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Simon Haines launches The Higher Self in Christopher Brennan's Poems by Katherine Barnes

Simon Haines

“That was the real, enduring Brennan”, says A R Chisholm, writing just after the second war but recalling the years just after the first, in one of the surprisingly few books on the poet. One remembers a few: by Gerry Wilkes, James McAuley, Richard Pennington; there have been important essays by Judith Wright, Alec Hope and Dorothy Green; and above all of course--and how fitting it is that we holding this launch in this house--there was Axel Clark, who once offered me a brilliant critique of Brennan’s poetry on an occasion when we were both sitting right over there. Unfortunately I was almost as affected at the time by a decent burgundy as Brennan himself wouldn’t have been (Axel wasn’t either). Which brings me back to Chisholm’s enduring Brennan:

 . . . a great voice, a great head, a great human bulk. That voice, especially when it intoned Latin, fascinated several generations of students: that leonine head dominated all the artistic and bohemian circles that mattered in the Sydney of the early twentieth century; that great bulk is a deathless part of the Sydney landscape for all those who saw it plodding through the streets, often covered with an overcoat whose sleeves were left loose, and carrying a large bag or a pile of books, sagging at the knees and seeming ready at every step to topple forward, as if the head were too heavy for the body, though the latter was weighty enough.

This is a portrait of the man who at the time was Australia’s first professor of comparative literature: a brilliant lecturer in both German and French (though a bit lax about hygiene, Axel tells us wickedly: the students tended to leave the first few rows empty); a Riverview boy changed for ever by his two years in Berlin in the early 90s; the author of considerable articles on 19^th century symbolism and German Romanticism as well as a substantial commentary in the 1900 Macmillan anthology of English poetry from Blake to Arnold; someone who left educated Germans and French staggered by his mastery of their languages and literatures, but who, incidentally when he became head of the German department, observed that he would not be happy until he had driven the last student out of it: by which he meant, not that he wished he had more time for research, but only that modern languages were not in his opinion to be taken as seriously as the classics; a classicist, to return to the point, whose mastery was Housman-esque, who made an important contribution to Aeschylus scholarship, footnoted in the Oxford edition, when he was only 18. Chisholm’s “great human bulk” was also a formidable scholar.

But we wouldn’t be here today if Christopher Brennan had only been an exceptionally cosmopolitan and metropolitan bohemian academic of the 1890s and the early 1900s, much as Australia needed such people then—and now. He wrote in his article on the fiftieth anniversary of Sydney University in 1902 that “Australianity” in the literature of the 80s and 90s “dealt with and was mainly addressed to mythical individuals called Bill and Jim”. I’m a bit of a Bill and Jim person myself but we know what he meant. Still, we’re here not so much for this but for the volume now known as Poems 1913 (actually published in 1914). Frank Kermode once said that this volume has given Brennan a distinguished place among all the English-language poets of the years between the 90s and the war, and he’s right. No other poetry quite straddles, or quite so bravely leaps into, that yawning chasm between decadence and modernism, between the sensibilities of Rossetti, Pater, Symons and early Yeats, and those of Pound, Eliot, Rilke and the later Yeats. Except Yeats, I suppose. The bridge Brennan set out to build across that yawning chasm, in his search for a lost Eden, for the deepest sources of poetry and life, for the “absolute poem”: this is what makes the book so ambitious and original, such an exceptional achievement in Australian literature. The bridge was made out of Baudelaire, Nerval and above all Mallarmé, with the evasive spirit of whose poetry (because as Axel points out Brennan didn’t see anything inimical to Swinburne and Tennyson in his admiration for French Symbolism) Brennan was more closely involved than perhaps any other poet writing in English has been. No-one has ever written anything like his 20 page echo of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dès called Prose-Verse-Poster-Algebraic-Symbolic Riddle Musicopoematographoscope, composed as he said “for 8 voices and no audience”: indeed the number of people in this room probably doubles the total number of all those who’ve ever heard that title spoken aloud in full (without hesitation). You may think Brennan isn’t much of a laugh but you’d be wrong. But here rather more typically are some lines from Brennan’s Mallarmean elegy for Mallarmé, echoing his prose poem La Gloire , demonstrating the Symbolist principles and evoking the achievement of the poet it celebrates (I’m quoting from a very recent critical book:

 Mallarmé returned the admiration, writing in a letter to Brennan : “Mon cher Brennan, poète merveilleux, vous remontez éperdument, puissament, limpidement, le courant ordinaire de poesie vers sa source la plus rare”. Not sentiments that the contemporary Bulletin would have shared. Not sentiments one imagines Mallarmé would have expressed for Henry Lawson or Banjo Patterson, for Bill or Jim. Of course Brennan will always remain stoutly outside that tradition, and so opinion about him in the English speaking world will always be ambivalent (however much he’s admired by those few who know of him in France and Germany). Still, however disparaging he was about the likes of Henry Lawson, Brennan did write this in 1927 about the Australian poet in general:

Destroyed by a marriage scandal in a disapproving milieu, by the awful death of his lover Violet Singer and above all by the burgundy, Brennan didn’t write the 1920s sequel to Poems 1913 which might have made him a truly great modern poet, an Australian Yeats: might have enacted some of this uncharacteristic manifesto: but as things turned out he’s still both essential and   importantly eccentric to the history of Australian poetry. And he did in any case write some poetry indicating how such a volume might have looked, like this sonnet for Vi, written in 1925:

A D Hope believed that in time Brennan, like Spenser, Milton and Donne, would “emerge into a historical position where their idiosyncrasies of language or syntax or metre can no longer blind us to the force of their genius”. Very few scholars have been fully equipped to take on the formidable task of untangling and clarifying the idiosyncrasies and enabling the emergence. But now there’s one whose command of the literatures and languages is as worthy of her subject as her first PhD supervisor Axel Clark’s was before her: and who has gone even beyond Mallarmé and French Symbolism, following Brennan where no-one has before, into the wilder shores of esoteric literature: of alchemy, Roscrucianism, the Kabbalah, theosophy, Boehme and Swedenborg, Novalis and Neoplatonism. According to Kathie Barnes, in this powerful book, which I’ve been privileged to watch at close quarters as it developed and from which I’ve perhaps learned some of the lessons Axel would have taught me that evening here in Tasmania Circle all those years ago, Brennan’s Poems “ demonstrate as few other bodies of poetry have the continuities between Romanticism and Symbolism, and constitute a profound response to the religious dilemma of the age, part of the great Romantic quest for the reunification of the mind and nature”. They are unique in their recourse to a conception of the “higher self”, grounded in mystical philosophy as well as Symbolist poetry, as a secular focus for these high aspirations. For all the modest demeanour of its author, this is a remarkably ambitious and impressively scholarly book shedding just the kind of new light on the poetry of Christopher Brennan, provoking just the kind of re-reading, that Alec Hope was predicting and calling for 30 years ago.

It’s a magnificent achievement, and I hereby declare launched The Higher Self in Christopher Brennan’s Poems: Esotericism, Romanticism, Symbolism , by Dr Kathie Barnes.