Of Sages and Sybils: Alec Hope and Judith Wright.(Critical essay)

'It comforts me' writes Alec to Judith in September 1964, 'that you are also engaged on a book of essays on Australian poetry. I have one about to come out on poetry in general (some Australian) and cannot help feeling that I ought not to be doing this sort of thing. Poets ought to write poetry not criticism. However, if you do it too that makes me feel better, like Adam and Eve and the apple'. (1) Three years later he writes again, 'I have to go to Hobart soon to talk about you--the chief occupation of poets these days seems to be taking in one another's washing', (2) to which she replies, 'I'm honoured to know you're talking about me in Hobart--since it's a reciprocal process for my talking about you in Brisbane.' (3) But in the later stages of her life Wright will complain that she is fed up with being always trotted out on the same platform, whether in literary review or stage performance, with Les and Alec. (4)

In draft material for her autobiography Half a Lifetime, some of which was excluded from the published version, Wright reflects on the position of the woman poet in Australia and her own attempts to render women poets more visible in compilations of Australian verse. Engaged in work on a new anthology for OUP she remarks on the 1948 anthology she edited for Angus & Robertson that had included 'an unusual number of women poets and poems'. 'Its reception by the reviewers,' she recalls, 'had convinced me that, if feminism were to get under way in Australia, it would not be through poetry. Some reviews had almost suggested that I was undermining the established views of poetry in Australia, and should be thoroughly slapped down for so doing.' Wright observes that her selection was made on the basis of her view 'that those poets Were among the best writers in Australia' but that '[m]aybe it would take a long time for women to be accepted as writers'. (5) What is particularly pertinent to this discussion, is her fluent shift into an expression of dismay that a poet of Hope's calibre and reputation--'the most admired of the masculine critics and poets'--would 'set to work' with such 'relish to tear flesh from one woman poet, a Tasmanian writer [Norma Davis] whose work was certainly unsophisticated but to my eyes genuine and worth far more attention than that of the dry male writers such as Mackaness'. 'I didn't argue publicly' she writes, but as her own stature as critic and poet grew, she would argue publicly with Hope, publishing a critique of his views on Australian poetry in the form of a poem--'To A.D. Hope'. (6) It was a criticism that Hope found hurtful and a challenge he found difficult to accept.

Both the sense of hurt and the difficulty might best be understood in terms of gender, elucidation of which offers insight into Hope's complex attitude to the woman poet in general, but more, to Judith Wright in particular. In the first of a series of lectures on Judith Wright, delivered at the University of Tasmania in 1967, entitled 'Smacking a Lady's Bottom or The Poetry of Judith Wright', (7) Hope includes the full poem Wright wrote in reply to The Cave and the Spring (which advocates the necessary return of satire) of which the last stanza reads:

   That organ-cactus, tall John Dryden,   that thorn-bush Alexander Pope,   may flourish as the deserts widen,   but give our worn-out soils no Hope.   Come, plant the Lyric everywhere!

The poem is witty, and not, by my reading, vituperative, but Hope records how, on receipt of the letter from the literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald asking him if he would like to reply,

   I sat there thinking of that cradle of European poetry [ancient   Greece] and brooding on the way my old friend in Australia had   savaged me in print. 'How could she write such a BAD POEM?' was   what I asked myself first. Bad poem? Well is it a bad poem or a   good poem? I read it through again and decided that personal   feelings got in the way too much. I couldn't tell. There was an   Australian gum-tree growing just below the terrace on which I was   sitting. Greece is full of Australian gum-trees ... I watched that   gum-tree bending in the gale and suddenly it said to me, Well you   know what to do, don't you Sport. Smack her bottom!--Yes, I said,   that's a pretty good idea: I'll smack it in iambic pentameter   rhythm, what's more! ... Anyway, all I managed to do in reply was   this, and it will serve very well as an indication of the way I   think of her. [4-5]

The threatened' smack on the bottom' which Hope promises to deliver in 'iambic pentameter' has reverberations in Wright's description of being 'thoroughly slapped down' for her misplaced feminist tendencies in the compilation of anthologies. But a smack on the bottom is so thoroughly patronising in a rather nasty fashion one wonders what will follow. The poem however is innocuous enough (8)--'To Judith Wright':

   Judith, my treasure, my wonder, my delight,   What prompted you to give me such a nip?   The editor of this literary page   Thought I might wish to challenge you, but no!   On the great roof of Michelangelo   The prophets and the sybils do not fight.   They speak with different voices for their age;   And poets, I trust, are of that fellowship.   Plant what we will, we do not plant in vain.   Be prodigal …