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  The poems were written by a younger student whose name was John Tranter. I read them and made some negative comments. They were apprentice works. Les continued to defend them. This was a surprising start to a celebrated literary feud, with Tranter becoming one of Murray’s most persistent critics.

  Les often talked about life on his father’s farm at Bunyah: how bush objects were sanctified by use. An old tree stump, used as a stool, was polished by years of people sitting on it. I suggested that he write about such things. I still had my long-term ambition of writing Virgilian pastoral poems, but had no idea where my subject matter might come from – unlike Les.

  I became his day-to-day critic. When he was at Bunyah during university breaks, he regularly mailed me a sheaf of new poems. I also showed him my own poems in the hope he would make detailed criticisms. In general, he did not. (A few years later he told me he dreaded the moment when I would say after reading a new Murray poem, ‘That’s bullshit, Murray’.)

  One day, having known Les for about six months, I was walking along Parramatta Road with two friends. One of them said, looking behind him, ‘Look, there’s that awful Les Murray person. Let’s run!’ They were not friends of Les’s, but I was. I ran with them.

  Les was keen on his middle name – Allan – he first published poems under the name ‘Les A Murray’. He later addressed his wife as ‘Valerie Gina’ and often addressed me as ‘Geoffrey John’ – perhaps a habit picked up from reading Russian novels. He may have hoped I would address him as ‘Leslie Allan’. Despite different temperaments, our friendship lasted for more than twenty-five years. After we had drifted apart, he said to my daughter Julia, ‘You know, I have Asperger’s syndrome. And your father has too.’

  About ten years after this conversation I was visiting Les at his two side-by-side houses at Bunyah. He was then seventy-seven. It was early spring and the grass was still lush. Large citrus trees were loaded with orange and yellow fruit. Lotus plants were at one end a dam and water lilies at the other. ‘They’re fighting it out’ was Les’s comment. I pointed to a half-dead vine scrambling up a trellis: ‘I see you’ve got a Dutchman’s pipe’. Les had not known its name and responded with a story of how he had rescued it – I think from a school that was closing down. ‘Yes’, he said conspiratorially, ‘we’re both autistic’.

  As well as three early Les Murray poems, the roneoed publication of the Writers and Artists Group contained a ballad-like poem by Ian Bedford, using half-rhyme. (Ian introduced me to my second wife Gail Pearson more than twenty years later.) Ruth Burgess had a poem ‘Paradise Regained’ about the bombing of Hannover during World War II. Ruth later abandoned poetry and musical composition and became a leading woodcut artist, making prints of forests and birds.

  The first meeting of the Writers and Artists Group was at the waterfront Vaucluse house of Ruth’s parents. The house had a grand circular staircase and marble fountain in a large entrance hall. Ruth remembers Les Murray reading to us from C. J. Dennis’s The Sentimental Bloke, also her kind-hearted mother expostulating with her: ‘You haven’t told those poor young men where the bathroom is’. One afternoon I was standing with Mrs Hansman at her front door. She hurried off into the garden and came back with a look of triumph, holding a needle she had found at the foot of a bush: ‘I’ve been wanting one of these’.

  We were an earnest and introverted group. Robert Hughes participated in our 1957 group exhibition of paintings in the Sydney University Union, but he came to only one meeting. Les also stopped coming.

  Towards the end of 1957 our group spent a weekend in a house in isolated bush at Woy Woy. I had fallen in love with the poetry of Wallace Stevens and also a blonde girl with dazzling white skin. As we rowed across the water one night to the township I recited Wallace Stevens’s ‘The Plot Against the Giant’, one of the few poems I knew by heart. My attempt to impress her was a failure.

  I met Brian Jenkins through our group. Brian worked as a salesman, drove a large new Ford car and had a disregard for parking signs. Brian loved Dylan Thomas and wrote poetry with a metaphysical flavour. Through Brian I got to know Lex Banning, a legendary older poet with cerebral palsy. Lex presided over a table of admirers at Repin’s coffee shop. Brian told them a story about putting on a cerebral palsy act while trying to cross Parramatta Road, and a police car stopping and halting the traffic. Lex was the only person at the table who laughed.

