In Memory of Gwen Harwood
1920–1995
It hardly seems credible, I know, but it was not until I was in my thirties that I caught my first fish. This delayed rite of passage occurred in the company of Gwen Harwood as we sat in her dinghy far out in Oyster Cove, in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, hearing and feeling the slap of the wavelets against the sides of the boat. Ann Jennings, the necessary third member of the crew, was recalling fishing expeditions of her youth and the despatch of gasping flathead by a single blow of an implement known in her family as a bodger. This led to speculation on the capacity of fish to feel pain. Gwen capped the conversation with a fantasy about a giant Old Man Flathead on the bed of the bay who might rise to the dinghy and pluck us all to our deaths, reassuring his fellow flathead with the words, “Don’t worry. They can’t feel pain.” We pulled fish on board at a great rate before going back to Halcyon, Gwen’s house at Kettering, to skin and fillet them. One of the least of the things for which I should feel gratitude to Gwen Harwood, perhaps. But perhaps not. Such occasions are the stuff of life and of art.
I find it difficult to know how to do justice to a figure of Gwen Harwood’s stature, and the loss that we have sustained. And when I say “we”, though I have in mind the whole Australian community, I am thinking in the first instance of the smaller Tasmanian community which was so privileged to have her at its heart for fifty years. Her loss here leaves a gap in nature. It is scarcely necessary for me to rehearse here the achievements of her career and her place in Australian literature, for they have been detailed many times already. It is true to say, I think, that Gwen burst onto the poetry scene in this country like Athena fully armed from the head of Zeus. We know that in her early career she did suffer some rejection, partly based, she believed, on the prejudice of male editors. Her pseudonyms and the famous Bulletin acrostic were prompted by such treatment. But equally it is true that from the publication of her first book she was at once widely acknowledged as one of the most important Australian poets. And her reputation only grew with each successive book. “By the end of her life”, wrote Alison Hoddinott in The Australian, “Gwen Harwood was arguably the finest and most highly acclaimed poet writing in Australia.” Even those who take up the challenge of that “arguably” would surely agree that she is among the select handful of our very best.
When we say that a poet is highly acclaimed, this often means, in fact, highly acclaimed by other poets, to a large extent the only audience left for poetry. It is widely believed, with some justice, that poetry has lost its readership in the twentieth century, that it has become too wilfully difficult (when it is not too craftlessly facile), that it places unnecessary barriers between itself and the common reader. There are poets who can be cited in support of this contention and poets whose work can be adduced to rebut it. Gwen Harwood is certainly one of the latter. At all times, even when she was dealing with quite complex philosophical or scientific concepts, she had the ability to make her poetry perspicuous and accessible. Her work, as a result, was not just admired but loved. It is read by many who would not generally read contemporary poetry.
If we discount her libretti, she was not an especially prolific poet. Like Larkin she left her admirers crying for more, a fate most poets would envy, and which few achieve. In the latter part of her life she received awards and prizes, and honorary doctorates-all deserved. However, a curious phenomenon of her later years was what I might call the cult of personality which grew up around her. More than any other Australian poet I can think of, she became, not just for her writing, but for herself — or what the public took to be herself — celebrated and sought after. Gwen always insisted on the “operatic I” of her poems, the distinction between the speaker of her verses and herself, the “real” Gwen Harwood. I suspect that the public never really wanted to hear this particular disclaimer and persisted in collapsing the two personae into one (did I say two personae?). Both Gwen and the public enjoyed these performances, but perhaps some of the public believed, or wished to believe, that the performance and the performer were identical.
In one sense the two were the same. In twenty years of friendship I never felt myself a match for Gwen in any sphere. The energy, the wit, the knowledge, the acuity and rapidity of intellect which we find in the poetry were there in the woman. She was an exhilarating friend, but she could also be an exhausting one. She expected as much of you as she could give herself. She was fierce in her passions, beliefs and standards, insisting that “good enough is rotten”, and withering in her contempt for anything slipshod, second-rate, ignorant and half-baked. She was brought up to believe that if your grammar, spelling and expression were not perfect you could not expect anyone to listen to your opinions. She was a perfectionist, and she had what it took to be one. As others have pointed out, she brought to the simplest and most mundane of everyday activities the same love, care and immaculate craft that she brought to her poetry. Her loyalty was unfailing.
It is well known that Gwen looked back on her childhood years in and near Brisbane as a time of bliss, a paradise on earth. This was no mere sentimental nostalgia, however, she being only too well aware of death’s presence in Arcadia. But in the same way that she could look back on those lost years and infuse them with radiance in her poetry, so could she do the same with the merest occasions of friendship. A day, an afternoon, an hour spent in Gwen’s company, however enjoyable, 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 and your part in it, taking renewed pleasure in the occasion presented to you for a second glimpse, and yet feeling slightly unworthy for the poverty of your own imagination and emotions in comparison with hers.
Poets, it is said, always retain a measure of the childlike in their makeup, maintain a childlike wonder at the world. Gwen was no exception. Like the father of “Nightfall”, she kept a child’s delight forever in birds, flowers, shivery-grass. This is in no way contradicted by her love and understanding of philosophy and science. Some of the profoundest questions of those disciplines could be said to have a childlike simplicity. Why do we remember only the past and not the future? Why do we fear the oblivion that will follow death but not that which preceded birth? Much of her beloved Wittgenstein is impenetrable to most of us. But not all. And some of his propositions have the simple resonance of great poetry. Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is; the wonder that there are things in being. Why should there be any there at all? For poets, of course, the how is miraculous too.
In facing the death of someone we love, we are forced to realizations of childlike simplicity, as opposed to the sophisticated and distant limbo in which we normally store our thoughts of death. Never again in the history of the world, it occurs to us with desolating immediacy, will this unique individual be present to us. We see the known face in our mind’s eye and assume it is still in the world. We imagine conversations; we imagine what we will say next time we meet. But there is only a space. Into that void we pour our grief and our memories. None of us is capable of holding in our minds the entirety of a lost life. So with those we mourn, our experience is, not reduced, but refined progressively into a smaller number of representative occasions, remarks, expressions, images, into which — like the increasing gravity of a collapsing star — the weight of memory and significance is condensed and held, smaller and clearer as the years go by.
As Gwen knew, the only immortality we can hope for is in the memory of those who survive us. Most of us who practise poetry can hold out no hope that our art will enlarge or prolong our presence in the common memory. Indeed, our poems may well precede us into oblivion. Gwen Harwood is certain to be an exception to that law, and the best of her work will surely find a permanent place in Australian literature, which means in the minds and memories of future readers — of this reader without doubt.
Of Gwen the woman I have many memories, but perhaps the most intense are those from the period when she lived at Kettering, south of Hobart by the shore of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, with views across to Bruny Island, the setting of many of her poems. I recall the superb, immaculately prepared and presented (and often too generous) meals, even down to the after-dinner chocolates invariably on hand, though Gwen herself disliked chocolate. I remember the guided tours around the property and adjoining bush, and particularly the wonderful rollcalls of plants and flowers that she would deliver in running commentary: white iris, scorpion everlasting, lilac bells, speedwell, waxflower, musk. She named them as we passed. I remember our walks around the shore of melancholy Oyster Cove, and that time out in the bay aboard the dinghy, hauling up the flathead, at the still centre of a Sunday afternoon, as the water and light, mimicking the eternal process, made a shaky mosaic of our reflections, which they unceasingly brought together and took apart.
Stephen Edgar, 14 to 15 December 1995
First published in Island, 1996
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