biography
Robert Adamson
Patricia Dobrez
Michael Dransfield's Lives
MUP $45.00hb, 588pp
0 522 84805 2
A PRODIGY WHOSE LIFE was cut short -- sex, drugs, rock'n'roll,
fame, transgression, a great talent for both brilliant poetry and
self promotion, set in the 60s. Dransfield has been all things
to all people who read poetry. This six hundred page book will
stir it up again. Who is Michael Dransfield? How does his poetry
stand up after almost half a century?
I was a peer and close friend of Michael Dransfield but after
reading this biography my memory has been refocused. The poet I
knew in the late 60s and early 70s doesn't seem as real. As Yeats
puts it: 'a poet is never the bundle of accident and incoherence
that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea,
something intended, complete.' There is a massive body of
research here. Pat Dobrez had access to Dransfield's prodigious
correspondence and interviewed his mother, family and friends
over a long period of time. There are lists and dates,
archaeology through the layers of time and paper but Michael
Dransfield is still not turning up for the literary festival.
Dobrez introduces the poet's work along with his life and her
generous quotes give the book its energy. At times, however, Dobrez uses language that obscures Dransfield's complex lyrical clarity. In the chapter 'Age of Aquarius' there is the following quote from the poem 'Island':
there is no real thing.
The agile enjambments, the sparse language here is saying 'this voice is not real either, it is poetry'. Dobrez however, thinks these lines mean: 'It is as if enveloping post modern technocratic society were conspiring to rob its members of the real, so that relief might come through artificial channels, the mass media, or books, or drugs' without understanding that poetry must be the ultimate 'artificial channel' itself.
none of these things is real.
he takes another book from the shelf,
glances, puts it aside, jabs a
needle in his
arm, listens to the wireless, kills it
with a touch.
there is no real thing.
he rises, and the face of the mirror empties.
Dransfield didn't write confessional poetry and it is misleading to look too closely into the poetry for clues that might reveal something about his life. He thought Lowell's work in that mode was prehistoric and anyone who reads his poem 'Robert Lowell' will get the idea: 'wherever he/walked he saw poached eggs./he went to consult a colleague/but was met by a poached egg./he journeyed to the interior/of the world./and of unknown lands./ poached eggs awaited him.' Dransfield is infinitely complex and witty.
The book gives the impression that he was a drug addict, based on a reading of his work and letters. The drug poetry is a fiction in the same way his family mansion 'Courland Penders' was: it didn't exist in reality. There is no proof that he was addicted to heroin, he was never charged for possession or using heroin; when he died it was not as the newspapers reported from an o/d; no substance which might have been the cause of his death was ever identified. Dobrez says the coroner's ultimate finding on the cause of death was 'acute bronchopneumonia and brain damage'.
Dransfield loved pretence and used it in his life and work. He was a true symbolist -- he invented a life for himself along with his wonderful poetry. This imagined life (Dobrez calls it 'imagineering') was woven through his existence. He embroidered everything, including his correspondence and his conversation and relationships, with his imagination. His existence itself wove in and out of reality and other people who weren't poets found it difficult to tell what was really happening in his life.
When he turned up at 50 Church Street Balmain, the house where I lived and the Poetry Magazine of the Poetry Society of Australia was edited from, he knocked on the door and introduced himself saying 'I'm Michael Dransfield and I wrote twenty poems last night and I'd like you to read them'. This wasn't unusual. It was rather hard to believe though, but within a week I learnt that he could in fact write twenty poems in a night. My co-editors, Carl Harrison-Ford, Martin Johnston and Terry Strum were not as impressed with Dransfield's work as I and only agreed to publish the tighter and less romantic of the poems.
I read Michael Dransfield's Lives along with the UQP Collected Poems -- this biography is successful in that, as one reads it, you are compelled by its narrative to reread the poetry. Dobrez conjures a simulacrum of Dransfield by sheer determination and opens out the poetry to be reassessed in a historic context. The poems seem more accomplished, more innovative, and strangely, tighter, more controlled than I remembered them. The work after The Inspector of Tides, the second book, is wildly uneven. A new edition of the best of Dransfield's work, a tight Selected would reveal that Dransfield's poetry stands up after time and would be read into the next century.
Another aspect of Dransfield's personality that Dobrez reveals is how he was ahead of his time in his decision to be a professional poet. What poet before him tried to live on poetry alone? Kendall comes to mind, another poet who suffered a similar fate -- Dransfield wanted to make a living from poetry. His famous lines 'to be a poet in Australia/is the ultimate commitment' is the blackest joke. I believe his resignation from his last regular job with the Taxation Office was a burning bridge that collapsed onto his river Styx. The 60s is a decade no different to any other era when poverty hovers above the rented 'Loft'.