  In the last couple of years of the Writers and Artists I shared the administrative responsibilities with Ian Boden, who started at university in 1958. Ian was a plump young man who wore hornrimmed glasses and a tweed sports coat. He was not a writer or artist but seemed to find the amateur and ineffectual nature of our group congenial.

  Ian worked in a bookshop. He often sat at the table in the university’s Manning House where Les Murray presided; and was one of Les’s unpaid creditors. Ian was not easily aroused, but one morning he must have felt unusually fed up with Les. Waving a five pound note in front of his debtor, Ian set it on fire and used the burning note to light a cigarette: ‘Now I’m enjoying spending my money as I want to spend it’.

  Years later Les wrote a poem ‘The Quality of Sprawl’, referring to this incident, and the five pound note had become a ten dollar note lighting a cigar, not a cigarette.

  Robert often talked about the importance of what he called ‘feeling’. Certain lines of Shakespeare and passages in Beethoven’s late quartets expressed ‘feeling’. Without ‘feeling’, life was not worthwhile. ‘Feeling’ was elusive and days might go by without it. The more you thought about it, the harder it was to experience it. Ruth mentioned Robert’s obsession about ‘feeling’ to her mother. Mrs Hansman said to Ruth, ‘You can tell Robert not to worry. I’m sixty and I can still feel!’

  In 1959 I started at the Law School. By the end of the year the Writers and Artists was defunct. We had all to a greater or lesser extent been obsessed by ‘feeling’. Robert was our inspiration. He spoke sombrely and with deliberation. His smiles were ironical. Some friends were laughing about me, he said, and named them. Then he added with a nervous cough, ‘I defended you’. I was relieved when Robert dropped out of my life.

  Robert died a few years ago. He invented a new musical nota-tion, which he said was simpler. I suspect he pursued the solitary path of ‘feeling’ for the rest of his life.

  In my first year of university I had another group of friends quite separate from the claustrophobic Writers and Artists. We were an informal group of five from different schools. We sat together in classes, and drank coffee during breaks. I knew John Hamilton from interschool debating. Colin Mackerras I knew from inter-school chess. He had a friend, John Sheldon, who became a Sanskrit scholar. They both knew Pam Suttor. She had been educated at Rose Bay Convent and was Tim Suttor’s cousin. Hamilton and I were Protestant atheists. The other three were linked through the Catholic Church.

  We could have been earnest young actors in a Whit Stillman film, with our know-it-all discussions, as we walked along the stone paved paths that intersected at the centre of the lawn of the nineteenth century sandstone quadrangle. They were my first group of close friends. Until then I had been the younger boy in the class, conscious that I had a family that was odd.

  John Hamilton knew he would become a barrister. He later became a Supreme Court judge. I was planning to study law and wondered whether a barrister’s life would squeeze out poetry. John was certain about his career in a way I wasn’t. He had been a ‘Quiz Kid’ on a well-known radio show. When we met as captains of opposing school debating teams, his distinctive and quietly authoritative voice was already familiar from the radio program.

  He was the only one of us who had a car – paid for with Quiz Kid earnings – a small fawn Ford Prefect whose numberplate began with the letters MU. I teased John by calling it the ‘Mu-car’. After a couple of years this car got a new numberplate, beginning with the letters ‘BUJ’. The ‘Mu-car’ became the ‘Budgeri-car’. He did not complain, but I sensed his ir
ritation.

  The Mackerras family were Catholic converts – with a defiant twinkle Colin began many conversations: ‘Mother Church says…’ Colin’s large family of brothers and sisters (one brother was Sir Charles, the conductor) were Wagner fanatics. ‘Wagner is the greatest composer’, Colin often claimed. ‘Well, a lot of people say that of Beethoven’, I once argued back. John Sheldon and Colin debated whether I was qualified to have an opinion. They devised a game. Colin’s knowledge of Wagner and Beethoven was encyclopaedic and he used to sing a few bars of music, and I had to pick the composer.

