David Malouf was a writer of wisdom, grace and generosity
- Written by Brigid Rooney, Associate Professor (Affiliate), Australian Literature, University of Sydney
David George Joseph Malouf AO, one of Australia’s most accomplished, internationally renowned and beloved writers, has died aged 92.
Malouf’s novels are cherished by readers – from Johnno (1975), An Imaginary Life (1978), Child’s Play (1981) and Fly Away Peter (1982) to Harland’s Half Acre (1984), The Great World (1990), Remembering Babylon (1993), Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996) and Ransom (2009).
He also wrote numerous short stories, producing four thematically coherent collections. All these works draw from and transmute elements of his own life, his detailed memories of places, people, things and experiences. Yet Malouf always maintained a clear separation between his personal, private life and his public self as a writer.
Malouf made an indelible mark on Australian literature. His many distinguished honours and awards included an Order of Australia, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2000), election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (2008) and an Australia Council Award for a Lifetime Achievement in Australian Literature (2016).
He was in every sense a man of letters. He was a great reader and profoundly erudite. He was a sociable, assured and generous contributor to literary and public conversation. These same qualities imbue his writerly voice, his regular invocation of a communal “us” or “we”. His intimacy of address marks his poetry and prose, inviting trust and drawing in readers.
A writer’s life
Malouf was born in Brisbane in 1934 to first-generation migrants to Australia, a Lebanese-Melkite Christian father and a European-Jewish mother. The latter had grown up in England, until financial misfortune prompted her family to emigrate to Australia.
His mother’s Anglophilia transmitted itself to the young Malouf. Unable to speak the language (Arabic) of his paternal grandparents, who lived nearby when he was young, Malouf knew of but did not identify with either his Lebanese or Jewish ancestry. He grew up reading the Anglo-European canon and learning several languages, as well as piano and violin.
He saw himself as a writer in English – not as a writer of the migrant experience. Likewise, he did not want his writing to be defined by his sexuality. These aspects of his life are, however, present in his writing, and they mark its character and preoccupations in both subtle and tangible ways.
David Malouf.
Ulf Andersen/GettyImages
In the wake of writers such as Kenneth Slessor and Patrick White, Malouf forged new pathways for settler Australian literature. Through his writing, he aspired to cultivate interiors – a sense of the mysterious or numinous dimensions of life and things. He sought to reconcile these interior qualities with outer worlds.
This also drove his attempt to imagine an interior history for Australia, to tell the untold stories of inner, collective experience behind or within external events. He believed in the role imagination and storytelling could play in recognising the darkness of settler-colonial history and moving towards reconciliation with Australia’s First Peoples.
In 1998, he presented the Boyer lectures, published as A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness. In these he canvassed the “complex fate”, sensibility and potential of a settler people, “children both of the old world and the new”.
Malouf’s public commentary on civic and national matters was matched by his quiet work on peace and reconciliation behind the scenes. In 1999, with Jackie Huggins, Malouf co-wrote the draft Declaration for Reconciliation, intended for consultation with the Australian people. He advocated the freedom of writers around the world through his long involvement in PEN Sydney, of which he was a life member. He was a lifetime ambassador of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.
David Malouf at the Indigenous Literacy Project, launched at the Lodge in Canberra. He was a lifetime ambassador of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation.
Mark Graham/AAP
A poet from first to last
From first to last, Malouf was a poet. From Four Poets (1962) – a joint endeavour with fellow poets Donald Maynard, Rodney Hall and Malouf’s close friend Judith Green (later Rodriguez) – to Earth Hour (2014) and An Open Book (2018), and many prize-winning collections in between, the luminous quality of Malouf’s poetry belies the complex dimensions it unfurls.
A poetic imagination, as Yvonne Smith says, infuses all Malouf’s writing with music, creating what Ivor Indyk calls its “pulse”. For Vivian Smith, the precise observations in Malouf’s poetry are sensual, “rooted in the tentacular, in the life of the body”.
Malouf is most known around the world, however, for his fiction. His books secured such prizes as the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Prix Femina Étranger and the inaugural International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. He was thrice winner of Australia’s oldest literary award, the Australian Literary Society’s (ALS) Gold Medal, a feat so far matched only by Patrick White and Alexis Wright.
But Malouf also possessed a rare ability to work across genres with flair and elegance. He composed libretti for at least four operas, starting with Voss, based on Patrick White’s novel. His play Blood Relations (1987) reworked Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Beyond national horizons
Though anchored in beloved Australian places, Malouf’s writing seeks coordinates beyond national horizons with world literature, from the classics of antiquity to the modern transatlantic canon. His writing converses with the works of, among others, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Honore de Balzac, James Joyce, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens and William Faulkner, and with the ancient poetry of Homer, Horace and Ovid. His lifelong love of classical languages is manifest in his writing.
Malouf felt a personal affinity with Ovid, with whom he shared a birthday. His internationally acclaimed second novel, An Imaginary Life, recreated the experience of the ageing Ovid in exile on the remote edge of the Roman empire. Here, through his encounter with his opposite, a wild child, the poet opens himself newly towards experience of the world, and towards his own bodily and mortal being.
Malouf’s last novel, Ransom, circles back to the ancient world. Reworking the last book of Homer’s Iliad, Ransom cultivates the interior history of the epic. While the epic tells of great events in heroic terms, Malouf explores the thoughts and feelings of the aged, grieving King Priam and the furious avenger Achilles. It ultimately returns us to Priam’s companion, an ordinary man and the bearer of the story, the carter Somax, and Beauty, his favourite mule.
Ransom creates, amid hostilities, a little pocket of stilled time. From here, the story expands to the past and the future. New models of being are ventured. The weight of convention, of royalty, of war, is balanced by the myriad “prattling” voices of the living world. The epic finds its counterweight in this novel, which attends to the small, the humble and the inconsequential.
The reality of the small and the inconsequential crystallises once more in Before or After, the very last poem in his last book, An Open Book:
… It is the small,the muted inconsequential,at this point that comes closest
to real.
With its evanescent and mysterious refractions, with its threading of connection between ancient and modern worlds, Malouf’s writing gives us a vision of life even at the edge of destruction.
He will be a remembered as a writer of wisdom, grace and generosity, and for the richness of his poetic imagination. He will be remembered for his curiosity and dedication to literature. He’ll be remembered as someone not bowed down, as only lightly touched, by time.
Authors: Brigid Rooney, Associate Professor (Affiliate), Australian Literature, University of SydneyRead more https://theconversation.com/david-malouf-was-a-writer-of-wisdom-grace-and-generosity-223011
