MEMOIRS OF A SLOW LEARNER

Joining Helen Trinca and Ross Fitzgerald for a discussion of Canberra journalist Alan Reid’s novel on the Labor Split of the 1950s, journalist, former Quadrant editor and MP Peter Coleman added his reflections on life as an intellectual over six decades. In his Memoirs of a Slow Learner, Coleman gives a narrative and intellectual history of twentieth-century Australia while discussing his growing disaffection with much of the liberal secularism he had lived by. Peter Coleman addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 14 June 2015.

MEMOIRS OF A SLOW LEARNER

PETER COLEMAN

A good way of reading this book is to start with  Chapter 6, where I  recall a meeting in  1955 of the Poetry Society – one of  its fortnightly meetings  in 217A Lower George Street, soon to be bulldozed for a grand international hotel. The Society was run by a fragile, diaphanous woman with the marvellous name of Imogen Whyse. A number of poets were there ranging from the prophetic, distant  A.D.(Alec.) Hope to the pallid, and noticeably underweight, Charles Higham later to become more famous – and better fed – as the best-selling biographer of Hollywood stars Errol Flynn, Marlene Dietrich and many more.

A number of less likely poetry lovers were also present, mainly lawyers – notably Hal Wootten, later to conduct the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody, and John Kerr, already a prominent QC although not yet the famous figure of Australian constitutional and political history that he was to become 20 years later.

But the central figure of the occasion was the poet Jim McAuley and the high point of the meeting was his first public reading of his new poem A Letter to John Dryden.  It’s a satire on this “vacant, sly, neurotic modern” world  and the various  responses to it  – Marxism, Islamic fundamentalism, liberal secularism and Christianity. It was, for me, a moving and unforgettable experience, my first intimation of a deeply felt critique of Australian liberalism wrought by an Australian poet out of Australian experience. It had a lasting influence on me and led me, 25 years later, to write The Heart of James McAuley. It is, as I will try to show, a key to Memoirs of a Slow Learner.

I urge you to have a look at A Letter to John Dryden. It may be a helpful antidote to some of the responses to the 1980 edition of my book. One or two of my reviewers may have been influenced by the cover lines which promised “an intimate personal memoir”. A number complained that I was far too reticent. It was quickly plain that I was no confessional poet compelled to advise readers of my sexual peculiarities and mental aberrations.

But the complaint went beyond that. I was too uptight. I seemed afraid to let myself go, said Dick Hughes the jazz pianist and himself an autobiographer. Why is there so little about my inner life, asked John McLaren, then editor of the leftist literary-political Overland. Fr. Edmund Campion, another autobiographer, found it too “shy”, “taciturn” and “dreamy’” – “No thrusting ego here, no raucous self-justification, no settling of old scores.” Geoffrey Dutton, poet and critic, found stray references to childhood unhappiness and loneliness which I “pass over at high speed but which must have gone deep”. The political commentator Max Teichmann also noted the early disappearance of my mother from the story and my total silence about my father’s second wife.

Other reviewers were closer to what I had set out to do. The poet Patrick Coady and historian Nicholas Brown, for example, saw that the book is not really “an intimate personal memoir”. Its real subject matter is the cultural and political turbulence of the 1940s and 1950s – a turbulence that had formed me. According to Jeff (J.W.) Shaw, later a Labor attorney-general in New South Wales, the book is a “document” of Australian intellectual life. (I should have stuck to writing, he said, and not strayed into parliament – “a mistake”, he told me when I met him while door-knocking his street in suburban Gladesville.)

The American critic Margaret Boe Birns took this a step further: the point of the book is “the larger life of the mind”. Forget about my supposed reticence. Read properly, “We learn more about Coleman than we think we do.” She believed she had found a key in my sketch of Manning Clark – the anguished historian and sage torn between the Catholic Church and the Kremlin.

Doug Buckley, writing in a Christian magazine, was the most pointed of all. Far from being too reticent, Memoirs of a Slow Learner is, he said, “amongst the most self-revealing” books he had ever read. Its core is an “ardent life-long search for political and spiritual truth”. It takes its sympathetic readers on an “expedition to the edge of Christianity…” (but stops short of  submission).

This fancy high-mindedness irritated some readers. Was it too prissy, ultimately evasive, a little ridiculous? John Douglas Pringle, a former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, in a broadly friendly review, found something “comic” in the book’s excessive earnestness, its “magnificent obsession” with spiritual  truth.

Readers will make what they will of these various reactions to the book. Reviewers of the new edition, although fewer in number, have been generally sympathetic and I believe perceptive – Rebecca Weisser, Ross Fitzgerald, James Murray, Peter Costello and a mysterious Daisy Mae on Kindle.

But let me return to where I started this evening. Looking back across 20 years and I see more clearly than I did at the time that the real origin of Memoirs of a Slow Learner was my immersion in the poetry of James McAuley (my co-editor at Quadrant). His autobiographical poems moved me deeply, especially, as I said, his Letter to John Dryden. It distantly echoed a similar family background to mine (freethinking father, Protestant mother), a similar education in a selective state high school and Sydney University, and an infatuation with  communism, anarchism and mysticism. But whereas McAuley found a resolution of his quest in the Catholic Church, I persevered with secular liberalism, in the belief that imagination and feeling could still moisten its parched landscape. Several writers published rejoinders to McAuley’s poem – Jack Lindsay, Amy Witting, A.D.Hope. Memoirs of a Slow Learner was mine. It could be called A Letter to James McAuley.

In the years since, I came to accept many of McAuley’s criticisms of my liberal secularism – many but not all. I have also become far more sceptical of the philosophers and freethinkers who influenced  me in my youth and far less sceptical of the churchmen who deplored their influence. When I finished the first edition of this book, I remained one step ahead of the Hound of Heaven. Am I still on the run? asked Peter Costello, a Christian, when launching this  new edition in Melbourne. One last chapter, he said, is still to be written. That may call for a third edition!

In concluding, let me mention an error in this new edition. Not too important but worth noting. Two facing pages are missing. I blame myself for not checking the proofs more thoroughly. One page has the dedication to my children. Its loss is a disappointment to me and maybe even to my children. It will not trouble readers. But the facing page, also missing, has a stanza from a poem by Jim McAuley which I published in the Bulletin  in the 1960s  It gives the book its title – and something of its theme:

Some like me are slow to learn;

What’s plain can be mysterious still.

Feelings alter, fade, return,

But love stands constant in the will.

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