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Alan Wearne

Spirit and Action

On John Forbes, 1950–1998

This piece is 3,500 words or about 6 printed pages long.
You can read more material about John Forbes on this site, and also in the issue of Jacket magazine (Jacket 3) that is dedicated to his memory.

(i) lodestar

John was talking about poetry, or at any rate the poetry world, when he died, and somehow you can believe he was doing much the same when he was born. Certainly the subject took up an amount of his conversational life, though poetry could, as easily, lead into other areas in John’s eclectic, ever-expanding mind and imagination: the US civil war, the novels of Patrick O’Brian, the novels of Anthony Powell, tips for the races, Kathleen Ferrier singing Gluck, Chuck Berry singing Brown Eyed Handsome Man , what the loopier Australian politicians were up to, the Catholic church, his Catholic upbringing, and on and on... Still, poetry was the lodestar, for since poetry could contain so much if not everything, everything returned to poetry. Yes poetry: as much the total sum of it as possible: which meant so much more to John than his own work and career.

John despised verse careerists, though he forgave those who had talent, and he often despaired of reputations he believed were based on the concept of the poet-as-mini-celeb. The tin ear in both writer and reader angered him (he was its greatest enemy) for few had such a fine-tuned sense as he had of a poem’s sound. Oh how he hated bad art! No, not bad art, but rather art that thought itself crash hot and decidedly wasn’t. He, who had put so much into his poems expected not necessarily works of genius but at least more than a serve of spirit and action. Poems of Spirit and Action was an early school anthology and this title, which John loved and intended to appropriate one day, sums up the vigour with which he encountered the craft both as writer and reader.

The last thing we talked about was Bruce Dawe’s sucess: how he wrote about ‘issues’, how schools studied ‘issues’, how, therefore Dawe sold lots of books in schools (how, as likely, if he hadn’t made a fortune from his art he must have made more than we had!). All this was on the phone, Wednesday; John died on the Saturday. The previous Saturday we had met to watch The Merchant of Venice on tv, and for me to read to John the latest installment of my never ending (as it would seem) work-in-progress. The Merchant is a static work, given more to tableaux than activity, yet aside from the rather creepy plot (which makes it more than ever a ‘problem play’ and thus deserving of constant reinterpretation and performance) apart from all that it is drenched in poetry. There’s probably too much of it and there sure was on that evening. What now? To follow so much Shakespeare with my own work on a heatwave January night was becoming an increasingly hopeless scheme. John, besides, was very tired; it made him blunt: ‘Sorry Al, but after Shakespeare you just don’t rate!’


(ii) ‘moonface’

Generous, irascible, contradictory, guilt-doomed, naive, worldly-wise, John deserved most of the legends that enveloped him, even those that were in the ‘Wasn’t but should’ve been’ category. For much of the Australian poetry world and its supporters he was the best loved of us all.

To say that he devoted his life to poetry means much more than that he wrote constantly and tirelessly for over twenty five years creating an intense opus equal to and probably surpassing any of his contemporaries. For him, poetry meant other writers — indeed anyone he believed in from Virgil at least (he was a strong backer of the Day Lewis versions ofThe Georgics ) right though to those newcomers he was supporting through criticism, enthusiasm and friendship.

He was a wide and deep incessant reader of the stuff, and his devotion to the art is for me a benchmark. It’s a measure of the writer that when you think of him you think not just of these great poems he wrote but, as much, those many other poets and poems he was attracted to (and wanted the rest of the world to know about).

Of course when he backed you the blinkers could very easily go on and never be removed. Which doesn’t mean that he would let you get away with mediocre verse, far from it, but once he had established what he felt you were on about little altered his visions. One of the major characters in my verse novel The Lovemakers is Gibbo, an obnoxious comedian/ breakfast announcer/ singer-songwriter, the court jester to many an eighties entrepeneur. This creation however is nowhere near the personality John had in mind: ‘Moonface’, Bert Newton, the king of mid-morn infotainment.

Forbes (for about the tenth time): That Gibbo, he’s ‘Moonface’ isn’t he?
Wearne (ditto): ‘Moonface’?
Forbes (increasingly eager): Yes! What’s’name on tv! ‘Moonface’!
Wearne (already sensing the inevitable): Bert Newton?
Forbes (overjoyed): Yes! ‘Moonface’!
Wearne (by this time annoyed): Gibbo’s nothing like ‘Moonface’!
Forbes (bewildered): He isn’t?
Wearne (...even angered): No!
Forbes (miffed): Oh...

