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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Henry Lawson

Henry Lawson

After Ned Kelly, it may well be that Henry Lawson, the Poet of the Left, is Australia’s greatest mythological figure. I seem to detect in Mr Prout’s informative and interesting biography an effort to cut Lawson down to human size. The effort has misfired in two directions. The biographer shows a regrettable tendency to moralise over Lawson’s alcoholism, whereas it would have been more to the point to blame the greater malady of journalism for cash as the boa constrictor that throttled Lawson’s magnificent talents. He also quotes Lawson’s jingoist verse very freely (none of it worth a second reading) and neglects the biting social satire he wrote as a spokesman of the working-class.

The Australian people loved Lawson because they knew his heart was with them. Mr Prout castigates Lawson for his habitual gloom, not caring to look further and see that this gloom frequently mirrors the emotional destitution of a society where the economic millstones grind people to powder daily. Perhaps all this amounts to no more than the fact that Mr Prout is a conventional man examining the life and work of a man whose mind, however muddled, was never wholly conventional.

Setting aside these serious limitations, Mr Prout’s book is most readable. Lawson’s disordered and pain-filled family life is examined in considerable detail; and there are numerous anecdotes from the mouths or pens of Lawson’s acquaintances which Mr Prout has gathered and preserved. I could have wished for more of them, and less biographical comment, since Mr Prout does not succeed well as an interpreter. There was one suggestion that raised the hair on the back of my neck – that Lawson benefited from the pruning of his verses by the editors of The Bulletin, who smoothed out its roughness and made it scan. Lawson’s greatest single technical gift lies in his handling of the dour Australian vernacular. One shudders to think how many condescending half-wits may have tampered with its fruits.

Lawson’s powers were stunted by the environment of arid gentility in which his literary mentors moved. The sources of his strongest stories and poems, however, lay in a different area – in the streets and pubs, on the bush farms, where the early Labour movement also had its roots. That militant Antaeuspage 656 drew its strength from poverty. Lawson’s writings were part of its scripture; and as its members were converted to become warders in the jail they had laboured to destroy, so Lawson, whose words had made the people sigh and mutter in their sleep, found himself drinking alone, and wondered why.

1963 (307)