Vol. 4 No. 13 · 15 July 1982
pages 6-8 | 4799 words
Australia’s Nineties
Clive James
- Christopher Brennan: A Critical Biography by Axel Clark
Melbourne University Press, 358 pp, £20.00, May 1980, ISBN 0 522 84182 1
No Australian poet before Christopher Brennan was fully conscious of the artistic problem posed by isolation from Europe, and no Australian poet since has been fully disabled by it. Brennan’s life and death dramatised the problem once and for all. It was and is a true problem, not just a difficulty. Brennan, whether he wanted to or not, lived the problem to the full, and thereby, on everybody else’s behalf, got it out into the open. His messy crucifixion was all the more thorough for the degree to which he co-operated, and it doesn’t have to happen again. If it does, then someone is being pretentious. Brennan spent too much of his time acting as an awful warning. That was one of the main reasons why his achievement fell so far short of his ambition: he put less energy into writing poetry than into being the poet. It was an aberration in which personality conspired with circumstances, creating a tangle which Axel Clark, in this admirably hard-headed critical biography, does much to sort out.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 4 No. 16 · 2 September 1982
From Hugh Lloyd-Jones
SIR: Clive James, in his excellent article about Christopher Brennan (LRB, Vol.4, No 13), has not done justice to the article ‘On the Manuscripts of Aeschylus’ which Brennan published in the Journal of Philology for 1894. Mr James writes that ‘the only thing that came out of it was a mention, with qualified approval, in a footnote to Sidgwick’s edition of Aeschylus.’ Brennan gets an honourable mention in a work very much more important than Sidgwick’s edition, the immensely learned commentary on the Agamemnon published in 1950 by Eduard Fraenkel. Fraenkel (Vol. I, p.6) names Brennan as sharing with F. Heimsoeth and F. Blass the credit for having refuted the theory that the later manuscripts that contain the Agamemnon and the Eumenides are derived from the Medicean codex; and he gives Brennan credit for having noticed that V preserves an interesting variant at Agam. 137. It gives me pleasure to think that the author of this article was also capable of the poetic (and alcoholic) achievements which Mr James describes.
Hugh Lloyd-Jones
Wellesley, Massachusetts
Vol. 7 No. 10 · 6 June 1985
From Editors, ‘London Review’
Wolfgang Leppmann’s Rilke: A Life was published by Lutterworth on 25 April (419 pp., £17.50, 0 7188 2620 5). It has been translated by Russell Stockman in collaboration with the author, and contains verse translations by Richard Exner. Reviewing the German edition in LRB, Vol. 5, No 20, J.P. Stern praised the ‘fine detail of the biographical reconstruction’ – achieved by Leppmann in the face of some difficulty, since ‘the art of biography has few outstanding examples in German.’ In Vol. 4, No 13, Clive James wrote about the Australian poet and ‘no-hoper’ Christopher Brennan. A selection of Brennan’s poems, letters and critical essays, edited by Terry Sturm, has been published by the University of Queensland Press in its ‘Portable Australian Authors’ series (477 pp., £16.95 and £9.95, April, 0 7022 1736 0).
Richard Wollheim’s The Thread of Life, reviewed by Jon Elster in the last issue, and ascribed there to its American publisher, Harvard University Press, is published in England by Cambridge.
Editors, ‘London Review’