Given a week, however, and some unsuspecting third party would be informed ‘Al’s writing this novel and it’s all about ‘Moonface!’’

Mind you such dead ends were inevitably worth it, being part of the whole Forbes package: for if he believed in your stuff, truely he became the leader of the claque. Over the years, as I took him touring that labyrinth which was becoming my second verse novel, John became a great colleague to bounce both plot and characters off, and once sections were in working order, to listen to a recital. The demands of my plots meant that parts of the work be set in suburban Sydney of twenty, thirty, forty years ago, and, since John had spent his adolescence there, where else but the Sutherland Shire? So in the Shire of my mind I invented a group of kids (who included four Catholic school girls) who grow into adulthood and middle age through much of the work. Liz, Monica, Chrissie and Louise rather appealed to John. ‘That’s them isn’t it?’ he’d beam, ‘that’s the Catholic school girls!’ Of course he knew the land I’d come from: much of what occurs in my novel’s Shire had been transplanted from my past. That summer’s Saturday when John and his brother Greg took me touring Sutherland, Miranda and Cronulla, well apart from the ocean, the bays and the different goal posts, it could have been Eastern Suburban Melbourne, anywhere east of Middleborough Road.


(iii) frank

John converted ‘poetry to hamburgers’ better than anyone I know, but one book he would never sell was the collected Frank O’Hara. He had already lost one copy, stolen along with other volumes and his pack as he slept beside an Amsterdam canal. Of course the Frank and John Show would be a constant throughout his life: little delighted him as much as going on your nerve FO’H-style (besides was anything less like John’s two bêtes noires: careerism and the tin ear?). Frank, that camp, elegant iconoclast of the fifties and sixties New York art scene, was for John ‘a killer’ who led a deadly talented gang: Ashbery, Koch, Schulyer, Berrigan (at whose age John died) Padgett, Shapiro, Waldman (he once gave our friend Ethel Tillinger a selected Waldman with the cryptic ‘Don’t believe them! Yrs John’ for an inscription).

When it comes to those games poet-watchers love to play, categorization and hunt-the-influence, John has been continually allocated the New York School for father figures. (And this probably is the case, but as he got older, many British poets offered him much more enjoyment than countless Americans; he would rather pick up a Ewart than a Duncan, put it that way.) True, he was a great believer in models, even in imitation, knowing that if a poet was good enough any acquired skins would be eventually, if not easily, shed. (How funny yet how apt, we both agreed, that all those would-be poets who are so determined not to read poetry — since somehow it will endanger their ‘creativity’ — all sound so strikingly similar.) That Messrs O’Hara, Ashbery and Berrigan were echoed and on occasions mentioned in John’s poems doesn’t mean he was just some kind of antipodean variant. Certainly he was a most Australian of poets, the reference points and concerns continuing to be ours, though not so much ours that they didn’t allow other cultures acess to enjoyment. Would it be too far fetched to think that John (celebrator of so much that is Sydney) was as much an heir of Slessor as of O’Hara?

Still, had things worked out a touch better he, rather than Tranter, might’ve become the Honorary Consul of the New York School. This is the tale as John Forbes told it: it’s Manhattan, mid 1975, and he looks up Ron Padgett in the phone book... which is of course the easy part. John calls but this New Yorker is busy. According to Forbes his reply was ‘Mr Padgett, I’ve come half way round the world to meet you and this is how you treat me!’ before slamming the phone down. But was it even partially like this? Or are we in that area of Forbesmyth (part hyperbole, part self deprecation, part imagination) constructed so as to make us feel both sorrow and anger equally for Forbes and Padgett?*

Well here’s something that I’m sure occured later that year: why? because I observed it. We are at a party in London and, somehow (and 25 years later I know not how) John, having gotten into a mildly drunken (or stoned?) reverie, is reciting The Man From Snowy River in front of a rather snooty young woman from, let’s say, Sydney’s North Shore. Her impatience seems manifest: this, after all, isn’t why she’d come to England, that is for sure!

