Book Launch: Gwen Harwood

Gwen Harwood: Collected Poems 1943-1995

I suppose I am not alone among Gwen’s friends and acquaintances in my recollection of how a visit to her place might typically begin — and I am thinking particularly of the years when she and Bill lived at Oyster Cove. Ann and I would be greeted with that signature smile and rapturous words of welcome, then drawn inside and immediately showered with a profusion of items that had been holding her attention in recent days: the book, or more likely several books, she had been reading, letters from children and friends, photographs, accounts of local goings-on — and these things often not sequentially but intermingled, or so it seemed. It could be quite exhausting. After she had released this cargo of news and made us a coffee, a tour of the property might follow — though I have a distinct impression, perhaps distorted by the years, that Ann was often waylaid and detained by Bill while he expatiated at enthusiastic length upon some new plumbing conundrum he had just managed to crack.

On one occasion we were ushered in and sat down to the peremptory injunction: “Listen to this.” Gwen popped a cassette into the player and turned it on, explaining that she had been preparing lunch when the song we were about to hear came on. “The first couple of verses are missing,” she said. “It took me a minute or so to realize that I was listening to a masterpiece.” It was called “The Ballad of Jacob and Marcie” and concerned a raven-haired, God-fearing young preacher man, Jacob, and Marcie, who

… was slender as a willow,
She had golden angel hair,
And the Devil must have made her by hand.

Of course, she seduces Jacob and works her wicked will. Her concluding words to him are:

Your soul belongs to Jesus, Jacob,
But your body belongs to me.

I don’t recall Gwen ever mentioning or playing the tape again. Years later, when her last book, The Present Tense, appeared not long before her death in 1995, I was struck by these words in the poem “This Artifice of Air”:

Your wits belong to Wittgenstein
but your body belongs to me.

The poem, incidentally, contains a character called Golden Child. Here, I thought, was evidence not only of the unlikely and disparate sources from which a Harwood poem might draw its details and images, but also of the fact that nothing Gwen committed to memory ever slipped from her mind. It was at this point in writing this speech that I actually acquired the Collected and discovered that I had been snookered, because this poem in fact dates from 1977, the year of the visit in question and the playing of the tape.

Nevertheless, I repeat: not much that Gwen committed to her memory ever slipped from it. Her memory was not simply good, it was astonishing, one might almost say frightening. My friend Andrew Sant has told me of an occasion when, in conversation with Gwen, he happened to make mention of the singer Neil Young and referred to one of his songs. Now Neil Young was not a singer, Andrew thought, that a woman of Gwen’s generation might be expected to know about. Gwen knew about him. Not only that, she knew the song. Not only that, she proceeded to recite to Andrew all of its lyrics, word-perfect, on the spot.

What was it about Gwen and memory? Some of her prose accounts of her childhood contain scraps of song and verse recited to her by her parents or grandmother, and I don’t know whether I am correct in speculating that those words, faithfully recorded decades later, had not been seen or heard by Gwen since her childhood, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Of course, a well-trained memory, particularly one trained in childhood, has an extraordinary capacity, and she had a powerful incentive for keeping that memory in trim. In all her writing life she never had a room of her own to write in. Like Jane Austen she had only the dining table to work on, when it was free, and consequently much of her composition was done in her head. But it was not simply a case of memorizing. In an interview I conducted with her for Island I made the mistake of asking her whether for her memorable meant memorizable, to which her pungent reply was, “Oh, fuck that!” We edited that exchange from the published version, but perhaps we ought to have left it in.

To revert to Andrew Sant for a moment, a few weeks ago we were talking about the writing of poetry and the reasons for doing it, if any, in an age and a culture for which it is of marginal interest. He said that for him writing was a redemptive act. I think this was the case for Gwen too. Memory was redemptive and poetry, which enshrined memory, was a further act of redemption.