  John Hamilton and I became regulars at the Sydney University Union’s weekly ‘Union Night’. An external speaker spoke to a motion and students spoke for or against. John and I joined the Union Night committee. Not long after Sir Garfield Barwick was appointed federal Attorney-General in 1958, the Union invited Barwick to address a dinner. My role was to be his minder. I sat next to him. He was a modest and courteous man, friendly in a reserved way with students, and pleased to be among us.

  In 1957 I had a conversation with Clive James in the internal stairway of the old Fisher Library. We were each about three months into our first year of study. We discussed literature. I spoke about some poets I had become keen on at high school, probably Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke. Clive replied with bitterness that having gone to Sydney Technical High School, he knew nothing about writers such as those.

  A few days later I was talking to John Hamilton. John was at primary school with Clive (and appears in Unreliable Memoirs). Clive could have gone to a selective high school, John said, but chose Sydney Tech because his classmates were going there. The products of selective high schools became doctors and lawyers. Sydney Tech made Clive different from the rest of us. In 1957 he regretted the ‘bad choice’ he made as a primary school child. But it may partly explain why he has become one of Australia’s most famous expatriates.

  That year there was great excitement when a university film society showed the Swedish feature film One Summer of Happiness. It had a long shot of a young woman and a young man swimming naked, and a more intimate shot of her breasts. We had an alternative name for the film: One Summer of a Penis. I had to wait another four years before I saw a naked girl. I was sexually frustrated and naive – like most of my friends.

  A victim of sexual disquiet and resident ghost of the university’s sandstone Victorian Gothic quadrangle, if it had one, would be the son of an Irish brewer, Christopher Brennan. He was a student there and later one of its most celebrated teachers, with a study in the quadrangle. He was a big man, his great hooked nose complemented by a meerschaum pipe. He died in 1932.

  When I was a schoolboy I borrowed the HM Green anthology Modern Australian Poetry from the Gordon public library and found these lines from Brennan’s long poem ‘The Wanderer’:

  All night I have walk’d and my heart was deep awake,

  remembering ways I dream’d and that I chose,

  remembering lucidly, and was not sad,

  being brimm’d with all the liquid and clear dark

  of the night that was not stirr’d with any tide;

  for leaves were silent and the road gleam’d pale,

  following the ridge, and I was alone with night…

  Brennan then speaks of the painful awareness where everything becomes meaningless after the ecstasy of being alone with the night:

  But now I am come among the rougher hills

  and grow aware of the sea that somewhere near

  is restless; and the flood of night is thinn’d

  and stars are whitening. O, what horrible dawn

  will bare me the way and crude lumps of the hills

  and the homeless concave of the day, and bare

  the ever-restless, ever-complaining sea?

  Brennan’s poem may be the greatest fin de siècle poem in our language, richer and more resonant than its contemporary, Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. One of the strengths of ‘The Wanderer’ (like Wordsworth’s ‘The Prelude’) is that it is set in an identifiable landscape – Sydney’s northern beaches, then sparsely inhabited. This was where Brennan went to live with his German bride after studying the German Romantics in Berlin. His marriage soon soured and his wanderings at night inspired his poem.

  Many from outside the university attended Brennan’s erratic lectures. He was scheduled to deliver them early in the day, before he was too drunk. A student introduced into his study was likely to find it in darkness, lit only by the red glow of a beaker of claret over a flame. Eventually the university dismissed him. My German professor Ralph Farrell, when young, was a friend of Brennan’s. Unfortunately I was unaware of this in 1957 when I became his student. With Farrell we studied Goethe’s Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) period and Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther). I was also having a love affair with the poetry of Rilke: the Neue Gedichte (1907), poems such as ‘The Panther’, ‘The Spanish Dancer’ and ‘Blue Hydrangeas’.

