We live in times which are not very loving. No politician is loved as Ben Chifley was loved, or even Maurice Blackburn. As an academic I must say that I know of no vice-chancellor today, anywhere in this country, who is as loved or as lovable as Raymond Priestley or John Medley, sometime of the University of Melbourne. None of us love our teachers much these days: there is a kind of critical disaffection abroad, and not only in the schools, of a ‘times are out joint’ kind, which has eroded affection from the market-place. No poet is loved as Lawson was loved; we may admire Fred Williams or Clif Pugh or Arthur Boyd, but unless we know them well on personal terms their work does not arouse a personal empathy between the viewer and the artist. Art has moved towards distancing itself from the consumer. Gladys Moncrieff, Roy Rene, Les Darcy, you are needed at this hour.
Among Australian authors there has been, in recent times, one interesting exception. Alan Marshall not only held a firm place in the thoughts of all who knew him—and it was never hard to get to know Alan, as he must sometimes have ruefully reflected—but was a man who was regarded with national affection.
This was partly because his art was never pretentious. He never tried to be trendy; on the other hand he was never self-consciously folksy, either. Of course he was punished for this, as Lawson was too, for two generations. It is only recently that the critics have been looking closely at Alan’s prose, and starting to recognise within it the superb literary and intellectual skills, the quality of thought, of which it is compounded. I will be very surprised if Alan Marshall’s creative reputation does not bloom very considerably over the next fifty years as his deceptively concealed powers become more accessible to investigation.
One of the reasons why we have accepted Alan’s art, rather than studied it and talked about it, is because of his immense skill in drawing us into his own world and making us feel, if not exactly part of it, then deeply engaged with it. I once had a letter from London, from a young architect, in which he talked about the poetry in a recent Overland as being symptomatic of ‘something a tiny bit intellectual, simplifying therefore distant’, but then goes on to talk about how Alan’s studies of the people of his childhood in the same issue (and now published in this book) exemplify what is needed instead: ‘compassion linked to a deepening comprehension of perceptions’.
I think this quality in Alan Marshall came through most clearly in his morning radio readings of material from his own books. Each one of these short readings was an artistic act of great power, linking the voice and personality of the creator with the words that evoke other times, places, characters, incidents. I don’t remember much these days of what I see or hear or read, and on the face of it I suppose the least likely setting to remember things is in driving to work over thirty miles of busy road. Yet the wonder of what Alan was doing in these broadcasts stays vividly with me: the child at the piestand, or the hobo looking for his mate and fearful he has fallen under the train. A marvellous and moving experience, in the fullest sense of the phrase an artistic experience, and I hope that for the sake of the future the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has kept the tapes.
In these broadcasts we had a combination of qualities: Alan Marshall as narrator, as writer, as man. I realised more fully than ever before that we had a person here of quite exceptional importance to us all, a creator who, in our fractioned world, impels us towards a unity of the spirit. It is true that in this book we lack the voice of the narrator: the dry, warm, Australian voice of Alan’s—the laconic evenness of the bushman rather than the polished cadences of the actor. But per contra we have the pleasure of being able to linger over the words and phrasing and of being able to return to the edge of the pool.
Alan seemed to me one of the most ‘whole’ men I am ever likely to meet. Like a benign priest, humanity could not shock him. More than this, I felt on talking to him that he asked more questions of himself about himself than the rest of us can dream of doing. This gave his writing, even the most dramatic of it, a sense of peace and unity, and I believe that with Marshall it is here that we must look for the core of that quality that all great writers have, the capacity to unsettle the reader. In other words, Marshall is hitting hard at the most exposed flank in our national psyche. Of course he can and should be read for simple pleasure, but whether he knew it or not he was in fact opening more doors than that.
Alan Marshall is no longer with us and, in death, he is probably all-forgetting. But, as Samuel Butler has reminded us, men like him will not be all-forgotten. Many who are not yet even a twinkle in their great-grandfather’s eyes will draw knowledge and beauty from Alan Marshall, and will still be his people.
Stephen Murray-Smith