|
|
LES MURRAY HAS WRITTEN a justly celebrated poem about his mother called 'The Steel'. In it, he attributes most of the blame for her death to the
doctor who refused to attend her, or to send an ambulance out to their
farm, despite repeated calls from his father. With irony which is itself as
cold and clinical as surgical steel, Murray cuts strips off the doctor, not
simply as a doctor, but as a member of the urban-educated middle-class, the
enemy of rural folk, and in this case, the Murray clan:
What were you thinking of,
Clan?
Doctor MB, BS?
Were you very tired?
Did you have more pressing cases?
Know panic when you heard it:
Oh you can bring her in!
Did you often do
diagnosis by telephone?
Perhaps we wrong you,
make a scapegoat of you;
perhaps there was no stain
of class in your decision,
no view that two framed degrees
outweighed a dairy.
It's nothing, dear:
just some excited hillbilly --
As your practice disappeared
and you were cold-shouldered in town
till you broke and fled,
did you think of the word
But in his recently published biography Les Murray: A Life in Progress,
Peter Alexander gives a very different account of Miriam Murray's death. He
suggests that the delay in getting medical attention was caused by Murray's
father, who did not tell the doctor that his wife was pregnant, or that she
had collapsed from loss of blood, and did not call for help from his
neighbours. According to Alexander, the father's reticence about his wife's
condition was probably due to shame and inhibition, produced by the very
clannishness which Murray extols in the poem. The doctor, on the other
hand, appears to have been completely innocent of the charges levelled
against him.
Thus arises a teasing question about the relationship between the work
of a poet, and his biography. More specifically, how are we to read 'The
Steel', now that we know that the man Murray accuses there of complicity in
his mother's death, had nothing to do with it? The poem is central to
Murray's oeuvre, not only because it is a powerful expression of personal
grief, but because it locates this grief within a larger sense of social
inequity and injustice -- and the sense of injustice, suffered by himself,
his family, his people, his class, is crucial to Murray's whole stance as a
poet. How are we to read a poem that makes so much of 'being just, seeking
justice', when, as we now see, it is itself unjust in its accusations?
One way to answer this question would be to argue that poems have their
own criteria of truth, which are different to those which govern discourses
based on 'fact', like biography or history. Another would be to argue that
the poem is true to the poet's emotional response at the time the poem was
written, and therefore shouldn't be judged in the light of subsequent
information that might not have been available then.
There is also the question of genre, since there are poems whose whole
business is to castigate and lampoon, and whose stock in trade is the
caricature, and we don't ask of them that they should be true or accurate
in their representations. But 'The Steel' is an elegy, and in this kind of
poem, which is a homage to the dead, the mood is easily compromised if the
same possibility of dignity is not also made available to the living.
There is something chilling about Murray's presentation of the doctor in
'The Steel', regardless of whether he was guilty or innocent of neglect.
Alexander doesn't say if the doctor was really run out of town, but the
poem makes a scapegoat of him as surely as if he was, making a sacrifice of
him to the solidarity of the clan. 'I can forgive you now/ and not to seem
magnaminous,' Murray writes. 'It's enough that you blundered/ on our family
steel.'
And yet there is a recognition, in the portrait of the doctor, of how
the clan mentality can lead to injustice. Murray offers it hesitantly, and
hedges, twice: 'Perhaps we wrong you,/ make a scapegoat of you;/ perhaps
there was no stain...' Significantly, on an earlier occasion when the clan
enters the poem, it is in the form of witch-like presences whose appearance
is intimidating to the young Murray himself --
In school and called away
It was just this terrible, primitive kind of authority, represented by the
Murray women, that Murray's father fell victim to, on Alexander's account,
when he refused to tell the doctor that his wife was pregnant.
I was haunted, all that week,
by the spectre of dark women,
Murrays dressed in midday black
who lived on the river islands
and are seen only at funerals;
their terrible weak authority.
In fact 'The Steel' is a poem in which blame is constantly on the
lookout for an object. Murray starts out by blaming himself (again wrongly,
as Alexander points out), on the ground that his own induced birth was the
cause of his mother's later miscarriages and eventual death. Blame then
settles on the poet's grandfather, the immediate cause of his father's
shame. It seeks to attach itself to the unborn child that caused the
haemorrhaging, but is refused. It hovers, tenderly, over the mother
herself, for allowing Murray's birth to be induced. Then, improbably, it
seeks out the mother of the boy in favour of whose birth Murray's own
induction was performed -- and is again refused.
Your comments are invited: email them in a letter toAustralian Book Review
Return to Australian Book Review /December 2000/January 2001