Journal Article

'By No Stretch . . . a Locus Amoenus': Traces of Dirt in the Early Poetry of James McAuley

Page, Jean

2020

Overview

While there are traces through the early poems, the dystopian motifs of debris and rubbish are most fully evident in the descriptive, thinly-veiled autobiographical portrait of the anarchist1 student living in rented rooms, in McAuley's poem 'Revenant,' dated 1939-1942, published in his first collection Under Aldebaran (1946): I enter the familiar house . . (16) In The Waste Land McAuley would have remarked Eliot's luxuriant images of inner city decay-'the empty bottles and sandwich papers' and the once pristine River Thames sweating 'oil and tar' ('The Fire Sermon,' CP 70-73), and in 'Prufrock,' the 'one-night cheap hotels' and 'sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells' (Eliot, CP 13). The Waste Land arguably licensed McAuley's resort to the trope of negatively value-laden, untidy debris, the mouldy bread-crusts and wine dregs, the overgrown backyard in 'Revenant,' whose Prufrockianpersona is further elaborated in the disillusioned artist vagabond protagonist of McAuley's early short fiction 'Under Aldebaran' (Hermes 45.2, 15-17). ('Perspective Lovesong,' in 'The Darkening Ecliptic,' Angry Penguins, June 1944) In the Malley poems the collective McAuley (and Stewart) do not draw on universal, generalised inner-city images but on those closer to home, the iconic inner Melbourne of their sojourn there in the early to mid-1940s while enlisted in the Australian Army: But where I have lived Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray ('Petit Testament,' in 'The Darkening Ecliptic') The demise of similar working-class communities would be lamented by the left philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, 40 years later ('Notes on the New Town' 148-55).

• Publisher: Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL)
• Subject: Aesthetics / American literature / Archetypes (Psychology) / Australian literature / Austrian literature / British & Irish literature / Collaboration / Dust / Dystopias / Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns) (1888-1965) / Fiction / Heroism & heroes / Inner city / Literary criticism / Literary devices / Literary influences / Literary studies / Literary translation / McAuley, James Phillip (1917-1976) / Modernism / Narrative techniques / Nationalism / Palimpsests / Poetry / Publishing / Publishing industry / Realism / Rilke, Rainer Maria von (1875-1926) / Symbolism / Symbols / Writers