Earlier, in New York, John had souvenired a NYPD badge out of a hostel bedroom draw, which he sewed into the crotch of his jeans (at that time starting to split). Perhaps he was wearing them that night in London? What with the badge, the jeans, Banjo Patterson, the cultured missy from Pymble, and John of course, it surely should’ve been dreamt. Though if it was John, later, certainly had a better dream. The Sydney Push was having a fun run to Kiama. Somehow, at a surf beach along the NSW South Coast, Henry Lawson came out of the waves and baton-like passed John a bottle of beer. And my god, you wonder, those waking dreams that must have been afoot when John was creating at his best.


(iv) odes

‘So,’ says the outside world, ‘who or what was he like?’ Coleridge, says Tranter, though admittedly more in relation to John’s personality than verse. Then again
he also saw parallels between Ben Jonson’s visit to Drummond of Hawthornden and Forbes just dropping by Chez Tranter to air his opinions (usually on other poets) loudly into the night. Come to think of it his poems often have a certain Jonsonian feel to them: delicate yet muscular/ muscular yet delicate (and so often with a classical underlay) you’d feel sure only large, sensitive educated men could have written these works.

Of course once you start casting around the best in our language for parallels comparing John with whoever comes to mind may be little more than a game. Still let me put in Andrew Marvell for a primary bid: and why not, since both have precision, concision, wit and intellectual passion. And as both distill their contemporary worlds both also contemplate eternity.

Wearne: I tried reading Upon Appleton House this morning.
Forbes: That’s a great poem isn’t it?
Wearne: Sure is. Do you know what it’s about?
Forbes: Haven’t a clue. Do you?
Wearne: No.

Whatever the late 20th Century equivalent to the odes that Jonson and Marvell did so well John loved the idea of them and some of their grandest practitioners (he was besotted with Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity and alas I always meant to ask him why). Then there were those strange Late Augustans who followed Pope: Gray, Thomson, Collins, and Cowper. What a shame John didn’t live to see Kenneth Koch’s fine hommage to Thomson’s The Seasons ; what a pity, being an enthusiast for Cowper’s The Task he only briefly considered it the subject for a thesis. (An aside which doubtless has its germination somewhere in the Forbes/ Wearne conversations: if James Schulyer wasn’t a 20th Century Cowper and his large scale works such asThe Crystal Lithium and Hymn to Life aren’t direct descendents of The Task I’ll go he.)

Our friend Robert Langsford, although dying of Aids, still held plenty of parties with him usually propped on a couch in ‘Beulah, peel me a grape’ mode, pumped full of what was keeping him alive and sane, whilst his Prahran home bopped along to plenty of reggae. At one such event Robert read us Thomas Gray’s Ode on the death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes. John knew this could be topped in the way In Memory of My Feelings tops Lana Turner has collapsed!, or indeed how Speed, a pastoral tops At the Pool. As a kind of Paradise Lost in miniature (as I’ve read somewhere) Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College made John extemely excited as the poet in 100 lines watches schoolboys at play and muses on the fate that awaits them. The tension slowly accrues and then, after Gray has finally shown how ghastly life will be after loss of innocence, the work concludes

To each his suff’rings: all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender for another’s pain,
Th’ unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate?
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies.
Thought would destoy their paradise.
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
‘Tis folly to be wise.

‘Christ!’ cried John, ‘It’s enough to make you go out and hang yourself!’


(v) shape

I’ll try to imagine what might have been John’s opinion on those tight (and maybe even formal) structures that worked: there was an intensity to be maintained (though with appropriate shadings and modulations) and to do that every word had to be the right one in the right place at the right time. And that’s what he found in Gray and Wilbur and Manifold. It’s what he always tried to do with his work, although he was also constantly set with going on his nerve. Mind you, some of his opinions still seem unfathomable. Though hardly a Robert Lowell fan, he did think he had written a grand couplet. ‘It’s really great,’ I was informed:

There, a maternal nineteenth century
Italian statue of Persephone.

Eh? Then there were his own rhymes, which when they occured were an erratic series of weird-enough one-syllable echoes that, somehow, helped knit the piece together yet (no surprises) truly worked. Mind you, W.S. Gilbert he wasn’t.

Though he loved the idea of both going on his nerve yet keeping that formal balance (and he did this better than any of us) John always had props to assist him, those devices to aid in the creation of art, which can be both applauded because the poet surmounts their challenges so well, and ignored because as scaffolding they blend so well into the finished structure. I was always rather awed that quite often he saw the actual poem’s shape before the piece had been commenced. This was particularly the case with many of those small rectangular lyrics that inhabit much of his earlier work: To the Bobbydazzlers, Angel, A Loony Tune, Floating. And you have to ask: the sheer look of a poem and John was in no sense a concreter? Of course it was no more ludicrous than someone deciding that today it’ll be ten haiku or a Meredithian sonnet or a page in Alexandrines.