Despite the regular church attendance which marked her later years, I never got the impression that Gwen believed, as James McAuley evidently did, in the resurrection of the flesh and the redemptive power of Christ’s blood. No, she was quite clear that the only immortality any of us can hope for is in the minds of those who remember us when we are gone — or indeed when we are still here but separated by the years or the wide world. I think of the early poem “Anniversary” with its three stanzas, each ending with the appeal: remember me. In the first two stanzas they are the quoted words of the poem’s addressee; in the last stanza the speaker’s own words.

So the light falls, and so it fell
on branches leaved with flocking birds.
Light stole a city’s weight to swell
the coloured life of stone. Your words
hung weightless in my ear: Remember me.

All words except those words were drowned
in the fresh babbling rush of spring.
In summer’s dream-filled light one sound
echoed through all the whispering
galleries of green: Remember me.

Rods of light point home the flocking
starlings to wintry trees, and turn
stone into golden ochre, locking
the orbit of my pain. I learn
the weight of light and stone. Remember me.

Only being remembered is proof of existence, it seems, in this poem. I have written elsewhere how Gwen’s memory could transform “the merest occasions of friendship. A day, an afternoon, an hour spent in Gwen’s company… might well be recalled to you by her, at a subsequent meeting, bathed in so radiant an aura of fond recollection that you stood astonished at the transfiguration of the scene.” The only way to redemption from time’s annihilation or the exile of distance is through memory. Well, here we all are, remembering her like anything.

Alison and Greg have done a splendid job in bringing us this collected, though not indeed complete, edition of Gwen’s poems. I once said that if we exclude her libretti she was not an especially prolific poet. Hmm. As well as the complete texts of all her published volumes, this collected brings together poems published in periodicals and the like but subsequently excluded by Gwen from her books and some later poems never published. As the editors say, they could not include all her lighter and occasional verse. There is one omission I have noted with regret. Whenever I hear of anyone engaged in work on Gwen Harwood I hurry to draw to their attention — and I thought I had done so to Alison and Greg — that “Address to My Muse” originally had an extra last stanza which Gwen omitted from The Lion’s Bride. She gave a copy to Ann. No one seems to believe me. You know the poem; it begins:

Dear Sir or Madam, as the case is,
blest being of so many faces,
known to the Furies and the Graces,
don’t be a clown,
just slip off those artistic braces
and settle down.

and in the published version ends:

O Muse, Sir, Madam of renown,
take off that multicoloured gown,
remove the mask, wipe off the frown,
we’ll name no names.
Just watch the world, when we lie down,
go up in flames.

In the original version the Muse is given an opportunity to reply:

I don’t find this approach exciting.
Sappho herself is uninviting
when she storms on the platform fighting
in Bardic drag.
Why not quit bitching & start writing?
Belt up, old bag.

You heard it first from me.

This is not the occasion, nor am I the person, to deliver a detailed critique of the Harwood oeuvre. Our presence here is sufficient evidence of the high opinion we hold of her work. Beyond that, let me say that Gwen is one of a smallish number of poets from whom I have striven to enrich my own poetry, from whom I have sought to distil a drop to diffuse into my own well. What, of her many and scintillating gifts, do I admire? Her Protean variety; think of all the pseudonyms, each with its own character. Her wit and mischievous humour: “The Sick Philosopher” is so clever and so funny that it makes one think of giving up the unequal struggle; and we mustn’t forget the famous acrostic execration — or was it an exhortation? — to do something indelicate to all editors, a challenge, I am bound to say, of mixed appeal. Her extraordinary erudition which never seemed to limit her accessibility. Her technical virtuosity, not simply in mastering any form that took her fancy — a feat that might be performed by a mere technician — but in subduing such forms to the expression of real poetry in language unconstrained by the exigencies of form. And her lyrical intensity, her capacity to give tongue to what John Fowles once distinctively, if rather opaquely, referred to as “the algedonic polarity of existence”, or in plain words the extremes of pain and pleasure between which our lives swing, and to do it in these astonishing verbal contraptions, these poems by turns — or at once — clever, wise, piercing, beautiful and, yes, memorable.

Stephen Edgar, 6 to 12 February 2003

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