Declan Fry

Letters

In defence of Harold Bloom

Dear Editor, I wonder how much of Harold Bloom’s output, interminable if not immortal, James Ley actually knows (ABR, May 2021).

Bloom’s earliest books – The Visionary Company, Shelley’s Mythmaking, and The Anxiety of Influence – were ground-breaking as well as rather gutsy for American readers. The Visionary Company included Hart Crane – famously dismissed by R.P. Blackmur – as the only American poet in a book containing readings of the canonical British Romantics. It not only in a sense reintroduced the culture to Romanticism but re-welcomed Crane to a conversation dominated by slavish worship of Modernism, especially T.S. Eliot. I remember reading it when I was twenty, instantly confirmed in my own passion for Crane, the joy of one’s youth (but of nobody else I knew at the time). Bloom’s book on Shelley makes the case, now routinely made by others, that Shelley was among the great religious poets. As for Anxiety, whatever its idiosyncrasies, it changed the vocabulary of literary criticism and extended the range of psychological criticism, and especially of Northrop Fry’s anatomies (Fry was Bloom’s teacher). That book, weird as it is, has always been more important to poets and artists than to critics of literature, especially academicians who are frankly frightened by its central claim, not because it is incontestable but because it eliminates ‘source hunting’ from serious consideration.

It’s hard to see how this ‘thoroughly institutionalised creature’ was that at all. The institution could only contain him by isolating him safely from the rest of the institution (he was not an official member of Yale’s English Department), but could hardly justify ridding itself of this brilliant nuisance, who taught his courses without a book, reciting from Shakespeare, Yeats, etc. As for his ‘assertions’ of the value of literature in a ‘democratic age’, that’s simply not borne out by the range of his work’s interests. Listen to Bloom on Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison or Emily Dickinson. Poetry has no politics, or if it has, it is not ‘democratic’. Art is not a democracy. In his Autobiographies, and long before the muse of ugliness ruined his prose, Yeats says that ‘intellectual freedom and democracy are incompatible’. Whether it is applicable to the crises of the moment, crises of representation and identity, it is still worth considering.

J.T. Barbarese, Rutgers University, USA

James Ley replies

I thank Professor Barbarese for taking the time to respond to my article. I am well aware that Bloom’s stance was grounded in his love of Romantic poetry and that his early criticism was forged in opposition to the anti-Romantic Eliotian orthodoxy that was pervasive at the time. I pointed this out in a review of an earlier book by Bloom, in this very publication (ABR, April 2016). There is no denying he was a singular figure; I am, however, inclined to take the fact that his ideas were shaped in opposition to the institutional culture he first encountered in the 1950s as confirmation of my basic point. If the author of The Necessity of Atheism can be reinterpreted as a religious poet, then surely it is not too much of a stretch to describe a critic who spent his entire adult life on the faculty at Yale disagreeing with his fellow academics as ‘institutionalised’.

I am not an ‘academician’, which is perhaps why I am not at all frightened by Bloom’s ideas; I simply find them implausible. The breadth of his reading is not the issue, nor is it in question. My objection is the narrowness of his interpretative focus and the cloistered view of literature he advanced. I trust I am not misunderstanding Professor Barbarese when I take his claim about the undemocratic nature of art to be affirming the notion that all writers are not created equal. I suppose there is something a bit undemocratic about the fact most of us will never be as good at writing poetry as Shelley. But art is democratic in the sense that it is available to everyone and addresses a common reality. One can only imagine that the author of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ would be astonished at the suggestion that poetry has no politics. As for Yeats’s claim that intellectual freedom and democracy are incompatible, I respectfully submit that it is complete nonsense.

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The gospel of Stan

Questions of history and identity by Declan Fry

希望本是无所谓有，无所谓无的。这正如地上的路；其实地上本没有路，走的人多了，也便成了路。 Hope is an intangible thing. It cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is like a path. Originally, there is none – but as many people come and go, a path appears.

Lu Xun, ‘My Old Home’

We both unsettled when the boats came.

Briggs, ‘The Children Came Back’

Let’s start with a portrait. The year is 1993. The book is My Kind of People. Its author is Wayne Coolwell, a journalist. Who are Coolwell’s kind of people? Ernie Dingo, for one. Sandra Eades. Noel Pearson. Archie Roach. And there, sandwiched between opera singer Maroochy Barambah and dancer Linda Bonson is Stan Grant, aged thirty. Circa 1993, Grant is a breakthrough television presenter and journalist whose mother remembers him coming home to read the newspaper while the other kids went to play footy. ‘[T]here was a maturity and a sense of order about him,’ Coolwell writes. The order belies his parents’ life of ‘tin humpies, dirt floors, and usually only the one bed for all the kids in the family’. They are unable to afford a football (Grant relies on rolled-up socks). His sister, one of three siblings, sleeps on a fold-out table. In one house, they have to chase away a group of occupying emus before they can move in.

A formative experience follows the family’s move from Griffith to Canberra: Grant gives a speech to his English class on poet (and relative) Kevin Gilbert. The teacher adores it; the kids are confused. Grant does not fit the stereotype of what an Aboriginal should be. ‘He was not going to be pigeonholed,’ Coolwell writes. Thirty years before Sheila Heti, Grant’s audience found themselves confronting a question that would come to preoccupy the young man addressing them: how should a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi person be?