When it came to what he liked in poetry this look of a poem rated somewhere I suppose, though there was much more that demanded his attention and respect. And if some of the pieces with which I associate John are not among the 20th Century’s big production numbers (The Second Coming, The Hollow Men, Auden’s Yeats’s Elegy etc etc) it was probably because John loved discovering Martin Bell’s Ode to Groucho, Richard Wilbur’s A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa Sciarra, Pi O’s Shower Fuck Poem and Jas H Duke’s Solidarity Explained.

When the axe first came into the forest
the trees said to each other
the handle is one of us

Mind you, John when reciting this from memory would inevitably double its size. But it does remain one of many poems I associate with him and thus more power to Jas Duke (for who could possibly say that, as a reader, Prufrock or Skunk Hour or even The Day Lady Died are theirs?). John wasn’t ever going to write like Wilbur or Bell or Duke but he did give them much more than just a distant nodding respect.

Of course when you discovered a poem you knew he would love there was no-one better to hurl it at. Upon reading Southey’s magnificently ludicrous OdeTo a Pig while His Nose was being bored I knew this must have been written for John and phoned him immediately.

Hark! hark! that Pig — that Pig! the hideous note,
More loud, more dissonant, each moment grows —
Would one not think the knife was in this throat?
And yet they are only boring through his nose.

Pig! ’tis your master’s pleasure — then be still,
And hold your nose to let the iron through!
Dare you resist your lawful Sovereign’s will?
Rebellious Swine! you know not what you do!

And on and on for eight further stanzas. I thought of John and felt like a matchmaker. Some years later he proposed a meeting between Pig and the Queen of the Vegans, Coral Hull. But after months he still hadn’t got around to it and I set about the honours.


(vi) Homage

How many of us have taken a volume of verse to bed and read it cover to cover till dawn? John did that more than once with a collected Murray. He loved that poet’s work with a fervour few of his peers could, or would want to, match. When a minor versifier trying to masquerade as a major critic imputed that he, Forbes, considered himself a better, a greater poet than Murray, minor versifier was knocked to the ground.

John thought Harry Hooton a fraud, visited James McAuley once (presumably out of curiosity) and became an obsessive fan of McAuley’s contemporary shadow, John Manifold, knowing it was poetry that saved Manifold from the unholy twins of Stalinism and the squattocracy. How much did John concur with Manifold the apparachik and squatter’s son? Probably as much as he concured with Milton’s Protestantism, or Hopkin’s Catholicism although he no doubt had a reasonable idea where all three were coming from and where they were headed. When he recited The Windhover (from memory) it was because this work was a remarkable poem, not because it arose from one of the stranger niches nurtered within his former faith. Re Manifold he liked to tell how some committee of the CPA had imposed rigid structures, particularly rhyme, upon their member poets (workers, it was presumed, wouldn’t read it otherwise). Throughout history churches had been known to do very similar things.

He rarely said a word against the Catholic church, however, and when he exploded once against some priestly anti-sex mumbo-jumbo he’d heard as an adolescent on retreat I noticed it because this was so out of keeping with John, the DeLaSalle, Cronulla, Old Boy. Certainly he felt nothing but loyalty to this teaching order. After all, hadn’t they put him on the path towards his and other writers’ poems of spirit and action? When the documentary tribute to John was being filmed many of the contributors read their favourite Forbes poems (all of which, alas, hit the cutting room floor). One of the most telling was John’s English teacher, Brother Quentin, reading Homage to Kenneth Slessor. Did John actually acquire his deliberate reading manner from this man? It could never be proven but for those few moments of this piece being read I was certain these were not just imaginary echoes I heard.

If John’s contemporaries are those born ten years either side of 1950 then I have yet to find lyrics of more finesse (as with John at his best) from any of those born 1940–1960, anywhere in our language. If he is still little known off shore then it’s for the rest of the world to catch up. I have known no stronger poetry lover than John and his example surely gives base to this dictum anyone taking up or continuing with our craft should attempt to follow: if you can’t love it, you can’t create it.

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http://www.austlit.com/a/wearne/forbes.html