Les Murray - 'Fredy Neptune' and the poetry of the vernacular.

It isn't fashionable to tease out the biographical threads in a work of fiction, but it is usually interesting and, in the case of 'Fredy Neptune', Les Murray's epic adventure or 'novel in verse', it is really helpful. Which may or may not be a criticism of the work - perhaps it lacks pathos, or is incomplete or obscure in some way and requires grounding in the life of the poet. If so, Murray has turned potential artistic failure into a virtue, since 'Fredy Neptune' is an account of one man's extreme dissociation from his body in response to shock, and a lack of pathos probably says more about that condition than any more deeply inhabited sense of the character could do. It is precisely Fredy's predicament that he feel his own absence, or not-feel his own presence; he can no more inhabit his body than we can, and so he must experience his story as we experience it - sprawling, episodic, picaresque, teeming with detail, with events and characters, but unmoored, chaotic, even, perhaps, untrue. And just as Fredy turns this predicament to his own advantage by exploiting his unnatural strength and oblivion to pain, so the poet employs the condition of objectivity, of hovering somewhere out of or above one's own experience, as a means of addressing a condition which must otherwise remain obscure, an experience which has to do with un-experience and which borders on the unreal.

This is the condition of the human being in a state of profound shock. We encounter it in the literature of the Holocaust, and also in the documentary analysis of victims of torture, of war and dispossession, and of sexual abuse. It is to these numberless victims that Murray tunes his poetic sensibilities, and a brief glance in the direction of his biography reveals a harrowing personal acquaintance with tragedy, beginning with the bloody death of his mother when he was 12, and continuing through phases of guilt, alienation, rage, sexual humiliation and self-loathing compounded by poverty, a sort of contemporary spiritual katabasis which connects umbilically to the fate of his protaganist.

It is difficult to say whether the poem would have been more powerful had Murray actually invested his character with this psychological charge. He would certainly have lost the distancing effect of his objectivity, but in so doing would have lost that paradoxically accurate way of describing Fredy's predicament. It is not enough, though, to learn in one brief stanza early on in the narrative that Fredy loses his feeling after witnessing the immolation of a group of Armenian women in the War, although the scene is shocking enough. It is likewise only revealed on the penultimate page that salvation lies in his ability to forgive not the perpetrators of the crimes he has witnessed, but their victims - the Aborigines, the Jews, the Armenian women, all women - a fascinating revelation of his state of mind which could have been used to greater effect earlier in the narrative.

That being said, the story is saved from its own psychological occlusion, and the consequent drift we might experience as readers, by its exquisitely empathic use of language. Here is the heart of the matter, the feeling that was presumed lost, hiding out in the open so to speak, in a fiercely politicized, populist vernacular; elastic, defiant, energetic, funny, and true. It contains, by virtue of its authenticity, the secret of what it was to be undivided, one with one's culture and one's people, and so it functions as a vessel, an ark in which the numb and unknowing Fredy sails until he reaches the state of reunion with his body proper. The only other modern equivalent use of common language would be Joyce's Ulysses, but Murray's epic is far more accessible and ordinary and thus ultimately more democratic, which is of course the point. Ordinary language as poetry, the real poetry, rooted in unselfconscious (and therefore whole) human life, fresh and uncontrived, with the abundance of natural metaphors and ingenious compressions characteristic of all authentic vernacular. It's liberating to think of common language in this way, revolutionary even, in the sense that Chaucer or Dante were revolutionary. From the first line of the poem, "It was sausage day/on our farm outside Dungog" Murray pronounces his faith in the uncommon beauty of the ordinary, and it buoys up the entire narrative. There is an absence of pretension and a pitch-perfect ear for truth in representation that argues passionately for Murray's cause without resorting to political invective. Socialists get very short shrift in this people's document. There are the "honest men who thought you could box this what? solidarity, and have it to share with all people" and the "dishonest buggers out to corner it for their lot". The unionist in the pub foolish enough to start "preaching ... in the name of Worker-" is cut short by another who

"... lifted up a face gnawed blue

by the dog Rum and growled out Fucking work!

Who's proud of lumping shit at the bottom all his life?

...Not a man here is proud that this is the best they could do,

donkey work for blacks' wages grafting your guts out till you're old

and life's passed you by and the posh smarties pick you by your hands

your voice, your skin, your cheap tog, your fat old missus.

Work's the penalty for no brains. Dignity of labour

my hairy date. Bullocks don't skite about their yoke."

Murray knows his people. It is not simply in the rhythms and eccentricities of their speech, but in the specificity of detail, the dust and grit of their stories:

"This day, Cos and Betty and me and Laura were sitting

up in King Edward Park above the city. We each told a story.

Betty told how when she was a station cook

she had one boss who made her take the raisins

and sultanas out of any cakes that went stale

and use them again. He was deaf, but you got his attention

by saying Twenty-five quid, as soft as you liked, around him.

While she was there, her baby used to sit on a blanket

right near the kitchen door, on the homestead verandah.

One day Betty saw a wet circle round the baby's head

and she puzzled over it. A gleamy wet ring above the ears-

and then her blood ran cold because she knew what it was:

a python had tested to see whether it could fit over the baby.

They swallow big prey by drawing themselves over it

like a stocking. Apparently the child had been too big ..."

It is intimate and true without probing the interior, and beautiful, and funny, and horrific by turn.

Murray has said that he considers poetry to be "the only whole thinking", and so it is proper that his craft contain the dislocated soul of his wandering Odysseus as it has probably at critical moments contained his own. Poetry holds the body abandoned by the mind until the mind understands it is still possible to live in its body, that the body has not died. It is the sort of religious thinking that belongs to the pre-Enlightenment belief in the resurrection of the whole person; there is no Cartesian dichotemy of body and soul in poetic thought, and no modern alienation patched with political rhetoric, only the one reality, the "single heart" which is free of judgement and capable of acceptance.

Fredy longs to return to his body and his home, but he cannot forgive the 'police' of the world or indeed their victims, since it is the victims who are the site of his identification-trauma and the reason for his existential refusal. Until he can accept what he has witnessed, he is left alone in the bombed-out shell of his body to act the part of an embodied self, which is why he is found in so many guises and performance scenarios, serving time as circus strongman, Hollywood extra, German seaman, and so on, a kaleidoscope of roles which share the one fact of their being a complete sham. He ricochets from one situation to the next like a pinball in a machine, taking in every damned and damnable episode in the history of the first half of the twentieth century, starting with the Armenian massacre and crashing through the Depression, poverty, racism, police brutality, the rise of Nazism, and two world wars. It is only his numbness and alienation that enable him to bear witness to this madness, which is ironically the outcome of modern alienated man's quest for meaning in a world without God or the sanctity of the ordinary.

And so it is an act of Grace that permits reconciliation in the end, not to be reasoned or understood beyond the injunction to "forgive God ... Judging Him and sensing life eternal ... are different hearts. You want a single heart, to pray. Choose one and drop one" but, significantly, to be experienced at last. And experience, true to reality, is both ordinary and poetic, "sore and heavy and bogged in chairs", which is where we leave him and where storytelling is no longer necessary or adequate, because in reality "there's too much in life: you can't describe it".