For fifty-seven years, Grant has sought to live life on his own terms. The bibliography begins in 2002, with The Tears of Strangers. It is perhaps his most successful work. Many of Grant’s preoccupations and approaches appear here, fully formed: the fascination with Jimmy Governor, on whom Thomas Keneally’s Jimmie Blacksmith character is based; the struggle with how Black and white Australia are implicated in one another (and eager to essentialise and dissemble their differences). Even something as simple and apparently inconsequential as a William Blake epigraph from ‘Auguries of Innocence’ will later appear, unchanged, in a Q&A episode, with Bruce Pascoe and others in 2021.

In 2016, Talking to My Country is published. Here, the authorial mode for which Grant has become primarily known arrives: channelling James Baldwin, passionately struggling with his country. Enlisting a small army of references to Enlightenment philosophers, he goes and tells it on the mountain – and on the TV, the front pages of newspapers, the radio. The previous year, he appears at the National Press Club. My people die younger, he says. Ziggy Ramo samples the speech on his début EP. Some three

decades after he first appeared on Seven’s Current Affairs show Real Miles Franklin-winning ‘identity novel’, The Yield (2019). Grant Life, the gospel of Stan has begun featuring on hip-hop records. views it as overly reliant on post-My Place ‘homecoming’ tropes

A short reflection, On Identity, together with another book that seek to locate identity in the past – ‘the search, the return of journalism-cum-memoir, Australia Day, appear in 2019. In home, to reclaim language or name’. Grant cannot even bring the both he refers to author Kim Scott’s memoir, Kayang and himself to write about the grandfather and family of Winch’s Me (2005). It contains a question that has long troubled Grant: novel without cordoning them off behind scare quotes. You can ‘You can’t be a bit and bit. What are you, Noongar or wadjella?’ practically see the grimace on his lips when he writes: ‘Being

‘It seems to me a cruel question,’ Grant remarks in On Thomas Wiradjuri is not something I rediscover; our language lives in the Keneally (Black Inc., $17.99 hb, 90 pp). ‘It comes with [...] as- now, not in the then. But for Tara – like Thomas Keneally, like sumptions of power: we will tell you who you are and whether you Kim Scott, like the judges of the High Court – being Aboriginal belong; we will determine your belongs to a time past, a connecidentity; you will answer to us.’ tion severed and then recovered

Though shorter than With and rescued; a time before mothe Falling of the Dusk (Harper- dernity and held out of reach of Collins, $34.99 pb, 320 pp), On modernity.’ Thomas Keneally is perhaps the Yet the influence of Bruce better – and more provocative – of Pascoe across this continent, the two books. I would not deny including among Aboriginal and that Dusk is a fine introduction to Torres Strait Islander communigeopolitics for those unfamiliar ties, would be churlish to deny. with the countries Grant surveys, Yes, his writing has been critiqued but it offers little novelty to those for relying on white referents. Yes, already acquainted. In On Thomas he is not saying anything that Keneally, the engagement with was not already known, either by Grant’s real preoccupations, his historians or the First Nations he Scylla and Charybdis, is sharper. refers to. But those two sleights

In rough order of importance, of hand are part of what has these are History and Identity. given the book such wide appeal As he wrote in Australia Day, and made it influential. Big Bill Grant comes from ‘the struggle Neidjie might have more philofor identity of a people whose sophical import; The Biggest Estate identities have often been defined on Earth might be more cerebral; – indeed legislated – by others, neither have sold hundreds of with often devastating personal thousands of copies. Interestingly, cost’. He is angry and he is weary Grant’s critique recalls Mudroo– and wary. He fears becoming a roo’s of Sally Morgan not being ‘man of ressentiment’, for whom Black enough: in both cases, the ‘the unquenchable thirst [is] for critique was mounted based on revenge; the refusal to let go; suf- the idea that the books appealed fering [at] the core of his identity too much to whiteness. Certainly [...] a prisoner of his past, caught there is some validity in this. But in a time warp’. it also doesn’t account for how

Much of the conversation First Nations in some instances around the On Thomas Keneally read and take up these books, as will come, I suspect, from its well as the influence they have engagement with that warp. It on the wider reading public and sees Grant critique both an old- Stan Grant at the première of The Australian Dream at the 2019 their ability to shift and move the er (Bruce Pascoe) and younger Toronto International Film Festival ( Igor Vidyashev/Alamy) conversation in productive and (Tara June Winch) generation unpredictable ways. of authors. Pascoe, Grant suggests, is too ready to give in to If readers are surprised by Grant’s criticism of other Aborithe urge to perform, to play to the crowd: ‘I can see in him ginal authors, they have not been paying attention. It is there something of the old-time carny [...] a spruiker in a travel- in the very opening chapter of The Tears of Strangers, in the avid ling medicine show’. He prefers, he says (pace his fellow 2016 disgust and self-flagellation he registers toward his identity NSW Premier’s Literary Awards judge, Thomas Keneally), as a successful Black individual. The reasoning that galvanises Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, ‘a dazzling work of fiction these critiques has varied in emphasis over the years, but largely I considered of greater depth and literary worth than Dark remained consistent. To take some illustrative quotes from ‘You Emu’. Winch, meanwhile, is criticised for playing it safe in her Can’t Be A Bit and Bit’, one of On Thomas Keneally’s key chapters: