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    On David Malouf: Writers on Writers
    On David Malouf: Writers on Writers
    On David Malouf: Writers on Writers
    Ebook62 pages1 hour

    On David Malouf: Writers on Writers

    By Nam Le

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    About this ebook

    Here was a very-much-alive half-Lebanese writer (from provincial Brisbane, no less) producing English-language writing of the very first order … The poetry was in the prose; it stayed and sprung its rhythms, chorded its ideas, concentrated its images. Every other novel claims to be written in “poetic prose”; the real thing, when you come across it, is actually shocking.

    Nam Le takes the reader on a thrilling intellectual ride in this sharp, bold essay. Encompassing identity politics, metaphysics, the relationship between life and art, and the ‘Australianness’ of Malouf’s work, it is unlike anything else written about one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers.

    In the Writers on Writers series, leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

    Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateMay 6, 2019
    ISBN9781743820926
    On David Malouf: Writers on Writers
    Author

    Nam Le

    Nam Le’s poetry has been published in The Monthly, The Paris Review, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Lana Turner and Tin House. His short story collection The Boat received numerous major international awards, including the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Boat has been republished as a modern classic and is widely translated, anthologised and taught. Nam Le lives in Melbourne.

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      Book preview

      On David Malouf - Nam Le

      PERIL

      PRIME

      Strange, that I remember only the mornings. Or maybe it was all a single morning, all those high school years – dark chill runny-nosed morning, shock of school uniform starch against the skin. Kerbs and platforms, buses and trains and trams and traffic lights. I was a scholarship kid and never felt like I belonged there and maybe I made sure to make it so – blocked myself out till pretty much insensible. Melbourne Grammar (1991–1996) was bluestone shadow, navy blue and paler blue recurring, faces floating against rain and a sort of drowned light. It was sports fields gone green and wet, galleys of wooden desks and the always reverberant voice in those woodfilled rooms calling Anyone? Anyone at all?, naming names – Sibree, Hooper, Dinning, Frye, Downing – fathers’ names, patriarchs’ names. The light that light of air just after rain. Classrooms full of wood and plastered drywalls, nylon charts and corked pinboards and washed and chalk-clotted blackboards, all barely masking the cold, sounding, ancient stone beneath. That was high school. Mood dream, time tolled through the body.

      But dreams are multi-registral. They can be all mood and still take in all sorts of other stuff. They admit whatever comes to mind. My mind at the time was mucked up: by hormones, by classroom codes, by inchoate insecurities and ambitions, by the disjunctions – language, ethics, expectation, allegiance – between school and home. Nothing was given. What was home, anyway, and what away? What I knew was this: I was most at home when reading, when being taken away by words.

      I read in English. (Both tenses apply.) For a while there I read mostly poetry, which seemed to ratify or at least dignify my outsized feelings. School, as everyone knows, is where books go to get sterilised, so I was lucky to have English teachers who let me read outside the curriculum. Palgrave and Norton were my boon companions. Human-wise, my best friend was Ché, a bawdy, brainy country boy who’d managed to land a spectacular triple scholarship (tuition, music, boarding). He played piano. I read poetry, and then I wrote it, and then he read it. He was my first real reader – by which I mean he proclaimed my talent as amongst the brightest that had ever blazed across our or any firmament. We were big on ranking talent, on absorbing and contriving distinctions. Yeats over Keats, Rilke over Rimbaud. Hopkins over Donne, but only just. We argued intensely and violently when I said Tennyson and he Blake. Or maybe it was the other way around. We were very serious; we persuaded our Lit teacher to accept a joint essay qua duet: Ché at the grand piano in the gym riffing off Ravel and Berg while I stood alongside, reciting rip-offs of Eliot and Pound.

      We were not popular.

      What we’d realised, though, was there could be agency in exclusion. If we were going to be outsiders, we would decide outside what. To hell with friendship groups stretching back twelve years plus, to family alums and fundraising networks, homes in Toorak and holidays in Noosa, to men’s eights and first elevens and eighteens – instead, we would camp on the periphery of ye olde haute culture, importuning ourselves upon its canons and classics.

      This, of course, was (is) classic cringe. A condition of always choosing the other side. Putting yourself on the wrong side. But so we chose. The dead over the living. The old over the new. The white over the coloured. The European over the Antipodean, the international over the Australian. Always the proscribed over the prescribed (or, in one of English’s archest contronyms – and how couldn’t you love this language? – the sanctioned over the sanctioned). At the time, post-Bicentennial, there was a grand push to triumphalise Australian literature, so even as we submitted to the Ozlit foisted on us at school, we saw those books for what they were: scabs, labouring to shore up the shibboleths of shoddy nationalism. We scorned them. They were substandard. They were, to use perhaps the most cutting put-down of our schoolboy sociolect, ‘try-hard’.

      And then we got where we were going. Assigned via VCE reading list: Remembering Babylon, David Malouf. An Australian book about Australian settlement by an Australian author. And here, of course, is where I’ve been going. This sleek, slim book – readable in an afternoon – was good. Not a whiff

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