. We have to write with Whitmanesque gumption and gusto, putting in the things that we want to be there, to be here. And in the end Australia has many histories: Mozart in Oz, cricket in Oz, roast beef in Oz, Wittgenstein in Oz, and Granny Smith apples. It was looking at Turner’s paintings, particularly ‘The Golden Bough’ that led me to see my own natal land more strongly, more complicatedly: ‘bringing it up rich’, as God says about the world in my dramatic monologue about him.

¶ Do you ever worry about obscurity?

I find obscurity very dark.

¶ Within your own work...Stop being funny.

You’re not going to stop me being funny. Yes I do. And that is the reason why with another side of my writing I press in to pick up popular topoi and popular voices, because I know that anyone who has such an exhilarated and hypnotised sense of the possibilities of language is likely, like me or like Hopkins, or like Les Murray, to be obscure.

On the other hand, one might say that obscurity might depend on a very wide range of reference, and is that then a danger for a modern poet? My sense is it’s not a danger. There are no pluses in being ignorant and the great novelists of the nineteenth century, for instance, whom we now regard, or affect to regard, as having been democratically middle brow were not at all abashed about being learned as well. That is to say, you don’t get any points for not knowing about history, the Bible, literature, at least a popular sense of nuclear physics, what’s happening in astronomy at a reasonably accessible level. There are no minuses for knowing these things. So why should not one allude to them? I mean if poets are not learned or are not absolutely heart piercing why should any one read them instead of prose which is much easier?

¶ In your poetry you are constantly coming back to the ever-changing unchanging elements of nature such as clouds, stars, waves. What is it about these things?

Ah yes, that lyrical, Hardyesque foursome. They all represent for me articulated versions of the Oceanic Feeling. They combine infinite variety with repetitive sameness, like a sclerophyll forest.

¶ Getting back to drawing for a moment I would have thought if you were to draw in a naturalistic way you would draw clouds, light, the eccentric Australian landscape. Would that be true?

Yes I’d like to be able to paint clouds. I greatly admire painters who have been good at doing clouds. There are great clouds in Giorgione and in Poussin, Constable, Turner, early Streeton.

¶ Clouds and light: is it partly a technical interest? an interest in the way art can hold onto the fleeting and illustrate what must be very difficult to illustrate, something numinous that changes all the time? Is that part of your interest or not?

I suppose part of it is technical. Yes. Part of it is also, as you are further suggesting in your question, the interrelation of transience with forms. That is, clouds, by their very nature, are extremely transient and yet they amass pleasing forms for the viewer and they do interesting things in high wind, at sunset, sunrise, the different contrast of patternings; just like my interest in leaves which seem endlessly variable and changing. It is partly technical. How on earth would one ever — I frequently say to a class — how on earth would you ever paint or write about all the leaves on a tree? And yet in a way that is asking people to look at how life is because life includes that massive plurality. There is another completely physiological thing that strikes me which is I have got very keen long sight, so any world in which I am, say, talking to people in the foreground, the trees and clouds in the background are also as sharp edged as they are, so the whole depth of focus is alive, changing and vibrant for me.

¶ Let’s move onto your forthcoming book, Whirling. Let me give you a rundown of how I read the manuscript. It seems a very summery, even more light-filled book than your others; it’s interested in memory and place as they go together; but it is also slightly darkened by the gods and shades of various sorts. Is that a fair assessment?

I am a very summery poet. I suppose there’s that in me which couldn’t imagine living anywhere else but in Australia and there’s that in me which delights in the openness of summer (not that I necessarily want it to be hot), but summer symbolises a lot of things for me about nature and culture coming into harmony with one another; about the psyche waking up and saying ‘this morning gives us promise of a glorious day’. Summer stands for a kind of positive. I also like seasons per se because of their cyclicity and one of the things I’m always interested in is the cyclicity of generations of eras, of species, of historical movements. I don’t have a Nietzschean sense of eternal recurrence but I do think of the things that we respond to as cyclic. For example, when people talk so much about greenhouse gases and the ozone layer I think with due ecological anxiety about this, but I also think of the innumerable times if there has been three cycles of warming and cooling and it may be that earth has to change a bit and at some stage, alas, earth may have to get rid of a few billion of us.

¶ A lot of your poems, particularly in this collection, such as ‘Floro-Biography’ and ‘One Life or Many?’ seem to be bringing nature and selfhood together more and more. Is this happening in your poetry?

I think that is absolutely true. I think nature and selfhood get closer and closer together. For some mysterious reason I don’t weary of nature as I weary frequently of my fellow human beings and the things that they’ve constructed. As political practice grows more and more disgusting the circulation of the seasons fails to be disgusting and particularly at a time when politics are so extremely nasty as now. It seems to me that both right and left have subscribed to a kind of punitive materialism in which any belief we hold that doesn’t return profits to the companies is regarded as trivial and chattering.

¶ Are you being attracted again to writing political poetry?

Yes, I am a little. If I write more political poetry it will probably be much further left in many areas than it was before — not in all areas, but certainly in areas of economics, jobs, social justice, a sense of resistance to cultural imperialism.

¶ When you showed Whirling to your editor at Oxford University Press was there any sense from her that it might have been too summery, not dark enough?

There may have been a little and that might have been connected to the final adjustment of contents that I put together. There was also hesitation from her, from my wife, from friends over the title.

¶ So you wanted to get away from the For Crying Out Loud, I’m Deadly Serious type of title?

That’s right. There are very Wallace-Crabbish titles that I’ve considered like The Parrot Can’t Sing, The Dog is a Ventriloquist but I wanted to have something compact. I was even tempted by more grimly one-word titles like Destiny but that seemed going a bit far.

¶ I’d like to talk a bit more generally about your poetry. Do you think that your poetry falls into two phases?

Two phases, yes. There’s an early phase that goes up to Where the Wind Came, which is handling a particular set of problems. The hinge-book is The Emotions are Not Skilled Workers.

¶ What about The Foundations of Joy?

The Foundations of Joy is an interesting little book, because that’s the one where I’m hunting around to see who I’m going to be next. When I went to make the Selected Poems, until I evened things out, I was tempted to put more poems from that slender little book than from a number of the much bigger books. It seems to me to be daring and restless and genuinely odd in the way in which it is finding new ways to write poetry.

¶ Is it just a coincidence that it happened to be a ‘Paperback Poets’ book? Did you think, this is part of that series, let’s loosen up?

No: it was sheer coincidence. A lot of the poems were written during a very depressed time in the West of England, in which I was looking for a new way of writing and there were various kinds of poems which we were building upon — where I got to with the earlier books, particularly Where the Wind Came, and there was something very psychologically complicated going on in that little book. Something between despair and exhilaration.

¶ Your Oxford collections seem marked by a continued use of free verse along with the construction of interesting stanzaic or stanzaic-like forms. What can you tell me about that? Do these stanzaic shapes present themselves at once, or do you ‘work them up’? You’re not using feet to determine line length as such are you?

There’s a lot of mystified confusion about form in Australian poetry. Formal decisions are only of any importance with respect to what they can express. Nothing is intrinsically admirable about inherited metres and nothing is avant-garde about free verse (the heroic couplets of the late twentieth century?), but critics with their own political agendas find the superficies of form to be a way of simplifying all the issues raised by their reading. It’s important for some pedagogues to have simple categories to impart, or impose. As a poet, I find that most poems demand their form. I’m an old enough hand to be able to ‘do’ free rhythms, semi-stanzas, poems with an iambic base, or whatever. When the first few lines of a poem flow into my consciousness they’ll declare pretty much the Gestalt to which the poem will aspire. Not always, though: with ‘The Lorelei’ and ‘The Crims’, say, there was a policy decision to use ballad form because the imaginative stuff of the poem was going to be essentially balladic; and occasionally a poem will spring out of the very struggle with a formal challenge; ‘Practical Politics’ would be an example, and quite fun, too. By now I don’ think about feet anymore than I think about the handlebars when riding a bike. But I must say I’m often amazed at how often Australian reviewers get stuck on form: the great Russian poets of this century were surely far more strict about form than any Aussies (except perhaps for Harold Stewart) and it didn’t geld their passion one jot or tittle. For myself, I admire the way Stravinsky, Picasso, Auden were versatile masters of available or invented forms. All three could improvise, like good one-day cricketers.

