Reviewed by Ian Lipke
Susan Lever identifies Alec Hope as being born in 1907 but reached acclaim as a poet no earlier than the 1960s. An expanded version of his The Wandering Islands was published in 1955. Until this date he was recognised as a satirist and a witty reviewer. With time Hope was showered with awards; his work appeared in the Norton Anthology of Poetry; all appeared to be his for the asking. He took the opportunity to promote younger poets such as Judith Wright, James McAuley, Douglas Stewart and Gwen Harwood.
By the 1970s when recognition of Hope’s work arrived, the poet’s fame conflicted with a new generation of younger poets, all seeking recognition for new styles and new voices. Hope’s promotion of free verse and poetic form was ‘old-hat’. His poetry was associated with impersonality, with classical models, clever rhyme schemes and formal or arcane language. This was poetry very different from the Australian avant-garde poetry of the 1980s. As Lever claims, “the Australian critical obsession with literary modernism, with its trust in experimental art as progressive both artistically and politically, renders Hope’s poetry as regressive, old-fashioned, part of Australia’s rearguard action against the major art movement of the twentieth century” (3).
Lever’s quite brilliant introduction sees Hope’s poetry as an intellectual challenge, ignoring the emotionally expressive function that many readers expect from poetry. As she says, ‘it is poetry that challenges rather than consoles” (4). Impatient with pretension, Hope’s writing is meant to entertain, to reveal a darkness under its humour and satire.
Lever has attempted to place an analysis of Hope’s poetry within the introduction to a much longer work, her biography of the man. This analysis stands as a fine example of academic writing. No instances of ‘fluffery’ exist; each point contributes in its own way to the overall structure of the introduction; each point is made with succinctness and in order. It is a fine piece of writing.
Chapter One, which deals with Hope’s childhood, is a very different affair. It is as though the author, living the life of an academic, found treating the life of children a trivial affair. The calling of Hope in youth by the name ‘Sonny Jim’ and later by the title ‘James’ seems an attempt to fill in some space. Similar names used to identify Hope in youth seem to offer a similar purpose. Hope’s interest in the centrality of childhood experience in the making of a poet is well developed, as is the love of poetry within the family. He asserts that “my Romantic mentors had convinced me that poetry should be above all richly poetical, but to achieve this I had to use a vocabulary which would not fit the Australian scene” (14).
Lever instances the war poem Ascent into Hell with its nightmares of flight from pursuing soldiers and animals. The brutal images in the poem, of chopped fingers and slit bellies, may remind readers of Hope’s better-known poems. Wending through childhood, Hope arrives at university, where fellow students shared his interests but academic life brought its own difficulties.
When in 1926 Hope became associate editor of the arts society journal, he received a foretaste of some future reactions to his work: Answers to Correspondents: A.D.H. Very low language: would be disgusted if we understood half of it. The university years taught its subjects stamina if little else. A.D. Hope, who was to become a professor, graduated with a third-class degree. Hope himself did not realise that the English luminaries of the age – Auden, Betjeman and Spender – saw a third or no degree as a badge of honour. Such was not the case for an Australian scholarship student, as Lever makes clear.
The 1930s revealed a disconsolate A.D. Hope struggling with depression and a sense of failure. His attempt to re-write Faust continues to puzzle scholars. By 1932 he was fully conversant with all aspects of sex. Lever writes “his poetry shifted key as his interest in sex began to emerge in it” (57). This is the period of St Mary the Gipsy, a disgusting poem representing Hope’s experimenting with what he can achieve in holding the beautiful and the grotesque in tension” (58).
Lever continues to develop the story of A.D. Hope. By 1940 she has told his not so remarkable story. When you read Lever’s tale you discover that it is really that of an unremarkable man who was able to make his way through the tertiary educational system at a time when new developments were proposed; a man who was able to make his mark on poetry while, at the same time using the new happenings to assist his way. Lever’s book highlights the events that worked for Pope while making much of the poetry he created. One needs to remember that this is, after all, a story of a second-rate poet in the grand scheme of things.
A.D. Hope – a Life
(2026)
by Susan Lever
LaTrobe University Press
ISBN: 9781760645885
$36.99; 320 pp