David Malouf died on Wednesday. You can read a lot about him elsewhere. The Guardian, for instance, has an excellent obituary by Jennifer King, and a personal reflection from Christos Szoltas. In blogland, Lisa at ANZ Litlovers Litblog has posted an overview of his work. This post is a much more partial thing.
My mind is buzzing with memories of the man. I can’t claim him as a friend, but I first met him more than 50 years ago and have had memorable encounters with him over the years. I want to write about some of them before numbing grief sets in.
I was an EngLit student at Sydney University in the late 1960s when David came back to Australia after some years in the UK. He was a wonderful lecturer who communicated his enthusiasm and love for the writers he was discussing. I remember the delight and awe with which he described Norman Mailer’s sentences – long, looping, sometimes going on for more than a page. I remember him discussing images of food in one of the Jacobean playwrights, bringing out the horror beneath the comedy of the characters’ greed: I don’t think he used the words capitalism or colonialism but he made us feel them – or at least he made me feel them, because he told me after the lecture that he’d seen me looking more and more nauseated as he spoke.
At poetry readings, I remember feeling his translations of Horace as a gift. They spoke of morning light glinting off milk churns beside a country road. I’d studied Latin for years, and loved Virgil and Catullus, but it hadn’t occurred to me until then that the Roman poets wrote about experiences very like ours – mine.
In my two years as a postgrad student I saw more of him. I loved the way he used four-letter words, with the same precise enunciation as he used with all language. I loved his glee when he told an anecdote about Philip Roth, then notorious for the novel Portnoy’s Complaint: a woman who was introduced to Roth at a cocktail party shuddered when he offered to shake hands, and said she’d rather not. And I loved this erudite man’s childlike hilarity when he told us about coming out of a movie and seeing that an academic colleague friend had spilled chocolate ice cream all down his white shirt front.
When he was living in Tuscany and I was planning a trip there, in early 1979, somehow I had a conversation with him. He said that if I went to Campagnatico and asked for il professore Australiano, someone would show me the way to his door. (While I may have been bold enough to propose a visit, I didn’t have the gall to actually knock on his door.)
One day in 2015, I was walking up Broadway in Sydney’s inner west when I saw a man in a grey tracksuit coming towarsds me. He looked like David Malouf, but I had never seen him other than impeccably turned out. Indeed it was him, and the first thing he said was that he had realised he was running late for a poetry reading at Gleebooks and didn’t have time to change into decent clothes. I may be conflating two meetings on Broadway, but I’m pretty sure that that is also the occasion when he showed me his right hand covered in blood. He had been holding a bleeding spot on his left arm. Alarmed, I produced a handkerchief, but it had obviously been used for other purposes and he politely declined the offer. ‘It’s not a big deal,’ he said. ‘when you’re old, you bleed easily.’ He was 81. I’m now 79 and I can confirm that he was right. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘if I go home to Chippendale with blood on my hands like this, it might be good for my reputation. They’ll think I’ve murdered someone.’ And then, even as he was bleeding and embarrassed to be seen in public in tracky-daks, he chatted appreciatively and illuminatingly about the poetry he’d just heard, some of which couldn’t have been further from the kind of things he wrote himself.
Four or five years ago I was on holiday on Magnetic Island and caught the ferry across to Townsville to go to a reading by David at the Mary Who? bookshop. He read beautifully, as always. In question time, a woman wearing a ‘No More Coal’ t-shirt commented, with more than a touch of reproach, that there were surely more important things to write about than memories of childhood. ‘What,’ she asked, ‘do you think are the important things poetry should be addressing.’ Without missing a beat, he said, ‘I think the most interesting thing in the world is a three year old child.’ At that age, he said, a person is just looking out at the world and putting together their own model of what’s there, and it’s fascinating to witness.
A poem that I’m pretty sure he read on that occasion, and that I heard him read many times over about two decades, is ‘Seven last words of the emperor Hadrian’. He always presented it almost as a technical exercise: the full meaning of the Latin couldn’t be captured in a single translation, so he had seven goes at it. What I didn’t hear him say is that the poem struck a deep chord for him as his own mortality made itself felt. I’ve just listened to a recording of him reading it on the University of Queensland website. Have a listen at this link.
David wrote Quarterly Essay number 41, The Happy Life. I happened to run into him soon after the correspondence on it was published in the subsequent issue. I remarked that it was interesting that all the correspondents wrote about how beloved he is. ‘Yes,’ he said, deflecting effortlessly, ‘it wasn’t the kind of essay they’re used to and they didn’t quite know what to do with it.’
Now I, and you if you want, can say how much we have loved him, and he can’t deflect any more.
Me fail? I fly! 