¶ One of the poems in Whirling was commissioned by the Victorian Opera. Do you like commissions?

I love commissions. Commissions, deadlines, things like that. I like them not only because they set a time to things but also because they give you the opportunity to mix with someone who is coming from another frame of reference and I think that should always be inspiring for a creative artist to have to do something for someone else. I still wonder if Les Murray wrote the jingle ‘This Goes With This Goes With That’ at Sussan. It is rumoured that he did and he didn’t deny it when I recently suggested it. If it was the right kind of product I wouldn’t mind writing for an advertisement or whatever. Some commissions might turn out to be too hard and so on, like many years ago [1966–67] when Peter Sculthorpe and I tried to write an opera and we just weren’t able to get our acts together.

¶ You have done quite a lot of work with the artist Bruno Leti. How does that work?

Once we’ve got to know one another we’ve become free to work in several different directions. He has on occasions started from existing poems of mine. On another occasion, as with the old pieces of galvanised irons that he picked up in the disused gold field at Clunes, he had the idea first of this old iron from a gold field and its historicity and he made prints by flattening out these pieces of old iron. This gave me a theme (the use of iron in human culture) around which I wrote a suite of poems. We also did something on wood which is going to be issued in a book next year. Sometimes it starts from his end, sometimes from my end, sometimes we have sat down together and develop something jointly.

¶ You’ve just finished or you’re in the process of finishing a couple of big projects for the Oxford University Press. You’ve just finished The Oxford Book of Australian Literary Anecdotes...

That was great fun because it was on the happy borderline between scholarship and self amusement, since an anecdote is such a dodgy, charming grasshopper-like figure. It’s been very interesting plucking out anecdotes that are sometimes comic, sometimes plangent, sometimes seem to sum up the whole of an artist’s work.

¶ Did you find trouble getting enough material or was there oodles?

There was plenty of material, but it was sometimes surprising to find writers whose work didn’t generate anecdotes. It would have been possible to get far more if one allowed merely oral forms but then the sky would be the limit. ‘Did you hear the one about how X and Y was screwing and they got caught by Z?’ There is no room for those I am afraid, so I’ve had to rely on things that had some published or at least some written form.

¶ I imagine certain figures stand out. Barry Humphries...

There is a lot of Barry Humphries, Henry Lawson, Brennan, Clive James, Nettie Palmer, A. D. Hope.

¶ I’d like to finish on the fact that you’ve just recently retired from Melbourne University after ‘a long association’. Could you give a few images which help define that place for you?

Perhaps I can quote Alec Hope: ‘Now that I have retired at last and feel thirty years of academic drudgery lift from me, it is surprising what I thought ingrained habits of mind dissolve and leave me in a pleasantly indeterminable attitude to things and books and writing. It is the way a cicada must feel, wet and weak after climbing out of its carapace and 14 years below ground’ [1].

To leave the leaf-fringed, sandstone arena of university teaching is just to walk out into another part of one’s life; and I’ve always tried to ensure that my life — postmodern in this way, if you like — had many separate parts. For all its enabling comforts, a campus tricks like other institutions; it can be mean, bureaucratic, fusty, silly, or foolishly trendy, but it does come up with a great supply of enthusiastic students. It is the Garden of Eternal Youth. And it gave me one especially pleasing poem: ‘Exit the Players’, which ends:

Ophelia’s hair is dry; she didn’t say much
but wouldn’t mind slipping over to the pub
with Rosencrantz — why does he have to keep nattering
to the King? It’s drinking time. Stiff Guildenstern
will not forgive Polonius and, to boot,
has lost his biro somewhere round the place.
It could have been worse. The dead all kept their tempers,
Gertrude cracked several, Hamlet one good joke
and they got through the whole agenda, perhaps because
Fortinbras is still on sabbatical leave.