  I sensed Farrell might have encouraged me to become a German academic. But I baulked at the prospect of spending the rest of my life with the claustrophobic German Romantics – the forebears of Robert’s obsession with feeling. I began to see Goethe’s escape from Romanticism into objective classicism as a way out of my own Weltschmerz. Timothy Suttor was also an influence.

  Our most colourful German lecturer was a handsome, elderly aristocrat, Dr von Stutterheim. He joked about German pedantry and used English in an interesting way. One of his favourite English words was ‘trickish’ – the German equivalent is betrügerisch.

  When we asked him a difficult question, he would say, ‘Ah that is very trickish’.

  I was younger than most first year students. I painfully asked a couple of girls out and was refused. A girl in the German class told me I gave her the creeps, because of how I stared. I was surprised. I was unaware I stared at her. She was a pleasant looking girl. That was all.

  Not long after I started at university I became obsessed with another student. Each morning I woke up, with nothing on my mind, ready to enjoy the day. Then my chest tightened – as though breathing in an iron lung – when I remembered her. I spoke to no-one about my obsession. She was a friend. I was sure she would not reciprocate my feelings. If she had known, she may have been mildly flattered, and treated it as of no concern.

  A portly fifty-year-old man in a striped, navy blue suit regularly visited the State Library reading room where I studied. He had soft lips and horn-rimmed glasses. He read at a table in his waistcoat, white shirt sleeves held up by silvery garters. Once, when he had left for the day, I looked at his pile of books. I flipped through them – they were about spiritualism – and I noticed a photographic plate of a woman with a startling resemblance to the girl I was in love with – Mrs Eileen Garrett, an early twentieth century medium. I began ordering up the book from the library stacks, to stare at the photograph. One day I showed it to a friend without commenting. He recognised the resemblance at once, and asked me some pointed questions. A few days later I ordered up the book. The page with the photograph had been removed.

  I dramatised my feelings in a poem:

  A Youth

  She did not now, she would never like him.

  Whining like a mandolin out of tune

  The tram rambled inanely through the afternoon,

  And he felt all sense forsake him.

  There was nothing at all gained by cursing,

  There was no use being embittered

  And regretting hours of hoping stupidly frittered.

  He felt too tired to feel anything.

  He felt as though the rickety tram would whine on and on

  And never stop and nothing could be done

  To make it stop, as though the afternoon sun

  For a whole millennium had shone and shone,

  And felt like some girl who in harsh sunlight lingers

  By a doorway for support, face white and drawn,

&nbs
p; And remembers a small back-room and something torn

  From her by crude, unsubtle fingers.

  The blankness was relieved by writing many poems. In one of them I saw myself as unable to close my eyes and staring at the sun. I knew I was in the grip of a lurid, almost comical madness:

  The Seed

  For months I was a field where nothing grew,

  I hugged my sunlessness with helpless greed.

  For months the rain fell and the wind blew

  And I nurtured in my brain a monstrous seed.

  For months the wind blew on the field in nightmare

  And the unsleeping seed swelled in my brain.

  I felt the seed grope upward after air,

  I tried to strangle it. I tried in vain.

  The seed butting with convulsive power

  Pushed through my skull as through a stubborn husk,

  And shot forth leaves and a lurid orange flower,

  Trumpeting insanely in the livid dusk.

  Before the end of 1957, the ‘iron-lung’ sensations I had when I woke up had stopped. I did not fall out of love. But I had exhausted these feelings. They were no longer important. However, the affinity I felt was not completely misplaced. About forty years later I had lunch at her house. Growing by the front door were the pale fern-like leaves of Rosa moyesii, a Himalayan species rose I grew myself.

  I heard from a friend that Judith Wright was addressing a senior English class. I loved poems such as ‘The Company of Lovers’ and ‘South of My Days’. The class was in a lecture room off the main quadrangle and we pushed the door slightly ajar. Judith was a compact woman, in her early forties then, and dressed in a grey woollen skirt and top. She was speaking in her firm, musical voice and characteristically dry manner. I was very taken with her. We reluctantly shut the door.